Let’s help the Bees, and make Bee Hotels! A Capstone Project of UM students

Here is a little info about the project: The project will target the urban area of Missoula and focus on specialist native bee species and their interaction with urban habitats. Through a local lens, this project will seek to establish additional habitat in urban Missoula by creating bee hotels to promote the abundance and diversity of native bees. Urban areas can support high levels of pollinator diversity, particularly in residential gardens and communal green spaces (Baldock et al., 2019), and bee hotels have consistently been shown to increase bee abundance and diversity across multiple studies (Rahimi et al., 2021). Citizen scientists (community members engaging in conservation) are integral to this project, and their work will facilitate the success of increasing abundance. To create bee hotels around Missoula, several workshops will be hosted, encouraging community members to attend, build a bee hotel from recycled materials, and learn about native bee conservation. All participants will be volunteers, and the materials will be locally sourced or recycled. Using community resources to establish bee hotels in a local urban setting aims to mitigate the effects of urbanization on native bee species.