Minnesota solar farms turn into wildflower havens, invites bee and butterflies

Two solar farms in Minnesota were built on retired agricultural land, and instead of the gravel or mown turf that usually goes under panels, the ground was seeded with native wildflowers and prairie grasses. Researchers from Argonne National Laboratory came back to the same test plots for five years and counted what flew and crawled past them. Insect abundance tripled. Native bees went up twentyfold.Bees, butterflies, wasps and hornets all turned up in greater numbers as the plantings matured. Lee Walston, the landscape ecologist who ran the fieldwork, builds his research around a plain question: "If you build it, will they come?" On land that used to grow row crops, the answer is yes—provided the right plants go into the soil.The insect count that turned a Minnesota solar site into a research case studyAt an 18-acre site in Ramsey, north of Minneapolis, the method is unglamorous.