For the last two weeks I’ve been in Montana’s Paradise Valley spending some quality time with ranchers and their flowers and bees as a partner in the “Buzz on the Range” project.

Last summer BGO was roped into this project by Barney Creek Livestock’s Meagan Lannan, rancher, educator, recent Leopold Conservation Award recipient, and all around badass.

It was an easy, “yes,” to join as a collaborator -- as the mission of this project and our Regenerative Bee Pasture initiative are one in the same.

There is an urgent need for resilient soil, grass, and bee habitat in our rangelands. Though most of the folks that we work with love planting for bees simply because it’s fun, interesting, and the right thing to do – in order for this to be scalable, it can only be achieved through fiscally viable approaches. The Buzz on the Range project attempts to demonstrate, with ranchers as the focus (supported by Meagan, BGO, MSU, and WSE), alternative practices to promote healthy bee populations, while also improving pasture plant diversity and healthy cows.

We are working in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in southwestern Montana to support a coalition of five ranchers on 8,900 acres of pasture and range. In this pilot project, we aim to find innovative ways to establish nectar producing flowers through facilitating endozoochory (dispersion of seed through ruminant dung) and utilizing rotational, adaptive grazing.

The project objectives also have a strong educational focus, to share what we learn with the greater ranching, farming, and beekeeping community.

Project Objectives

Objective 1: Increase producer and consumer interest in the connection between soil health, bees, and grazing in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

Objective 2: Build and support a coalition of producers who are adaptive grazing, who are interested in increasing their bee communities and who are interested in connecting with Montana beekeepers.

Objective 3: Test adaptive grazing plans with participating producers to support bees.

Objective 4: Measure bees and soil health over 3 years in several locations.

Objective 5: Provide community promotion of engaged producers involved in the project.

Objective 6: Collect and share the economics of the considered practices involved in this project.

The team at BGO is excited to support each objective with the diverse array of skills that we all offer. Sarah G designed the research protocol and is doing the bee taxonomy, I’m doing the field work (monitoring bees and flowers) and connecting with the ranchers, Ginelle is handling operations, and Tara will jump in to assist with formal education.

Because we were a little late to join the project, there isn’t much funding in the original grant available to support the BGO team. If you’d like to donate to help support this project, we’re grateful for your tax-deductible donation! Click here to fund this work.

If you would like to follow along with this project, check out my Instagram page here, and my Stories here.

- Sarah

Our RAD logo was designed by Hannah Strack.