Professor Danforth with a collection of solitary bees in a case

A picture of different types of bees.

Project Ground Nesting Bees

Tuesday, July 8, 2025, 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Project GNBee – how you can help to preserve our most threatened and valuable pollinators: the ground-nesting, solitary bees. Come in person r over zoom!

Ground-nesting, solitary bees comprise 70% of all bee species. They are valuable, but vulnerable, pollinators across the landscapes and habitats of New York. Previous bee conservation initiatives have focused on enhancing floral resources, but little attention has been focused on preserving nesting habitats. With funding from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, we have developed a community science project aimed at locating, researching, and conserving ground-nesting bee aggregations wherever we find them. The talk will provide background on bee biology and life history, threats to bee populations, and how you can help us both study and conserve valuable bee nesting sites.

Instructor's bio: Bryan Danforth received his PhD in Entomology in 1991 from the University of Kansas. He joined the faculty in the Department of Entomology in 1995 after post-docs at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and Cornell. His lab has focused on studying wild bees, including bee phylogeny, evolution, pollination biology, and conservation. Danforth has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles on bee biology, ecology, systematics, and evolution. He recently completed a book on solitary bee biology (co-authored with Jack Neff and Robert Minckley) entitled “The Solitary Bees: Biology, Evolution, Conservation” (Princeton University Press).