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, Griffiths-Lee and her colleagues enlisted 150 volunteers across the U.K., from the Outer Hebrides archipelago in northwestern Scotland down to Cornwall in southwestern England. They divided the citizen scientists into groups of three; one group received a seed mix of commercially available wildflowers, while a second group received a seed mix of wildflowers believed to specifically be beneficial for pollinators, devised through the help of entomologists.
These two groups sowed their seeds in two-by-four-meter patches, but the third group didn’t receive any seeds at all. The researchers then asked each citizen scientist to set insect traps around the mini meadow — flowers or no flowers — and send them back to Griffiths-Lee’s team from May through August in 2016 and 2017. Back in the lab, the team divided these delivered arthropods into taxonomic groups, paying closer attention to the main pollinators of the region and classifying them by species.
The two types of seed mixes differed a bit in terms of the types of insects they attracted: The commercially available mix was more tempting to solitary and bumblebee species, and also significantly increased bee diversity compared to its entomologist-curated counterpart. That being said, this more targeted mix was indeed attractive to solitary wasps.
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