Manitou Springs is taking the “save the bees” conservation movement very seriously, becoming the first municipality to be certified as a Pollinator District.

Butterfly Pavilion, a Westminster-based nonprofit invertebrate zoo that runs the Pollinator District program, has worked closely with the city for nearly five years now, even through the pandemic. Amy Yarger, Butterfly Pavilion’s horticulture director who will be bestowing the city’s certification, has been helping spearhead the effort since the beginning.

“Manitou Springs is one of those places where people feel very strongly about where they live,” Yarger said. “It was really the people who lived there who decided that this is something that they want. Especially the Manitou Pollinators, which is a grassroots collective of people who really felt like this was important.”

Yarger worked with people such as Melody Daugherty, the executive director of Manitou Pollinators. Alongside other partners like the city’s Parks and Recreation Department and many devoted citizens of Manitou Springs, its certification serves the community at large.

Pollinator Districts are communities designed with invertebrates at the forefront. They’re areas in which the goal is to improve the habitat for pollinators, which directly contribute and ultimately shape many areas of human life. Whether it’s the trillion-dollar agricultural industry as a whole or simple pleasures like chocolate and dairy, pollinators are the hidden workers who run these shows.

“Even people who think they aren’t ‘nature people’ can’t deny that our food security relies on these pollinators,” Yarger said. “I think many of us are noticing how high food prices are and of course there are many factors that contribute to that, but pollinators play a huge role.”

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Pollinators — like honeybees, beetles, moths, and flies — rely on a diverse and affluent environment to do their jobs. That is why the restoration of spaces such as Manitou Springs with things like native plants is so important.

“These pollinators help our native plants to reproduce,” Yarger said. “And when you have healthy native plant communities, what that does is help them hold onto soil since native plants have massive root systems. This also gives them more resilience when there are natural disasters, whether that is a fire or a flood, because you have plants that are well-established.”

Pollinator populations worldwide have declined in recent years due to environmental factors like habitat destruction, pollution and global warming. Manitou Springs is just the first step in what Butterfly Pavilion and other organizations seek to encourage: sustainable, lasting conservation efforts.

“Animals are our backbone,” Jennifer Quermann, Butterfly Pavilion’s director of communications and marketing, said. “They do so much for us, but they’re understudied and underappreciated. If they don’t survive, we don’t survive — and that’s very literal.”

Conservation enthusiasts can join Butterfly Pavilion in Manitou Springs on Saturday to celebrate this landmark certification.

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