Welcome!

Dear Friends -

Twenty years ago, if you had told anyone that I was going to be an advocate for bees, they probably would've laughed in your face. I was notorious for my fear of bees. Badly stung as a child, to me the only good bee was a dead bee. The mere sound of buzzing was liable to send me into a panic.

But, working as a naturalist, I decided that I needed to learn about bees - not to love them, but to understand them. My journey began with honeybees in an indoor hive where I worked, and compassion kicked in that summer when the hives on the property were diagnosed with Foul Brood and had to be destroyed. It was heart-breaking to watch the worker bees return to where the hive had been and find it now in a pit, going up in flames and smoke.

By the time I was working as a naturalist in the Adirondacks, I was hooked on macrophotography and gardening - which meant I was now sneaking up on bees to take their pictures.

Circumstances found me moving to the Midwest in 2010. It was while I was in Illinois that I truly became a bee advocate. I started to stalk the bees in my native wildflower gardens, and discovered that I was hosting the federally endangered Rusty-patched Bumblebee! Then Bell Bowl Prairie hit the news - a 14-acre remnant gravel prairie (about 25% of that type left in IL) that was slated for demolition by the Greater Chicago-Rockford Airport. RPBs were documented on the property, but that didn't matter - in early March 2023, the prairie was bulldozed despite the efforts of hundreds of people to save it.

The more I learned about our native pollinators, the more I knew that I had to do what I could to help them. Native bees are given short shrift by the pollinator industry - they are all about the honeybee, which is not indigenous to this continent. Many species of plants are exclusively dependent on the services of our native bees, and many of our food crops are best-pollinated by them as well, not by honeybees.

Besides, they are beautiful. They are complex. They have interesting life histories. The majority of them are harmless to people. And they are killed, mostly, because of our ignorance and dispassion.

Yes, I now love them.

Now that I am back in Central New York, where I grew up, I am determined to discover which bees are (still) here. The RPB was once common here - but it's been some time since it was last seen. Other species are also in decline...and we may not even know just how many.

I hope you will join me on this journey to document the native bees of Central New York. Who is here - and who is not!

Happy bee-watching!

Publicado el 02 de abril de 2023 por batgirl