May 2018

The first meeting of the Native Solitary Bee working group was held at Tom McDonald’s Smiling Dog
Ranch at 9AM. In attendance were Tom, Anne Ellis, Kim Kruezer, Sara Starkebaum, and Connie Thomas. 

We shared our educational and work experiences as we got acquainted and assigned and assumed
tasks related to organization, goals, outreach, and developing a mission statement.

Kim works with/for the Arizona Wildlife Federation and will reach out to their board to determine if they
would allow us to put information on our activities, etc in their publications. She also loves to build stuff
and I suspect there will be at least one prototype bee house forthcoming!

Sara, a SMMG intern, brought several ideas to encourage active involvement by the community in noting the activity of bees…the ‘great sunflower project ‘, and ‘bumble bee watch’ were two of her suggestions
for our consideration in community outreach.

Anne has a great love of the desert environment and has a PhD in Public Policy from ASU as well as an
extensive career in various scientific applications. Among other things, she will be on the hunt for an entomologist that will work with our group in identifying the bees we encounter.

Tom will continue to contact friends, neighbors, professionals to learn more about the resources available to us from those various contacts.

Connie takes notes, will look into the pros and cons of working within the Citizen Scientist programs and present findings at the next meeting scheduled for 6/14 at Tom McDonalds.

We worked on a mission statement and decided that it would be: to identify native solitary bees in the Sonoran desert: to identify their habitat(s): to determine how to support those bees. We adjourned at 10:30 AM.