Yesterday marked the second annual Honey Bee Day in Broomfield — an event held to share more information about how pollinators impact our community.
The event was a team effort with the key players being the Butterfly Pavilion, McWhinney and Baseline.
The day’s activities included a tour of Checkers Square, an interactive musical performance for families, face painting, sidewalk coloring and lots of information about pollinators.
Butterfly Pavilion is in the process of building an 81,000 sq ft facility in the Baseline area and has played a key role in intersecting construction with conservation efforts and build a pollinator district.
In 2019, the Butterfly Pavilion conducted a survey of the area searching for pollinators. They only found a few, said Amy Yarger researcher at the Butterfly Pavilion. A new study is in the process of being conducted and so far the results have been promising.
Researchers have found that pollinator counts have more than doubled since 2019. The newest pollinators to the area include three kinds of bee, — the bumblebee, the leafcutter bee and the digger bee — the two-tailed swallowtail butterfly, the hover fly and the flower fly.
This return of pollinators is due to the landscaping efforts of the community — which include using Colorado native plants that also assist with water conservation.
“Over time, what we would expect to see is as we see more kinds of landscapes, here at Baseline, we’ll actually continue to see diversity increase. My hope is that we’ll not only see not only overall pollinator diversity increase but we’ll see some of those pollinators that maybe need more space,” Yarger said.
The Baseline community recently closed on the 100th home of 9,000 units that are expected to be built. Although the community is young, Baseline’s Senior Community Engagement Manager Christine Jakupovic said her team realized quickly how important community education was on the topic of pollinators.
“... with the pollinator district aspect of the community we knew that Honey Bee Day would be a pivotal part of the community,” Jakupovic said. “We tried to get some of the people in the area and the experts in the field to come and join in and be part of everything that is going on.”
An important part of the day was to teach children more about conservation by creating fun activities to teach young ones and their families.
“With the landscaping and what we are doing now, we are already making a difference,” said Joanne Bell, Colorado communications manager.
