Holiday Gifts to help you and help the Bees!

Gretchen Lebuhn's picture

From a field guide to common bees to lovely notecards, here are 3 holiday gift suggestions for the bee and garden lover in your life. Your purchases support the Great Sunflower Project's pollinator conservation efforts.

book covers Field Guide to the Bees of California, including the Western United States. Here is the book that I've been working on for the past two years! Noel Pugh, the illustrator, was finishing up a certificate in scientific illustration at UC-Santa Cruz and asked if he could do some drawings for the Great Sunflower website. As soon as I saw his bee faces (see the ones below!), I knew we had to do something more with them! I wrote the guide to give people some tools for telling the different bees that they see. While titled "Guide to Common Bees of California", I wrote this book so it could be used all across the United States. The keys and description of the genera work for everywhere! I'll happily autograph each book.

Notecards imageBumble bee Notecards. Back by popular demand, our notecards by Noel Pugh, illustrator of the Field Guide to Common Bees of California. Each package will contain 15 cards (five of each painting). This year, we are able to offer these at a lower cost and with no shipping charges! Put these together with the Field Guide and you'll have the perfect gift for the gardener in your life.

Perpetual calendar cover Perpetual calendar. with beautiful images of bees.Celeste Ets-Hokin and Rollin Coville have produced a calendar that never goes out of date. Keep it in your garden shed and track when your flowers bloom each year. Better yet, keep a record of your pollinator observations, or simply use it to remind you of birthdays and other important dates. We actually disassemble these and use Rollin's photos as posters in our classroom and laminate them to use in the field.