Monthly Meeting: Dr. Leif Richardson

 Join us for our virtual monthly meeting! 

Register for the Zoom meeting here.

We’ll kick things off at 6:30 pm with a few quick Society updates to get everyone up to speed.

 Next up: we’ll spotlight a California native plant that’s been absolutely buzzing with activity lately!

 Bee sightings welcome!
We’ll then turn the mic over to community members who’ve been out photographing bees to share what they’ve discovered. If you’d like to participate, please upload your photos using this Google Form. 
We’ll share your photos on screen, and you can unmute to tell us a bit about the bee you found.

 At 7:00 pm, we’ll welcome our featured speaker, Dr. Leif Richardson

Dr. Richardson is a conservation biologist with The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, where he leads the California Bumble Bee Atlas, a community science project to inventory the native bees of the state. In this capacity, he has primary responsibility for most aspects of the project, including training volunteers, obtaining permits, field inventory, species identification, and fundraising. More generally, his research focuses on the ecology, distribution, and declines of North American bumble bees. Dr. Richardson previously worked as an environmental consultant, studying pesticide risk to bee pollinators, and as an ecologist for Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department. He is co-author of a range of scientific publications on bees, including Bumble Bees of North America: An Identification Guide (2014), the standard reference manual on this group of insects. He is an expert in the inventory and identification of bumble bees, and has extensive experience training others to collect bumble bee distribution data in the field. 

If you are interested in joining the CA Bumble Bee Atlas, learn more here.