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In this time of uncertainty, everyones priorities have changed. Mine too, of course. My family’s health and safety comes above all, but I cannot ignore the personal importance of the Bees@Schools project. I have been leading this project for over a year, and many many hours of work have gone in to getting it this […]

Exciting news! Applications for the summer 2020 season of the Bees@Schools program are now being accepted! If you are a teacher of a grade 4 to 12 class at a school in Canada and you’re interested in giving your students some hands-on experience with the scientific method, please follow the application link below. Each of

It is hard to believe with all the snow we just got here in southern Ontario, but we are starting to prepare for our next round of bee hotel installations! We got started this past weekend by turning 10′ chunks of PVC pipe into 10″ bee hotel foundations. Last year we did this using hand

One of the major goals of the Bees@Schools project was to get an idea of cavity-nesting bee distributions across Canada. Check out the map below to see our 2019 schools! Although there are a few places we definitely want to improve on, we think we did pretty well for our first year! During our 2020

Today Sage and Katerina finished opening all the individual tubes in the successfully installed nest boxes! The next step is now to pulverize the materials and begin the DNA barcoding process.

We are almost finished opening up all the nest box tubes! Each individual tube’s occupants are given their own sterile vial. Next up: we will be able to start DNA barcoding to determine what species of bees occupied the nests and what types of pollen they collected!

As most of our successful bee hotels have now been returned to the university, we are busy at work opening the tubes that have been nested in. In each nested tube, a single bee larvae will be separated from its siblings by a wall of material. The material used is specific to the species of

These are just a few of the nest boxes that were installed over the summer of 2019. It is exciting to have all of our nest boxes arriving here at the University of Guelph. They have been installed at 83 schools across Canada since June, hopefully gathering some bee occupants.

We are busy at the University of Guelph making our nest boxes. These will soon be sent out to schools across Canada who are participating in the Bees@Schools project. Constructing this many nest boxes would not be possible without the help of my many volunteers, so huge thanks to Elaina, Sam, Sarah, and Emily! The