Welcome mat for bees Nonprofit group leads way in helping to
develop habitat Friday May 9, 2008 THE DALLES, Ore. – It
couldn’t have been a nice way to wake up on a cold spring day.
After an entomologist dug it up from its comfy underground home
overlooking a cherry orchard, the longhorn bee was placed in a
tiny glass vial and passed among a crowd of curious onlookers.
To the orchardists, university extension agents and others in
attendance, the sleepy insect was proof that a patch of bare
soil on a scraggly hillside could serve a worthwhile purpose: as
a home for native pollinators. “There’s all sorts of different
places where you can squeeze habitat in,” said Matthew Shepherd,
conservationist with the Xerces Society, a nonprofit
invertebrate preservation group that is organizing a series of
native pollinator workshops in Oregon. The problems plaguing
commercial honeybees have attracted a lot of attention since
late 2006, when roughly one-fourth of U.S. beekeepers lost about
45 percent of their hives, he said