In April 2018, city council passed a motion that, ironically, generated almost no buzz: the declaration of Toronto’s Official Bee.The metallic green sweat bee — Agapostemon virescent is the species name — was chosen for three reasons. One, it’s abundant: of the more than 360 wild bee species that inhabit Toronto, this one is fairly common. Two, it’s hard to miss: it looks like it’s all zhuzhed up to hit the bee version of Studio 54, or maybe the Brunswick House before it became a Rexall. And three, it lives in a condo.Females of this species create communal nests in the ground. The nest has a common entrance, but each bee gets its own unit. One female guards the entrance at a time, its iridescent head poking out of the burrow. Uncommonly for wild bees, which typically aggressively defend their nests, the guard bee lets other stranger bees, its neighbours, into the entrance. For its welcoming attitude — and its condo lifestyle — Agapostemon virescent was deemed worthy of Official Bee status. The motion was adopted along with a citywide pollinator protection strategy. Next month, council will vote on Toronto’s first-ever biodiversity strategy. In a way, this metallic green sweat bee can be seen as a mascot for a broader movement: the recognition that cities can and must play a role in protecting biological diversity and fighting climate change, the world’s two conjoined environmental crises.Urban areas “are often thought of as landscapes of regret, because they are so developed, and there is so little intact habitat or anything coming close to intact habitat. But I really see these as landscapes of opportunity for conservation — but it has to be conservation done differently,” says Faisal Moola, a professor in the department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph.Usually, when people think about protecting nature, they envision remote swaths of intact forest. ...
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