This talk will feature the University of Virginia's T'ai Roulston highlighting research and natural history on Virginia's native bee species. Wild bee species pollinate the bulk of native plants in Virginia's wild areas, are the most frequent pollinators of home gardens and often dominate pollination on small farms. They work alongside European honey bees pollinating major crops on large farms but only if the broader landscape supports their populations. This talk will describe some of the different life histories of native bee species, the challenges they face in our landscape, and some things that can help keep them around.

Guest Speaker: T'ai H. Roulston

T'ai H. Roulston is a research associate professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and the Curator of the State Arboretum in Boyce, Virginia. He has worked with UVa for 25 years. His research focuses primarily on insect ecology and conservation. He and collaborators have found and mapped a population of the endangered rusty patched bumble bee in the mountains between West Virginia and Virginia, a population widely separated from its larger population in the upper Midwest. He and his graduate student Kate LeCroy have documented the declines of native mason bees in the Mid Atlantic with the proliferation of non-native mason bees. He is now undertaking a project to document remaining butternut trees in Virginia and determine if there any pockets of remaining trees showing resistance to butternut canker, the primary disease killing them.

An arboretum is a plot of land on which many different trees or shrubs are grown for study or display. The State Arboretum of Virginia stands in the central 172 acres of Blandy Experimental Farm, located in Boyce, VA (near Winchester). Visitors can explore labelled tree and shrub collections that date back the early 1930’s from all over the world.

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