Photos: Martin Dohrn
AWARE by Katy Beem
Our neighbors probably do not appreciate our lawn quite as much as the bees do. Each spring the white clover and dandelions — two breakfast flowers for bees, in seasonal terms — bloom unrestrained in a friendly merger with the Kentucky bluegrass. Milkweeds crowd the juniper shrubs like an ungainly landscape design fail. I smile sheepishly as adjacent, our neighbor patrols his turf, liquidating the first hint of invaders with copious pumps of Roundup. The weedy interlopers, along with hyssop, echinacea and bergamot I’ve planted in the backyard, comprise my little bee buffet. Admittedly, we can feel anxious and unneighborly about our weed-friendly lawn. The social expectations for a green glade and disdain for stingers run strong. Even our 10-year-old, cool as a cucumber in our yard, pantomimes terror amidst his friends should a beneficial insect stray to its deadly misfortune onto the school playground. Woe to the nesting ground bee minding her own beeswax on the soccer field. Watching the pollinators work our humble nectar and pollen circuit is mesmerizing. This month, a new episode of Nature presents the genesis of a British man’s bee obsession. My Garden of a Thousand Bees features a veteran wildlife cameraman, restless and seeking refuge from the pandemic, filming the bees in his small urban garden. Soon he’d catalogued over 60 species of bees and even be-friended an individual bee throughout its entire lifespan.
Photo: Amanda Bachmann
More Bees Than People
Amanda Bachmann. 4
Learn. Dream. Grow.
Approximately 400 species of bees are native to South Dakota. When we visualize bees, many of us default to the iconic: honeybees and bumblebees. “The archetype we have in our minds is that a bee is black, yellow, fuzzy and kind of largish,” says Amanda Bachmann, Pesticide Education & Urban Entomology Field Specialist at the South Dakota State University Extension Regional Center in Pierre. But South Dakota bee species vary wildly. They can be bright metallic green or resemble tiny wasps. “Just because people don’t see insects in an area doesn’t mean they aren’t there,” says Bachmann. “If we increase areas of habitat, we can really do a lot to support the populations that exist in the margins.”
