You’ve probably heard “Save The Bees!” but do you know which bees need saving? Over 4000 species of bees inhabit North America, and most don’t live in hives or make honey. Wild bees come in every size, shape, and color you can imagine, and they live all around us, hiding in plain sight. In this lecture, ecologist Dr. Nick Dorian will introduce you to the wild bees of New England. You will explore their varied lifestyles, habitat needs, and intricate relationships they have with native flowering plants and other insects. You’ll come away with clear action items for how to explicitly incorporate the needs of these important pollinators into land management.

Dr. Nick Dorian is an ecologist, an educator, and a naturalist. While studying the ecology and conservation of wild bees at Tufts University, Nick co-founded and ran the Tufts Pollinator Initiative (sites.tufts.edu/pollinators), which worked to build capacity for community-based pollinator conservation through habitat creation, place-based education, and ecological research. Currently, Nick is a post-doctoral researcher at the Chicago Botanic Garden where he studies how to integrate and optimize pollinator gardens for biodiversity conservation.