Bethpage State Park Ecology

      Our National Honey Bee Day Celebration!                Honey bee feeding on Blazing Star ( Liatris spicata ). This month, our park hosted a National Honey Bee Day event, sponsored by Bayer BeeCare, who graciously awarded our park a grant to expand our picnic pollinator garden this year. With their cooperation and The Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA), we were able to put together a fun-filled day of fantastic activities and environmental learning. At the event, pollinator-friendly flowers (specifically varieties that bloom later in the season) were added to the existing garden by those in attendance. Amongst the planters was the Girl Scout Brownie Troop #3410; they actually planted sections in the garden earlier this spring but enthusiastically, came back for more on National Honey Bee Day! Giveaways included fuzzy toy bees, pollinator coloring pages, tools to identify pollinator host plants, even honey treats. Our on-site beekeepers Moira Alexan

         Every year, when the flowers begin to bloom, Bethpage State Park becomes a stomping grounds for monarch butterflies. This is a likely result of our park containing acres of natural habitat, which provide both oviposition sites and nutritional resources for the butterflies before their long migration to overwintering locations in Mexico.   With that in mind, this year we decided to participate in Monarch Joint Venture's Monarch Monitoring Blitz. This was a week long event, from July 29th-August 5th, where locations in Canada, U.S and Mexico made a collective effort to observe and note monarch activity. The only requirement to participate in this event was that the location being monitored had to have growing milkweed. Milkweed is a native plant that provides adult monarchs with nectar and monarch caterpillars with the only food source to complete its life cycle. Given that Bethpage State Park has multiple milkweed varieties growing in large stands all throughou