Bee On It: Delaware Highlands Conservancy Event Highlights Pollinator Decline and Conservation

﻿

The Delaware Highlands Conservancy is inviting the community to learn more about pollinators and their crucial role in the ecosystem at its upcoming event, Pollinator Pathway: Bee On It, on Saturday, August 23, at the Van Scott Nature Reserve in Beach Lake, PA.

Rachel Morrow, education and volunteer coordinator for the Conservancy, explained her role and the organization’s mission:

“My role as the education and volunteer coordinator, I create and put out education events, and I also bring in speakers that are professionals on that topic, to help educate not only landowners, which is our main focus, but also the general public. So, families, kids, middle school age, high school age.”

The Conservancy serves four counties across the Upper Delaware River region: Delaware and Sullivan in New York, and Pike and Wayne in Pennsylvania. “In those four counties and a couple outliers but mostly those four counties we have helped conserve over 19,000 acres of land,” Morrow noted.

Featured Speaker on Pollinators

The August 23 event will feature Louise Washer, a Conservancy board member and founding member of the Pollinator Pathway initiative.

“She helped found it in 2017 and it’s now a network of over 350 communities across 19 states and Canada,” Morrow said. “She serves as a facilitator of the pollinator pathway advocacy and pesticide committee, which has helped work to pass the Bees and Birds Protection Act in New York in 2023.”

The event will begin with a lecture on pollinator decline and species such as bees and butterflies, followed by a guided walk through the Conservancy’s meadowlands. Participants will search for monarch butterfly caterpillars on the milkweed plants at the Van Scott Nature Reserve.

Why Pollinators Matter

Pollinators are essential to both natural ecosystems and agriculture, Morrow emphasized.

“Pollinators in general are really anything that helps pollinate flowers and plants. It’s a big component to agriculture—helping not only wildflowers thrive and keep alive but in agriculture we need those plants to be pollinated as well,” she said. “Pollinators can range from bees to butterflies, but it ranges out to other things that people don’t think about like birds, beetles, and grasshoppers.”

She described pollinators as a “keystone species,” meaning their loss would cause ripple effects across the food chain.

“If they start to diminish or we lose a lot of them, we’re going to see less success in our flowers and in our agricultural crops. Agricultural crops going down means less yield of food for not only us, but animals that we feed… then the whole meat industry could go down. It’s a whole tumbling block effect.”

Why Van Scott Nature Reserve?

The event will take place at the Conservancy’s 144-acre Van Scott Nature Reserve, which was donated by the Van Scott family in 2020.

“It has multiple different types of habitats. There’s two ponds on the property, there’s some wood lot, but then there’s a whole bunch of meadow, rolling hills and meadow,” Morrow said. “In that meadow is a bunch of milkweed… a great space to see pollinators and to find specifically monarchs.”

Event Details

The Pollinator Pathway: Bee On It program begins at the Conservancy’s main office at the Van Scott Nature Reserve on August 23. Registration is available online at delawarehighlands.org.

Morrow offered this advice for attendees:

“If you do plan on coming, make sure that you’re ready for walking on a little bit of hills, because our reserve definitely isn’t flat. So make sure you have some water with you and some sneakers on your feet, and you should be good to go.”

Image: A pollinator pathway in Chappaqua, NY. (Credit: The Inside Press).