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Marin team designed the Honey Bee Haven
When Jessica Brainard picked up a pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream at a Sausalito 7-Eleven in 2008, she added a link to a chain of events that culminate tomorrow with the official grand opening of the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at UC Davis.
Brainard was featured in a Marin Independent Journal article that detailed how she and three other local landscape designers followed a link on that fateful ice cream carton, leading to their having a substantial role in the creation of the half-acre garden that will raise awareness about the plight of the honey bee.
Interpretative planner Brainard, landscape architect Donald Sibbett, landscape architect Ann F. Baker and exhibit designer Chika Kurotaki won the garden design competition and a year's supply of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Their winning design plan (pdf) can be viewed online.
The team designed the garden with:
Honeycomb Hideout, a space with large-blossomed plants and an over-sized honey bee sculpture that gives visitors a sense of a garden from a bees-eye point of view Waggle Dance Way, a path on which visitors can meander through a natural landscape Pollinator Patch, full of berries and fruit trees Save-the-Bee Sanctuary, which tells the story of how bees pollinate much of America's food My Backyard Garden, with perennials and a lawn substitute, which illustrate how almost anyone can make a garden bee-friendly Nectar Nook, shows how to create a natural-looking oasis for bees with native and drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants Langstroth Lane, a walkway with a pair of trellises that gives visitors the sense of entering and exiting frames of a bee box "It was really important to give visitors an emotional connection to the plight of honey bees," Brainard told reporter Debbie Arrington. "We wanted them to understand how important they are to our food production and to our life. This garden celebrates that and provides practical examples to promote bee-friendly backyards." The garden, planted last year, already houses a vast diversity of bees, including bumblebees, carpenter bees, leaf cutters, borer bees, mason bees and sweat bees. The grand opening event, free and open to the public, is from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 11, at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, Bee Biology Road, University of California, Davis. More information is available in a news release by Department of Entomology writer Kathy Keatley Garvey.
The honey bee haven at UC Davis.
Be kind to honey bees
A national roundup of honey bee happenings on the website Tonic.com touched on the UC Davis Honey Bee Haven, a bee-friendly garden set to open to the public Sept. 11.
Tonic reports on good things that happen, dwelling on stories that "inspire, bring hope or simply put a smile on your face." And what could be more inspirational than a lovely flowering garden made possible by a generous donor that daily brings delight and joy to the world, Häagen Dazs ice cream?The Honey Bee Haven is designed to encourage public awareness of the modern-day plight of the honey bee, which Tonic reporter Liz Corcoran described even though it is perplexing and sad. In recent years, bees have been subject to a mysterious decline called Colony Collapse Disorder. Factors that scientists suspect cause CCD include pests, pesticides, malnutrition and stress from transport.
Häagen Dazs - recognizing that fruit, nut and honey ice cream ingredients are dependent on bees - launched the Häagen Dazs Loves Honeybees campaign and donated half a million dollars to Penn State and UC Davis for honeybee research and awareness programs.
Here are some ways to be kind to bees shared in the Tonic story:
- Adopt a beehive, offered by the British Beekeeping Association for about $50 a year
- Support reinstatement of the Boy Scout beekeeping merit badge, which was discontinued in 1995
- Plant sunflowers, hollyhocks, foxgloves and flowering herbs, and if you have room, fruit trees, buddleia and hebe
- Forego the use of herbicides and pesticides.
An artist's rendering of the Honey Bee Haven.
