Incentivized Farm Bill plantings benefit the native bumble bee community

Habitat degradation and loss drive insect pollinator decline, threatening the ecosystem services they provide. The Farm Bill invests a substantial amount of money towards programs like the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) and the Environmental Quality Incentive Program (EQIP) to incentivize landowners to convert managed and unused land into native pollinator habitat. Many landowners enroll into these programs, but follow-up surveys to confirm success of plant establishment and pollinator presence are lacking. Using Missouri lands enrolled in CSP and EQIP programs, we investigated how site size and seed mix composition impact the flower community and bumble bee (Bombus spp.) visitations to 19 plantings in 2023 and 23 plantings in 2024. Together, the plantings supported 90+ species of flowering plants, of which 26 were visited by bumble bees. We found 6 species of bumble bees using floral resources on these plantings, including 2 species of conservation concern in the state of Missouri. We found that the flower community was context dependent, but the most common floral resource at a site tended to be the most frequently visited. Additionally, we observed that site size and flower identity predicted higher bumble bee diversity. We conclude that native plantings incentivized by the Farm Bill can help mitigate the negative effects of habitat loss for insect pollinators by bolstering the amount of floral resources on landscapes that are now primarily managed farmland.