Natural History Wanderings

June 3, THURSDAY @ 7:30 pm

Speaker: Sam Droege
Zoom registration here The conservation of native bees is the management and conservation of native plants.   Many native bee species (up to 50% in southern California) gather pollen from only one family of plants, often restricting themselves to a single genus, at times, one species of plant.  Rare bees, and therefore bees most in need of conservation, are often these specialist bees.  The good news is that bees are small and readily colonize newly planted landscapes.  That landscape could be your quarter acre lot, they aren’t picky about the neighborhood, just their food plants.   We will talk plants, patterns, what to plant, the bees that benefit, and where to find lists of plants that host bees.

Sam Droege grew up in Hyattsville, Maryland, received an undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland and a Master’s at the State University of New York – Syracuse.  Most of his career has been spent at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center.  He has coordinated the North American Breeding Bird Survey Program, developed the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, the Bioblitz, Cricket Crawl, and FrogwatchUSA programs and works on the design and evaluation of monitoring programs.  Currently his team is running an inventory and monitoring program for native bees, developing tools and techniques manuals, along with online identification guides for North American bees at www.discoverlife.org, reviving the North American Bird Phenology Program, and producing public domain hi-resolution photographs of bees, insects, and flowers @USGSBIML

You can learn more by following the USGS Native Bee Lab @USGSBIML on Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook.