Symbolically, on Earth Day, the pilot project “Don’t mow yet, lolo” begins in Belgrade, which will implement a different way of mowing and maintaining green areas in cities, following the example of the world’s metropolises. The initiative was launched by “Bee Center”, a beekeeping center from Silos in Belgrade. The project is being realized in cooperation with PUK “Zelenilo – Belgrade”, with the support of the Embassy of the Netherlands, a leading country in this field.
The goal of the project is to provide greater access to food and habitat to all bees, butterflies, bumblebees and other pollinators that live here.
Part of the green areas in the city that are not used directly for the recreation of the population or for some other purposes should switch to a new maintenance method that implies different approaches to mowing those plots.
– Honey plants will be sown in the Academic Park, which will be mowed in a mosaic manner, which means that with each mowing, a part of the lawn is left unmowed so that the flowers reach their full cycle, and bees and other pollinators have a source of food and a place to live. Some locations around the city will be mowed periodically after May and after September. In the course of this year, only a few sites with limited space will switch to a new mowing model in order to test a new maintenance approach – they explain in “Zelenil”.
Bees, like all other pollinators, are decreasing and many of them have been put on the endangered list, while some have completely disappeared.
There are about 250 species of bees in the city, while there are 800 of them in all of Serbia, but the number of so-called solitary bees (solitary bees, female bees that do not swarm, do not live in societies in a hive, do not have a queen, but all work as individuals) is decreasing from year to year per year. Intensive agriculture, climate change and the use of pesticides have a negative effect on the number of pollinators throughout our country, so in the end, cities have proven to be safer places for these creatures to live. And without bees, there is no survival of life on the planet because it is estimated that there would be a mass extinction of species a few years after all the pollinators would disappear.
– Due to leaving one part unmown, it will not increase the number of mosquitoes or ticks, and the expected benefits of the “Don’t mow yet, lolo” project are numerous. Research conducted in some world cities showed that the number of pollinators increased in places where the grass was not cut often, and flowers and tall grass better absorbed heat and moisture, which reduced the impact of heat pockets in their vicinity. Beekeepers from the “Bee Center” together with experts from the Faculty of Biology in Belgrade will monitor changes in the number of pollinators in those places, so that at the end of the project they will have concrete strategies for continuing and improving harvesting in Belgrade, as well as recommendations for other cities as well – they state in “Green”.
The project begins on Thursday in the Academic Park, where a workshop will be held from 10 a.m. for all those interested, and then honey plants will be planted together with the children from the Old Town kindergarten.
