In the Dutch city of Utrecht, 316 bus stops are now planted with flowering greenery, inviting pollinators like bees to stop by and take a blossom break. The Netherlands initiated the project after learning that more than half of its 358 bee species are endangered, but it comes with other benefits, too, like storing rainwater and improving Utrecht’s air quality by capturing fine dust.

Pollinators and other beneficial insects are currently being decimated around the world by habitat loss, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides. Even so-called “safe” pesticides could be accumulating to toxic levels in pollen. The University of Maryland reported that U.S. beekeepers lost 38 percent of their bee colonies last winter alone, and the current administration has upheld market use of weed-killing substances like glyphosate while also ceasing the collection of quarterly data on honeybee colonies.

Though honey bees get the most publicity, they’re just 1 of 4,000 native North American bee species, all of which are threatened. Bumblebees, carpenter bees and orchard bees are among the wild bee species that benefit from plentiful food sources in urban settings, along with other pollinators like monarch butterflies, leaf cutters, wasps, beetles and even bats, mosquitoes and flies (which are also disappearing at alarming rates.)

Their decline is a threat to human food sources everywhere. Pollination is needed for about three-quarters of global food crops, and bringing in domestic honeybee colonies or tiny pollinating drones can’t necessarily replace the benefits of wild insects lost as their habitats are destroyed.

Cities could play a key role in pollinator conservation, according to a recent study carried out by scientists at the Universities of Bristol, Edinburgh, Leeds and Reading in the U.K. Part of this is due to where they tend to be located: in coastal and riparian areas where biodiversity would naturally be high otherwise.

Residential and community gardens can play a major role in attracting pollinators with plants like lavender, dandelions, borage, thistles and buttercups. The study encourages the utilization of public parks, medians, sidewalk strips and other public green spaces for pollinator-attracting plants and mowing less often so they have a chance to flower frequently. It’s also recommended to provide water sources, avoid pesticides and allow for some undisturbed areas where the insects can nest.

There needn’t be such a stark division between even the most modern urban centers and the natural world. At Frontiers, a group of ecologists argue that nature needs urban territory in order to survive, and calls for the creation of more “green infrastructure” like native landscaping, urban farming, access to nature, gardens that reduce flooding in urban landscapes and, in particular, pollinator-focused efforts, using the monarch butterfly as a prime example. The researchers studied the ways in which focusing on preserving the monarch can benefit urban wildlife habitats as a whole.

“Powerful urbanization trends have understandably been accompanied by a sense that nature has been displaced in urban landscapes and can only be found where cities don’t exist. On the one hand, urban life has been characterized as ‘distanced from nature’ accompanied by an ‘extinction of experience’ as people move to urban settings. On the other hand, the conservation community has achieved huge victories in places far from the urban world, and a side effect has been to reify the notion of ‘wilderness’ in the American mind. Large protected areas have “increasingly become the means by which many people see, understand, experience, and use the parts of the world that are often called nature and the environment.”

“Our results add to a growing body of literature showing that metropolitan areas matter for wildlife conservation. Despite being developed, these landscapes have high potential to maintain functional habitat for a variety of species, including migratory and threatened endemic species. Habitat within and between US cities can help connect the dots for monarchs, other pollinators, and birds along migratory pathways from Mexico to Canada and back.”

Individual cities around the world are taking initiative with projects like wildlife corridors, shoreline restoration, massive urban parks and integrated city planning that works with nature. And cities won’t do it themselves, perhaps a resurgence of guerrilla gardening is in order.

Worker wasps build with the materials available in their environment, including different hues and shades of paper, which can lead to radical rainbow homes when properly apportioned.

Biology student Mattia Menchetti began giving a group of European paper wasps a variety of colored papers in a specific sequence in order to facilitate their creation of colorful nests.

The effect is quite compelling, but wasps are not the only creatures that can take on colors from their surroundings and incorporate them – bees and ants have been known to as well.

In one instance, an M&M production plant in France was found to be responsible for changing the color of honey created by a local bee hive. Apparently, the honey tasted fine, but of course, putting such oddly colorful honey on the market is a tough sell.

In another instance, we can see the effects of giving colored sugary water to translucent ants, whose bodies then take on the spectrum of looks found in their drinks.

In this case, a scientist named Mohamed Babu from Mysore, India shot a series of photos of the colony consuming this liquid sugar water (via Colossal).

This ‘3D-printed’ bottle wasn’t made by a machine, unless you consider an army of industrious honeybees a machine. For a new Dewar’s Whiskey campaign, 80,000 highlander honey bees producing the prime ingredient for its new highlander honey whiskey were enlisted to work on a side project: a three-dimensional bottle made of honeycomb.

The bees were placed inside a vessel that mimics their usual hive setup in all ways except one: the shape. They quickly got to work creating the honeycomb bottle. Sid Lee Creative Studio and The Ebeling Group call it ‘3B Printing.’ Watch the video to see the process in action.

This isn’t the first time living creatures have been put to work on creating three-dimensional projects. The MIT Media Lab created a “collaboration between digital and biological fabrication” with a network of silk threads made by a CNC machine, which was then covered in a natural netting made by dozens of silkworms squirming all over its surfaces.