What you choose to plant can help MA's rare bees... or not

Native bees have a 150 million year history with blooming plants. Not unexpectedly it has gotten complex. Many bees are extremely picky about the flowers they gather pollen and nectar from. We will explore this pickiness and also point out that many of the most uncommon bees are specialists and simply planting more of their pollen plants can be the type of conservation that each of us can do in our backyards.

Sam has coordinated the North American Breeding Bird Survey Program, developed the North American Amphibian Monitoring Program, the BioBlitz, Cricket Crawl, and FrogwatchUSA programs and worked on the design and evaluation of monitoring programs.  Currently he is developing an inventory and monitoring program for native bees, online identification guides for North American bees at discoverlife.org, and reviving the North American Bird Phenology Program.