Event

Caring For Pollinators from The Ground Up

The Sonoma Ecology Center will be offering a Bee Patch Garden Workshop from 1pm to 3pm on Saturday, June 9th, at the Sonoma Garden Park.

Did you know there are over 600 varieties of native bees live in Sonoma County? Most we will never see because theyre fast, often small, and nest underground. But take a summer stroll in Sonoma Garden Park and youre likely to spot more bees than you can count. On one day alone, researchers documented 80 bee species. Other beneficial insects and hummingbirds use the garden, too, as its a busy oasis of year-round habitat and food resources. The Garden is an exciting and productive local offset to mounting, worldwide pollinator declines.

Come join us at the Sonoma Garden Park to learn how your garden can help reverse the downward spiral in pollinator populations. A well-designed, home garden Bee Patch offers the biodiverse foraging and nesting habitat pollinators are stressing to find. If you build it, they will come!

Workshop co-leaders are: Oona Heacock, assistant executive director with the North Coast Resource Conservation & Development Council; Katy Pye, former conservation district leader and author of a pending workbook on tracking garden pollinators; Kandis Gilmore, Ecologist and Pollination Biologist from Sonoma State University, and Joan Weir, apprentice in the UC Davis Masters Beekeeper program.

A lecture period will set up a Garden walk to observe forage and nesting habitats and identify native bees and the plants they prefer. Participants will learn how to create a Bee Patch habitat in their home gardens and monitoring techniques for contributing data to citizen science biodiversity studies.