Dear All,
Happy Pollinator week! We hope you can take a moment to do a pollinator count. This summer, we plant to send bi-weekly newsletter to help you remember do regular counts and to share some of what we know about different types of bees. We are hoping to get data from as many different plants as possible this summer ( in addition to our favorite, the Lemon queen sunflower) in part to understand what happens during droughts in the west.
This week though, we wanted to share this very silly song about saving bees by the British comedy duo Flo and Jo. While we don't agree with everything in the song, we loved the energy! We hope it makes you laugh.
Later in the summer, we are hoping to reach out to the community to get input from you on two things: 1) what questions do you have that we can help answer with the data that we've collected or could collect in the future and 2) should we consider a different funding model for the project? We need to do some website upgrades and would like to do more with shools and have more interaction with the community, but we need more funding to do these things. We've been looking at FeederWatch as a potential model which has a small fee for membership and if you choose to become a member, they sends you data sheets and other fun items. You can also just continue to participate with no membership. We want to be sure that anyone who has an interest can participate so, we would never restrict access. If any of you have good ideas about how best to do this, we'd love input. I'll write more soon and we'll probably do some sort of survey to get your advice.
Here in the western US, we are suffering from a terrible drought. It is going to be a hard year for bees and other pollinators. Our data will be really important for understanding how pollinator communities respond.
I hope the rest of you are enjoying your spring and early summer flowers.
Bee Well,
Gretchen
The Queen Bee