Second Saturday Hike on July 11th- "The Dance of the Native Bees"

Many of us are aware of honeybees. But did you know that honeybees are actually nonnative and that there are 400-500 native bees that live in Wisconsin? Most of these bees are small and inconspicuous, lead solitary lives, and nest in the ground. Despite their small size, however, they play a huge role in pollinating many of the plants that grow in our area, including on the remnant prairies that Friends of the Blufflands has been restoring.

On July 11th please join Friends of the Blufflands at 9:00 am for its monthly Second Saturday Hike. We will meet at the Upper Hixon parking lot next to the weather station on FA where Danielle Hudson, who studied bees as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, will lead a brief discussion about the biology and conservation of bees. We will then hike out to one of the nearby prairies, possibly Lookout Prairie and/or Zoerb, where we will hopefully catch a few bees with nets to observe and talk about identification. We also may bring a few specimens back to the shelter at Upper Hixon to look at them in detail with a dissecting microscope.

Here is a link to the Wisconsin Bee Identification Guide to help get you started: https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/files/2016/08/WI-BEE-IDENTIFICATION-GUIDE.pdf

And here are few photos of bees (and the flower they are on) for you to try to identify before the hike: