Ngaro Huruhuru
E hoa mā, kia āta poipoi i tā tātou ngaro huruhuru
Friends, let's carefully nurture our native bee!
In 2019 we teamed up with photographer Birgit Rhode on behalf of Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research, Dr Ngaire Hart NZ native bee specialist, graphic designer Philip Kelly and Graeme Brazier Ltd to create the first ever poster of New Zealand’s native bees.
As of 2023, the poster is no longer in print, but Dr Ngaire Hart has an updated version of our 2019 one with the female and male bees to scale, as well as many other wonderful posters and an ebook about New Zealand Native Bees available to download on her website.
For The Love of Bees also received a small grant in 2019 from Hugo Charitable Trust that enabled a series of native bee site visits and education around Tāmaki Makaurau, a public tour at an inner city site, films for the future talk and film night, and a series of posters across the country and social media campaign to raise awareness of our native bees as they emerge with the warm weather and spring flowering.
We aim to raise the level of public awareness of our unique NZ native bees, who are a keystone species and critical to our native flora’s health.
World-wide native bees are understudied and there is little known about the effects of current pesticides and chemical weed management use on their populations.
The fact that we have around 28 native bees indigenous to Aotearoa is little known.
“Native bees preserve the natural structure of native forests and trees, which depend on pollination for their own reproduction. Through this, can be seen the reciprocal act of kaitiakitanga.”
Dr Ngaire Hart
Dr. Ngaire Hart is a New Zealand native bee specialist and co-creator of the ebook Celebrating Nga Anahera o te Ngahere - The Angels of our Forest.
In 2023 Dr Ngaire Hart created posters on NZ Masked Bees, Hairy Bees and Sweet Bees. You can download these posters in A0 or A3 for free and use them in your classroom or workplace
