Buzz on the Range: Partner Spotlights
Buzz on the Range Partner Spotlight: Lily Andersen
Back when it was honey bees all day every day for me - I got my hands in hundreds, if not thousands, of hives every season as a bee worker, hive inspector, or a beekeeping educator. I worked for one of the largest beekeeping operations in the country and also with people who had two hives in their backyard.
It didn’t matter how many hives people had, their personality and their ability to steward animals with grace and kindness came through in the personality of their bees.
Ranching much larger livestock doesn’t seem to be much different. When I first met Lily I instantly liked her. She’s one of those people who is spinning multiple plates at once, yet when you’re in the eye of the storm with her, you feel at ease.
When not standing in a field talking to me about bees and flowers, Lily is raising two young girls with her husband, Kyle, owning and operating her community’s feed store, The Spurline, raising beef cows, and milks cows at their family dairy. There’s also quite a few pigs, chickens, cats, horses, and badass cattle dogs in the picture.
Yet the vibe around the ranch and store isn’t mayhem; it’s quiet and calm and friendly. When I’m out in her pastures monitoring bees and flowers, her cows follow me around like puppies. They are curious, kind, and calm.
As a “Buzz on the Range” project partner – an initiative organized by the Western Sustainability exchange and Meagan Lannan of Barney Creek Ranch, funded by Western SARE – Lily has been utilizing some innovative methods to get more flowers on the ground for bees through utilizing cattle. These are: feeding flower seeds in mineral, winter bale grazing, and adaptive/rotational grazing.
So far, her “treatment” pasture is dominated with alsike clover (Trifolium hybridum), which the bees love. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) were common on her property, as were striped sweat bees (Agapostemon). Over the last three years, we also found some very cool native bees in the treatment pasture such as anomalous metallic sweat bees, bald-spot sweat bees, bull-headed furrow bees, Edwards's long-horned bee, scurfy pea carder bees, Trevor's mason bee, and two-form bumble bees.
One of the coolest bees spotted was the orange-tipped wood-digger bee (Anthophora terminalis). This bee could easily be mistaken for a small, scruffy bumble bee – as she is black, yellow, and orange. This is an interesting bee because unlike most Anthophora (digger bees) who nest in the ground, she will nest in old, rotten wood or pithy stems. I found her in our “control” plot, a pasture for Lily’s milking cows that has a healthy riparian zone and borders the forest. This bee is a testimony to the importance of a diversified landscape; the more varied habitat you have (trees, shrubs, uncompacted and open soil) the more diversity in bee species you have. Which, in turn, leads to a diversity of flowering plants, healthier soil, and a healthier and more fertile ecosystem for our food to be grown and raised on.
Follow Lily on social media at @milkmaidmeats, @thespurline, and @landersen.skattumdairy and learn more about her and support her with a purchase of her pastured meat at https://www.milkmaidmeats.com. Learn more about “Buzz on the Range” here.
Buzz on the Range Partner Spotlight: Alex Blake
Coming soon!
Buzz on the Range Partner Spotlight: Malou Anderson
Coming soon!
Buzz on the Range Partner Spotlight: Meagan Lannan
Coming soon!