Plan Bee initiative

The Plan Bee initiative is a collaboration involving pollination ecologist Alexandria Farmer, in the Department of Biology and the MRU Grounds team. Together they have designed areas of campus to be pollinator friendly; planting  native species to help provide food sources for the bees.

There are two simple, yet crucial components to pollinator habitat; food (flowers), and nesting habitat.  

The provision of native flowering plants ideally offers nutrition in the form of nectar and/or pollen, from early spring, through late fall. Native plants are far more beneficial to native bees because, having evolved together, our native bees have a huge variety of tongue lengths to access the equally huge diversity of native flowers.  Diversity in short, offers resilience to an ecosystem, reducing the risks of pest and disease outbreaks that we see in monocultures. 

Nesting habitat for bees comes in many forms, but what most people do not realize is that most of our native bees nest in the ground!  The nesting boxes you can see on the wild flower hill are specifically designed for colony forming  bumblebees, of which we have dozens of species known to occur in the Calgary area. A queen may choose to start her colony in this box which has also been equipped with natural raw cotton as a nesting substrate.  As for the other non-colony forming bees referred as solitary bees (which is a misnomer as they are anything but solitary in most cases), you can find them nesting in the ground, in old rodent holes or elaborate burrows they carve themselves, along with hollow stemmed plants, and other small cavities they may opportunistically utilize for nesting. Nesting involves laying eggs along with the provision of food reserves. Often these are compartmentalized into what look like tiny cocoons made of vegetation such as leaves, with pollen and nectar inside along with the egg. 

To learn about the many native flowers and native bees we have on campus, you can click on the QR codes you will see around campus that will bring you to information on a plant, or a bee, or maybe both!