The Princess and the Pollinators

​What came first - the pollinators or the plants?
We did not manage to answer this question at the Princess and the Pollinator event on 26 November – but the children of Buck Road Primary  made some wonderful discoveries about pollinators at Princess Vlei.
Armed with charts to help them identify flowers and pollinators, the Grade 5 learners spend an afternoon closely examining and recording pollinator activity on the fynbos that has been planted by school children in the past few years. 

​They discovered many pollinators busy gathering pollen or nectar, and helping the plants along the way. These included monkey beetles foraging in the vygies, butterflies, flies, ants, spiders, other beetles and sunbirds.
Keeping track of pollinator activity helps us to measure the health of the ecosystem at Princess Vlei. There can be no doubt that the Eastern shore of the vlei is unrecognisable from the sandy wasteland that was there five years ago.  This is a wonderful testimony of the hard work done to rehabilitate the area, much of it done by school children. 

​Collecting data about pollinators teaches the children valuable skills, gets them excited and absorbed, and helps us monitor the plants. The Princess is flourishing, thanks to the help of her pollinators and human friends.  

Download the pollinator identification chart