Today marks the beginning of National Pollinator Week, a good time to think about pollinators. Many posts from The Metropolitan Field Guide have focused on pollinators, so to begin Pollinator Week, here is a roundup of the posts. Once you learn about pollinators, visit Pollinator Design and Butterfly and Moth Design for many resources to learn how to [...]
As honeybee populations suffer from colony collapse disorder, some people are looking to our native bees to see how they can fill in. Dave Hunter from Crown Bees is one of those people. I recently took a class from him about raising mason bees and learned a great deal about why we should raise mason [...]
The Pollinator Pathway is planned along a one-mile stretch in Seattle from Seattle University to Nora’s Woods replacing grass strips with pollinator gardens. The brainchild and creation of Sarah Bergmann, the Pollinator Pathway currently consists of two installed gardens with another 16 planned and has 20 total homeowners signed up to participate. I visited one [...]
Set to open to the public on September 11 of this year is the winning design of the Häagen-Dazs-UC Davis Honey Bee Haven Design Competition located at the Honey Bee Research Facility on the UC Davis campus. The winning team from Sausalito, CA was made up of a variety of professionals including landscape architects, exhibit [...]
When we talk about a nest box we usually envision a wooden structure, often in the shape of a human house, hanging from a tree in the backyard. However, if you talked about a nest box in the UK, they may have a different idea. The RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) has [...]
Via Animal Architecture blog, the result of the Beyond the Hive Competition (that was featured here last month) was announced this week and the winner was the Beevarian Antsel and Gretel Chalet. There are images of all of the constructed designs along with images of the structures with their designers at the British Land website. [...]
The UK really does have some excellent wildlife habitat design competitions. One of the most recent is called Beyond the Hive where designers created luxury hotels for the insects of London. The competition is a joint effort between British Land and The City of London Corporation “to celebrate 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity.” [...]
The Pollinator Partnership is a source for pollinator information and their website includes a valuable tool for designing for pollinators. Their Pollinator Friendly Planting Guides provide detailed PDF’s of many regions throughout the United States including my local region, the Pacific Lowlands. The guide discusses the need for pollinator assistance, a brief overview of the [...]