The Town of Ridgeway has met the standards to become a Certified Affiliate of Bee City USA.
Mayor Craig O’Der said he was notified Ridgeway had completed all the inspections to become a Bee City in early November.
“We’re very happy. We’ve been working on this for a couple of years developing some pollinator gardens, and it felt like this was the time to go ahead and apply and see if we met the standards to be a Bee City. They felt that we had done a good job on” it and “we met all the prerequisites to become a Bee City, and so we’re very excited about that,” he said.
O’Der anticipates Ridgeway will hold an event in the future to officially announce and celebrate this achievement.
“Where we can invite the public out, sometime after the holidays, because right now everything is full on” with holiday events, he said.
To meet Bee City USA’s standards, O’Der said four pollinator gardens were created throughout Ridgeway.
“What we did was we developed them on the VDOT (Virginia Department of Transportation) right of way. It wasn’t being used; it was just right-of-way use that the state had. I had reached out to VDOT and told them this is what we wanted to do, and the local Resident Engineer” Lisa Price-Hughes “blessed it,” he said.
While he knows one of the pollinator gardens is on Ridgeway Town property, O’Der thinks two -of the others are on VDOT rights-of-way.
O’Der said Ridgeway went after the Bee City USA designation to continue its mission of making the town a great place to live for its residents.
To further this goal, he added Ridgeway plans to go after getting a Tree City designation next.
Bee City USA is an initiative of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, a Portland based nonprofit organization that has offices across the United States.
Bee City USA National Coordinator Laura Rost said research has shown significant declines in native pollinator population sizes.
The decline “ranges globally with up to 40 percent of pollinator species on earth at risk of extinction in the coming years as a result of habitat loss, the use of harmful pesticides, and climate change. Bee City USA provides a framework for communities to work together to conserve native pollinators by increasing the abundance of native plants, providing nest sites, and reducing the use of pesticides,” she said.
Rost said pollinators are a keystone species in almost every ecosystem on earth, which enables the reproduction of over 85 percent of all flowering plants and 67 percent of agricultural crops.
“While bees are the most important pollinator, butterflies, moths, beetles, flies, wasps, bats, and hummingbirds also contribute to pollination,” Rost said, adding in addition to the well-known honey bee, there are more than 20,000 described species of bees globally, and around 3,600 species of bees native to the United States.
Xerces Executive Director Scott Hoffman Black said the program aspires to make people more pollinator conscious, or PC.
“If lots of individuals and communities begin planting native, -pesticide-free flowering trees, shrubs, and perennials, it will create large-scale change for many, many species of pollinators,” he said.
How each locality completes the steps to conserve pollinators is up to them, Rost said.
“To maintain their affiliation, each affiliate is expected to report on their achievements and celebrate being a Bee City USA affiliate every year,” she said.
Rost noted it’s also expected that each affiliate should hold public awareness activities, publicly acknowledge the commitment to the program through a standing committee, signage and web links, and prepare an annual report on habitat enhancement activities.
An event will be scheduled this spring to celebrate the Town of Ridgeway’s recognition as a Bee City USA affiliate.
For more information on Bee City USA, visit www.beecityusa.org.
