Just two miles south of downtown Rochester, behind the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence on South Plymouth Avenue, is a spacious lawn where neighborhood kids come to play and people connect to a solar-powered Wi-Fi table.
There's a fruit orchard on one side and a garden on the other. In the spring and summer, it's ripe with raspberries, tomatoes, corn, beans, herbs, and bright flowers. A tempting feast for deer and woodchucks.
And bees. Lots of bees.
"I really love bumblebees. I love digger bees. I love leafcutter bees so much, and we have those here," said Alexandria "Lex" Hoang, the institute's director of learning and education. She's leading an effort to expand and protect the wild bee population here.
The project will be funded by a $20,000 grant from the New York Pollinator Conservation Fund. That's an initiative using proceeds from a 2023 settlement with Bayer CropScience and Monsanto over misleading claims about the safety of Roundup weedkillers, which can be toxic to bees and other pollinators.
"When I talk about sustainability at the Gandhi Institute, conserving the wild bee population is so important to me because they make up about 30 percent of our pollinators for all our produce in New York," Hoang said. "We could take care of the smallest creature, and in turn, they take care of us, too."
This winter, she plans to work with community members and other neighborhood organizations to start native flowering plants from seed then plant them in the spring. And build and install bee hotels around the grounds.
Those are wooden boxes with hollow reeds or tubes where a variety of bee species can safely nest, side by side, including the solitary ground dwelling bee.
"I think of them as like single moms, just all kind of living near each other, usually in the ground," Hoang mused. "But if I give them the access to a bee hotel, they'll be able to go there. And when we mow the lawn, for example, they won't get disturbed."
The final part of the project involves community education. This will include signs in English and Spanish near the bee habitats. The messages will let visitors know not to be alarmed if they hear buzzing. It will explain why there is a bee farm on the property.
Eventually, workshops will be offered to teach people about the importance of pollinators and learn how to build their own bee habitats. Hoang's goal is to pass on an understanding and a connection to nature that she didn’t have as a child - growing up in an urban environment.
"My mom didn't feel like things were safe, so I developed like a phobia of the outside, fear of bugs," she recalled.
To try to overcome that fear, she learned everything she could about bees, and she became fascinated with them.
"My hope with educating people in the neighborhood is to show them that the land is not a frightening or scary thing," she said, standing alongside a garden filled with asters and bumblebees.
"There's so much that we could learn from the bees, and the bees could learn from us."
