A museum exhibit – created in collaboration with Cornell experts, illustrators and students – seeks to shine a light on the vast diversity of wild bees through breathtaking photos, unusual specimens, video footage and extremely rare bee fossils from as many as 100 million years ago.
Five years in the making, “Bees! Diversity, Evolution and Conservation” is on display until June 1, 2020, at the Paleontological Research Institution’s (PRI) Museum of the Earth in Ithaca.
“People hear a lot about honeybees, and they hear a little about bumblebees, but the other 96% of bees on Earth don’t get much press coverage,” said Bryan Danforth, an entomology professor and expert on wild, solitary bees. He created the exhibit with Helaina Blume, director of exhibitions at PRI, Rob Ross, associate director for outreach at PRI, and other PRI colleagues.
The creators hope that visitors will walk away from the exhibit with some understanding of what a bee is in terms of anatomy and evolution; ways that bees are considered an evolutionary success; rewards that plants provide bees and how bees harvest those rewards; where and how bees nest; the importance of bees to agricultural pollination; and things we can do to maintain wild bee populations.
“It’s important to remember biodiversity in conservation efforts,” Ross said, “and that people don’t conserve what they don’t know anything about.”