Pollinator garden generating a buzz on campus

So Bee Campus USA is a designation that's done through the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. What it does is it gives a scaffolding for faculty, for staff, for students who have an interest in bee conservation to come together and to support the work that they do to make the campus more bee friendly. The Virginia Tech Bee Campus Standing Committee saw a need for a habitat maintenance team so that we could bring all of the campus partners together to take care of the pollinator gardens that we put in here at Virginia Tech. When we're talking about native pollinators, we have a large variety here in Virginia. There's over 474 species. So we'll have solitary nesting bees, like our orchard bees and mason bees and things like that that'll be coming and going at different times, and they'll just need a little bit of a pollen here and there. Or we'll have some of our social bees, things like our honey bees or some of our bumblebees, like the common Eastern bumblebe that you will often see. In beekeeping, we do want a large variety of things to be able to provide greater support and be able to have, um, some of the micronutrients that can show up in different species of plants because that nectar will stop being available in October. And so we're making honey now that will allow my bees to be able to overwinter. Being involved in habitat maintenance for the pollinator gardens is very fulfilling. And so we find that when we have staff, students and faculty all come out together, they just have a really nice time making a beautiful space, and they also feel like they have some ownership in the space, and they take skills with them so that they can create their own gardens.