Butterflies provide ‘extraordinary’ help pollinating cotton fields

Bees are great pollinators—and so important for crops such as almonds and apples that they’re driven in to farms and orchards by the truckload each spring. But when it comes to cotton, butterflies play an unexpected role. A new study suggests that by cross-fertilizing cotton flowers that bees don’t visit, other kinds of insects—principally hoverflies and butterflies—add about $120 million per year to the cotton harvest in Texas alone.

Read more…