NCC Magazine - Spring 2020

Driving along a one-way road in Pinery Provincial Park,
Ontario, with a colleague in 2009, Sheila Colla spotted
a bumble bee in the roadside weeds that looked different
from others she had seen that day. Sure enough, it was a rare
rusty-patched bumble bee. But it was also the last individual
of its kind observed in Canada.
“It was exciting at the time — my first drive-by identification, but it’s
sad, as I haven’t found any since then,” says Colla, a pollinator conservation
researcher at York University, in Toronto, Ontario.
Native bumble bees are rapidly declining and some are at risk of
being lost from Canada. Recently, the Nature Conservancy of Canada
(NCC), with funding from The W. Garfield Weston Foundation and
Mitacs, supported Colla’s research into pollinator-friendly management
practices in agricultural landscapes. Between 2016 and 2018,
Colla’s team identified the presence of many species of native pollinators
on NCC properties, including three species of bumble bees that
are rapidly declining (American bumble bee, yellow-banded bumble
bee and golden northern bumble bee).
“I’ve been researching native pollinators for 15 years, documenting
the decline of native bumble bees in Canada and the U.S., before it was
on the public’s radar,” says Colla. “Often when people talk about pollinator
decline, it’s about non-native honey bees and agricultural crop pollination.
According to a national poll, roughly half of Canadians believe
the European honey bee is a native, wild bee in Canada. But I work
with our native bees, thinking about how to conserve their biodiversity
and the importance of doing so for ecosystem resilience in light of
climate change.”
Art may be a more effective tool to
convey the benefits of pollinators than
a scientific paper.
these culturally important native plants, their
pollinators and what threats they encounter,”
says Colla. She adds that scientists need to
be open to incorporating different knowledge
systems into their research and recognize
that humans are part of the natural world.
Colla and Myers hope their project will
help share Traditional Knowledge about
Indigenous medicine plants and pollinators,
including bees, that evolved alongside them.
“I’m interested in how these gardens
are changing the landscape to more closely
resemble what was there pre-colonization
or settlement,” says Myers. “I hope to raise
conversations about ecology as it relates
to colonization, develop relationships with
people who knew Mike and invite artists to
respond to these gardens with their artwork.”
Colla hopes that the gardens become
spaces for people to observe Canada’s diversity
of wild pollinators. “[The gardens are]
where people can be a part of the ecosystem,
appreciate and learn about plant-pollinator
relationships and our connections to them.
And through that learning we can get people
to care about our native pollinators before
more of them are at risk of extinction, like the
rusty-patched bumble bee is,” she says.1
KITCHENER-WATERLOO ART GALLERY.
Colla finds it challenging to communicate the value of conserving
native pollinators to the public, as it’s often hard to understand how
they positively impact humans.
She believes that art may be a more effective tool to convey the
benefits of pollinators than a scientific paper. And this is where her
collaboration with Lisa Myers, an artist and curator of Anishinaabe
ancestry, takes root.
Colla and Myers are colleagues in the Faculty of Environmental
Studies at York University. They’ve embarked on a unique research
project — Finding Flowers — to replant the late (1941–2006)
Mi’kmaq artist Mike MacDonald’s gardens across Canada.
The first garden in the series is located outside the Kitchener–
Waterloo Art Gallery in Ontario. This striking circular garden features
seven sections and a wooden teepee overhead. The Indigenous medicine
plants growing there support pollinators from spring to late fall,
showcasing the connections between pollinators, traditional medicinal
plants and Indigenous culture.
“[Through Finding Flowers], we hope to integrate ecological studies
and Indigenous art, and gather basic ecological information about
Medicine and Butterfly
Garden (2019),
Mike MacDonald
Kitchener-Waterloo
Art Gallery
natureconservancy.ca
SPRING 2020 17