UC Riverside: A Bee-friendly Campus

Entomology Teaching Garden: In June 2023, we completed installation of our departmental teaching garden. We selected plants that are important to our local ecosystems, as well as vary in their bloom time, and what birds and insects they attract. This “living laboratory” offers students the opportunity to learn about our native plants and observe what insect and bird pollinators they attract. Students will learn to identify native plants, and have the opportunity to collect and identify floral visitors. Erin Wilson-Rankin designed and obtained grant funding for the creation of this teaching garden. We gratefully thank David Rankin for his tireless assistance with the installation and Tos Ishida and Mark Jones for their help with irrigation.

Want to check out the garden? Come visit! It is located in front of the UCR Entomology Research Museum. Read more about this new garden in today's Inside UCR

Already native bees are making this new teaching garden their home. This short video shows some cute Lassioglossum (Dialictus) bees bringing back nectar and pollen to their nest.

Inland Empire City Nature Challenge (Every April). Since 2021, UCR has participated in the iNaturalist Bioblitz event, City Nature Challenge as part of the Inland Empire. This year, it takes place April 26-29, 2024. For more information, check out our iNaturalist project. Want to see what we found in the past? Take a look at the 2023 results. Last year, nearly 600 people particpated and observed over 1700 species!

Interested in honey bee health? Check out what is going on at CIBER!

Find the best native plants for butterflies and moths with The Butterfly Net: The insect order Lepidoptera--which includes butterflies, moths, and skippers--is one of the most diverse groups of insects, with over 14,000 species in North America. Throughout their life cycle, Lepidopterans provide critical ecosystem services. As larvae, caterpillars are a primary food source for native birds; and as adults, butterflies and moths help pollinate wild and agricultural plants. To complete this fascinating life cycle, butterflies and moths depend on both host plants (for caterpillars) and nectar plants (for adults). And they are picky eaters! Like the monarch butterfly needs milkweed plants, most of the thousands of butterfly and moth species in California require very specific native plant species in order to thrive. That means we need to be picky in choosing which plants to provide them. Recent PhD graduate, Dr. Chris Cosma (Rafferty Lab), has developed a web application, The Butterfly Net, that helps anyone in California select the best native host and nectar plants to support butterflies and moths at their location. Check out the tool here: Butterfly Net.

Many more projects are ongoing at UCR! We will continue to add projects and activities that our students, faculty and staff are involved in that promote pollinators.