Bee Urban Growers Project

📢📢📢 Hard copies of our native bee habitat management guide are now available at the Resource Center in Lansing!

You can borrow a guide from the Resource Centers library to help you prep your planting area, select native flowers, or learn more about the bees you see pollinating your crops 🐝The library also has tools, seeds, and many other resources to help gardeners and farmers!

More May flowers! 🌻Balsam ragwort (Packera paupercula) is in full bloom through the Great Lakes Region. During our sampling on urban farms, these flowers were visited entirely by banded sweat bees, green sweat bees, and small carpenter bees. All of these groups of bees are common native pollinators of squash and pumpkins!

If you swipe right you'll see that we didn't observe as many bees visiting ragwort compared to the other flowers, but we know they are popular with mining bees, leafcutter bees, and mason bees! Balsam ragwort can keep flowering into August, so there's still time to see if you can observe any of the bees that we missed 🐝

May flowers bring more than just bees! 🌼 This crab spider blends right in with the white petals of wild strawberry and waits to catch flower visitors like flies. Copying the "sit-and-wait" hunting method of the crab spider is the best way to take pictures of flower visitors, too!

Wild strawberries are blooming now! Swipe right to see who is visiting them (sweat bees, small carpenter bees, Sapyga wasps, and cuckoo sweat bees) or copy a crab spider to catch some visitors for yourself🐝🐜🕷

If April showers bring May flowers, what bees come to visit? 🌻

We planted 15 species of native plants on urban farms, and five of them bloom during the month of May! Last year we surveyed the bees visiting those flowers and recorded 1,588 interactions. As each plant species begins to flower again, we'll share the results of our surveys 🐝

Starting with Golden Alexanders (Zizia aurea)! In our sampling, they were most popular with tiny masked bees (Hylaeus spp.) and European honey bees (Apis mellifera).

These flowers might seem less popular at a glance, but that's only because we didn't start to survey until June! Since Golden Alexanders flower earlier than most other species, they are most important NOW while other resources are more limited. Submit May observations of bees on Golden Alexanders to our iNaturalist project to help us learn more! You'll probably spot some black swallowtail butterfly caterpillars too 🐛

🐝Happy Earth Day!! 🐝

Here's a throwback to some urban farming bees from this summer! Female long-horned bees (Melissodes sp.) like these spend their days collecting pollen to bring back to their underground nests to feed their babies. In the process, they pollinate our squash, pumpkin, melons, sunflowers, and so many native plants 🌻 Conserving all species of pollinators helps us grow our food and keep the earth going 🌍

Had so much fun launching our Bug Community Scientist Kits at the Bug Day last Saturday! Coming soon, you can check out a kit that includes everything you need to *bee* a scientist 🐝That includes a hard copy of our urban bees pocket guide, retractable nets, bug containers with magnifying lids, more pollinator science books, and resources for submitting your observations to our project! All of this comes wrapped up in a hiking bag, making it easy to bring with you wherever you go 🍃

If you're just wanting guidance on managing native bee habitat or info on the pollinators you want to attract to your backyard garden, you can also check out one of our guides by itself 🌻