Each month our Bee Informed Blog highlights current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability. 1. She ripped up her manicured lawn and challenged the norms of gardening stories (npr.org, by Melissa Block) "I love a person who talks kindly to plants," poet Camille Dungy writes in her new contemplative memoir. And for sure, Dungy can be counted among those who do exactly that. In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, Dungy describes her years-long project to transform her weed-filled, water-hogging, monochromatic lawn in suburban Fort Collins, Colo., into a pollinator's paradise, packed instead...
Each month our Bee Informed Blog highlights current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability. 1. Native Bees Climb Social Ladder (County News) A native bee which nests in tree-fern fronds is helping scientists understand how life developed to be social and altruistic — and how bees evolved to purposefully hatch sterile young, a fact which defies Darwin’s natural selection theory. The Australian bee Amphylaeus morosus only recently made the jump from being a solitary species to a social one — which made them a perfect, and rare, animal to put under the metaphorical microscope. The...