Portland's Sabin schoolyard abuzz with "tickle" bees | OregonLive.com

Portland's Sabin schoolyard abuzz with "tickle" bees | OregonLive.com

Portland's Sabin schoolyard abuzz with "tickle" bees

By Katy Muldoon, The Oregonian

May 03, 2010, 1:27AM

MACE VAUGHAN/XERCES SOCIETYBees at Sabin Elementary.Mace Vaughan is a bee guy. So how perfect is it that a year ago he moved into a Northeast Portland home across from a schoolyard field abuzz an estimated 20,000 native bees, known to the kids as "tickle bees" for the way they feel when they land on your skin?

"On a hot day in the spring you're just knocking into them all the time and you don't get stung," says Vaughan, pollinator program director for theXerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.

Now, Vaughan uses the story and photos of Sabin Elementary School's bees -- genus Andrena -- during lectures nationwide, just as he will in a May 14 pollinator workshop at the Oregon Zoo. Vaughan wants farmers, land managers, landscape architects, gardeners and others to understand the ecological and economic importance of North America's 4,000 native bee species; the Willamette Valley is home to 250 bee species, and the deserts east of the Cascade Range hold 600 to 800 species.

By and large, they're misunderstood.

"If you say bees," says Anne Warner, Oregon Zoo conservation manager,