Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts & Agriculture
Events
Bee Habitat in Cyanotype with Sarah Red-Laird (aka Bee Girl)
Learn more about bee keeping, soil building, native bees, and wildlife coexistence. Followed by a pasture walk.
Sarah Red-Laird (aka Bee Girl) envisions a future in which kids frolic in pastures of flowers, abuzz with bees, alongside happy, healthy, ecological farmers and ranchers. She and the Bee Girl Organization (BGO) hive are currently collaborating with a group of partners on 13 farms, ranches, and vineyards, spanning over 50,000 acres in the American West.
Through their projects, BGO is working to:
• Identify bee community refugia in agricultural spaces
• Quantify the land stewardship practices that have created these unique areas
• Celebrate the farmers, ranchers, and vineyard managers who steward these ecosystems
• Assist in preserving these landscapes through awareness and policy
• Support additional producers in creating and maintaining islands of bee refugia on their lands.
Our vision is transported from prairies and meadows to gallery walls through the “Bee Habitat in Cyanotype” project. Sarah collects and presses flowers from each landscape BGO works on, then combines them to create mixed media pieces with bees and cyanotype prints, resulting in visually engaging and educational works of art. A dedicated webpage is created for each piece to celebrate the flowers, the bees, the land, the producers, and the specific bee habitat project from which the bees and flowers originate.
In this lecture, she will share details about BGO’s 2023 projects and how her focus has evolved to encompass not only beekeeping but also soil building, native bees, and wildlife coexistence. Attendees will get a preview of some of the pieces she will be working on during her residency at Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts & Agriculture (PMRCAA) and, weather permitting, they will have the opportunity to enjoy a pasture walk to view the “Regenerative Bee Pasture” collaboration between BGO and PMRCAA.
