Students at Harrington Park Public School have been doing an unBEElievable job conserving native pollinators. Last week, Mr Martin’s year 4/5 class and Aboriginal students from kindergarten to year 6 learnt all about Sydney’s native bees and their habitat.
“The majority of Sydney’s 200 native bee species are solitary – live on their own – so they have completely different habitat requirements to social bees, like the honey bee, which live in hives,” says Margot Law, National Parks Association’s Citizen Science Officer.
“Solitary native bees live in small holes in wood, pithy stems and in clay soils. In an urbanising landscape, it’s important to provide safe habitat for bees to continue the vital work that they do pollinating our plants,” says Ms Law.
Harrington Park Public School made pollinator habitat, colloquially known as bee hotels, to support native bees in their homes and the school yard.
“Students made 55 bee hotels for their favourite Sydney bee species, including the leaf cutter bee and carpenter bee. This is the second year that we have run pollinator activities with Harrington Park Public School. It was great to see that our bee hotels from last year have got some guests!”
“It’s important to remember that providing native bee habitat in backyards is a fantastic first step towards pollinator conservation, but it needs to be accompanied by planting native flowers too. There’s no point having habitat, if there’s no flowers to pollinate”
The nearby Harrington Forest is a site for “Bringing back the Buzz to the Cumberland Plain Woodland” – a project that aims to restore the endangered ecological community with bushcare. We have been monitoring how pollinators and butterflies have been responding to bushcare since 2016. The community can help restore pollinator habitat at Harrington Forest with the Bushcare group that meets on the third Saturday of the month from 9am to 12pm.
Media Contact: Margot Law, 0439 407 063
‘Bringing back the Buzz to the Cumberland Plain Woodland’ is managed by the National Parks Association of NSW with support from the NSW Government’s Environmental Trust