Bee Month: Interview with Phyllis Stiles, founder of Bee City USA
Phyllis Stiles is the founder of Bee City USA (as well as Bee Campus USA), which works to galvanize communities to sustain pollinators, in particular the more than 3,600 species of native bees in this country, by increasing the abundance of native plants, providing nest sites, and reducing the use of pesticides.
HFC’s Sheina Crystal interviewed Phyllis and we are so excited to share the conversation below!
Phyllis poses at a table where she is spreading information about pollinator habitats.
1. What inspired you to create Bee Campus? In 2007, Colony Collapse Disorder catapulted my husband and me into the world of European honeybees and their keepers. Due to my ignorance, I was completely shocked to learn about the litany of manmade, existential challenges the bees were facing, not the least of which was pesticide exposure. Tending a hive of bees allows an intimacy we don’t often experience with insects. It was thrilling to watch them coming and going with different colors of pollen on their legs. We spent hours watching them gathering their food in our yard, flower by flower, and were disturbed to learn that, for many, a large part of their diets was white sugar due to the shortage of natural flower nectar. I asked how could such an essential member of our ecosystem be treated so badly?
By 2011 at age 55, I could no longer just be a passive witness, I felt I had to do something, but what and how? Thanks to a career of working for nonprofits at almost every level, I knew something about organizing people around a cause. I reasoned if Tree City USA could mobilize cities to protect their tree canopy, could something called Bee City USA mobilize cities to protect their pollinators? Thankfully, members of the Buncombe County Chapter of the NC State Beekeepers Association agreed to serve on a steering committee to help me design Bee City USA. Our charge was to add to, not duplicate, the pollinator conservation work already being done by other organizations with the emphasis on what individuals and communities can do to reverse pollinator declines.
During that planning process and the next year, our focus changed to native pollinators who, unlike European honeybees, co-evolved with our North American plants and have no “keepers.” Happily, at every step, concerned individuals and organizations were willing to use their time and talents to help design and implement this brand new program. Those people inspired me to keep going despite the fact that I was working full-time and had no funding for this new initiative. Bee Campus USA grew from Bee City USA in 2015. The landscaping director for Southern Oregon University, Mike Oxendine, not only asked me to launch a university version of Bee City USA, but was also willing to help design the new program. The opportunity was just too good to pass up and Bee Campus USA was hatched.
Phyllis poses in front of a Bee City USA sign with her great niece and nephew.
2. What did the first few years of the organization look like? With nearly 300 city and campus affiliates in 45 states today, we are celebrating our 10th anniversary this year! But Bee City USA was a completely volunteer-run (or “pollenteer-run” as we like to say) organization until June 2018, when we merged it into the Xerces Society, where it continues to flourish. Asheville, North Carolina is our ground zero. We had to prove the concept was viable somewhere, and my hometown was that testing ground. On June 26, 2012, Asheville City Council voted unanimously to adopt the Bee City USA resolution. We all celebrated and there was wonderful media coverage about this new initiative. Afterwards, I corresponded with people from across the country interested in getting their cities certified. But it wasn’t until two years later in August, 2014, that it finally happened.
Talent, Oregon adopted their Bee City USA resolution thanks to pollenteer Dolly Warden and overnight, the program went coast to coast! That opened the dam and many more cities—large and tiny--soon followed. Affiliate cities enthusiastically recruited other cities. I ran Bee City USA out of my home office in the evenings and on weekends during my free time using free technology to maintain and communicate with an exploding list of contacts. My husband agreed with my decision to resign from my paid position in 2015 to devote all my time to leading Bee City USA. Like most people, I had a lot to learn about pollination ecology so I became a sponge. I was invited to make presentations on the same stage with some of my heroes like Doug Tallamy, Tom Seeley, and Heather Holm. I even got to speak at the Smithsonian! Margaret Mead’s assertion was constantly proven to be true: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Igniting passion is pure power to make change. Passion is a more impactful resource than money.
A sign at UC Berkeley, part of Bee Campus USA.
3. Why did you choose to focus on universities? Unlike cities that have limited ability to direct landscaping decisions except on municipal property, universities completely control their landscaping choices. Colleges and universities are famously agents of change, and they are uniquely positioned to serve as demonstration sites for pollinator-friendly landscaping policies and practices. And, they can engage their faculty and students in pollinator conservation education and service. The campus community and its stream of visitors have the potential to spread a new landscaping paradigm of pest management that does not harm pollinators, using plants that are locally native, reducing lawns, and enhancing natural pollinator nesting habitats. In 2015, we certified Southern Oregon University as the first Bee Campus USA affiliate and they immediately made a presentation at the annual conference of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) which quickly drew in many more campuses. As of May 2022, 139 campuses have been certified.
4. What do you think represents a model Bee Campus school or city? A model Bee Campus USA affiliate has a strong committee comprised of landscaping staff, faculty and students. They have a pollinator-friendly habitat management plan that includes a list of locally native plants and their local suppliers, and an integrated pest and pollinator management plan. Their habitat plan is promoted publicly on the Internet and interpretive signage tells the story of why and how the landscape supports pollinators. Their curriculum includes pollination ecology topics at least every other year, and their students do service-learning projects that help conserve pollinators on or off-campus. They submit an annual renewal report that chronicles what they accomplished the previous year in each of the areas above, providing institutional memory and inspiring others to follow in their footsteps.
Phyllis’s pollinator-friendly front yard in bloom.
5. What steps do you take in your own life that others can easily implement to protect bees? Before our eyes were opened, we landscaped our yard with mostly exotic species. Now that we understand that plants and pollinators worked out very particular, mutually beneficial, relationships over thousands, if not millions, of years, we have integrated lots of native trees, shrubs, vines, wildflowers and grasses; reduced our lawn; increased flower beds, and we leave our leaves and dead stems in the fall. We have never used insecticides, fungicides or herbicides, except an insecticide to combat the deadly wooly adelgid aphid-like insect in our hemlock trees, since no other pest management practice for large hemlock trees has proven feasible for a homeowner. Signs in our front yard tell passers-by that what they see is pollinator habitat.
6. What is your vision for a toxic-free future? The key is allowing nature to find balance. The world’s war on bugs and pursuit of picture-perfect landscaping does not understand or value our planet’s rich biodiversity. Like so many of us, I have not studied or been taught ecology, or natural science generally. I became a devoted student once I understood how much the world (and its human inhabitants!) depends on pollinators to thrive. We are losing species daily due to climate change, pesticides, and habitat fragmentation and loss caused by human actions.
My vision for a toxic-free future is teaching children ecology from an early age, so they will know how to sustain their life support system—the Earth. This would require reengineering K-12 curriculum and recruiting more scientists into teaching. Colleges and universities could lead this paradigm shift. Those people and institutions that practice integrated pest and pollinator management would regularly publicize their policies and practices to educate others, approaching their work using the scientific method to determine which policies and practices are the most viable and cost-effective.
Right now, the standard managed landscape has lots of lawn edged with mostly exotic trees, shrubs or flowering plants. You can even be cited for not following weed control guidelines. All of the energy (literal and figurative) used for maintaining lawns could be transferred to more productive pursuits of landscapes that support wildlife and don’t poison our environment. As Bee City USA promotes No Mow May, a variety of cities are experimenting with tolerating taller lawns with flowering weeds in order to feed the bees the pollen and nectar they so need in the spring.
While our lawn is small, my husband enjoys mowing it regularly to keep it tidy. He left his Japanese evergreens behind when he learned how important locally native plants are for conserving pollinators and he no longer mulches leaves in the fall. Recently, an old dry stem intentionally left standing from the previous year as a nesting site for bees stabbed his eye while he was weeding a flower bed! In other words, change is hard and peer pressure to conform is strong. But just as peer pressure causes neighbors to regularly mow their lawns and rid them of weeds with herbicides to make them look like golf courses, peer pressure can cause neighbors to reduce those lawns altogether, allow weeds in the lawn, and mow their lawns less often. Paradigm shifts at the grassroots level (no pun intended) will radiate up to local, state and national government policies and practices and the great American lawn could become something we only read about in history books. When offered more native plants and nesting sites and protected from pesticides, many pollinator species will rebound.