A few years ago, Rebecca Louie was an unlikely leader for the largest bee conservation nonprofit in the New York metro area. Her background was in entertainment reporting and tech. “I was this New York City girl, not very eco,” she said. But her “soul felt empty.”
In 2019, Louie learned of growing public concern over colony collapse disorder, a condition in which most of the worker bees in a colony disappear. The disorder is thought to be caused by disease, poor nutrition or habitat loss. For Louie, beekeeping seemed like the most direct way of getting involved in finding a solution. She joined a community of urban beekeepers, where she met Guillermo Fernandez, founder of the Honeybee Conservancy, now the broader Bee Conservancy.
The bees and our food
Bees are critical pollinators. Their decline threatens ecosystems, food security and public health. And these harms hit harder for communities historically excluded from conservation efforts.
The Bee Conservancy’s roots trace back to Fernandez’s upbringing in an immigrant community with limited access to healthy food, Louie said. As a beekeeper, he became fascinated by the link between pollination and food production: Honeybees pollinate roughly one in every three bites of food people eat.
But honeybees are only a small fraction of the world’s 21,000-plus bee species, and pollinate just 25% to 40% of flowering plants native to the Northeast. Native bees, including bumblebees and sweat bees, pollinate the rest.
“All those other folks flying by are very important” to food systems too, Louie said. So after joining the Honeybee Conservancy in 2019 as its first full-time employee, she helped rebrand the group as the Bee Conservancy. That shift expanded the organization’s work into habitat restoration, including pollinator-friendly gardens across the city. Louie eventually became the organization’s executive director, leading its pollinator conservation, food justice and community science efforts.
Unlikely partnerships
Among the organization’s most surprising partnerships is its collaboration with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The relationship began when an employee at the World Trade Center campus with an interest in pollinators reached out. The conversation led to a pollinator habitat project at Liberty Park, which overlooks the 9/11 Memorial. The Bee Conservancy partnered with the Port Authority’s landscaping teams to install native perennial plants that support pollinators. Since then, more than 1,500 native plant species have been added to the park. The project later expanded to other Port Authority sites, including the grounds surrounding bridges and tunnels.
To Louie, that collaboration showed that environmental work can thrive beyond forests and nature reserves. For instance, the group works with the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). At the NYCHA Farragut and Ingersoll campuses in Brooklyn, the Bee Conservancy partnered with senior gardeners and community groups to create pollinator habitats. Children help water plants while volunteers teach them about bees.
“It feels pretty magical,” Louie said.
How you can help bees and other pollinators
- Plant things bees love. Through its Food Justice Award program, the Bee Conservancy offers community gardeners and farmers seeds, pollinator-friendly plants and training and mentorship.
- Beyond gardens, one of the nonprofit’s fastest-growing initiatives is community science, mobilizing everyday neighbors to help collect ecological data. Using smartphone apps, volunteers photograph pollinators in their neighborhoods. “If everyone took one photo of a pollinator and uploaded it to iNaturalist and Bee Machine, suddenly that would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of data points,” she said. The work is especially focused in communities identified by New York State as environmentally vulnerable or historically underserved.
- Not everyone can maintain a beehive, she said, and beekeeping is far more demanding than many realize. However, nearly everyone can contribute in some way. That contribution might mean planting native flowers, avoiding pesticides, fundraising or attending events to educate yourself and others.
“In our day and age, it’s hard to really see and feel the power of little actions because it feels futile,” Louie said. But, she adds, “people don’t realize there are so many ways to support bees. The snowball effect is powerful.”
