Three Community Scientists Receive Annual Award for Enhancing Our Knowledge of Vermont’s Bees
Left to Right: Andrée Sanborn, Deborah Laramie, Jody Frey
As with most VCE projects, the Vermont Wild Bee Survey (VTBees) has been blessed with an incredible wealth of skilled and dedicated volunteers during the year. This year alone, 428 people have contributed observations to our project on iNaturalist. With so many deserving candidates, it was impossible to pick just one! We are therefore delighted to present our second annual VCE Community Scientist of the Year award to three women who have done tremendous work helping us document bee (and other taxa) diversity in less well-studied parts of Vermont. In addition to documenting numerous new county records, all three volunteers are collecting specimens with malaise traps; these will be invaluable to fill in gaps of difficult-to-ID specimens.
Few people credit horseflies with any redeeming qualities, but Deborah Laramie got hooked on insects by Tabanus calens. This strikingly large horsefly prompted Deb to start documenting insects on her property on the west side of Snake Mountain in Addison. Several years ago, Deb set up a horsefly trap to monitor and control the many different species of horse flies that were tormenting her horse. For the past three years, she has opportunistically and meticulously collected any bees that have found their way into the trap, sharing her finds with VTBees. Deb’s laborious work has provided VCE with an amazing dataset that includes several species we’d have otherwise missed, and provides a multiyear window into the bee fauna of a unique natural area.
Jody Frey became hooked on nature as a kid through the National Wildlife Federation’s magazine, Your Big Backyard. During the COVID-impacted summer of 2020, she finally found time to document the diversity of flora and fauna in her own backyard in Barton. Jody credits her good friend Andrée with introducing her to iNaturalist, which she now refers to as a “magic carpet that connects your backyard to the rest of the world.” Her particular backyard happens to host an impressive number of unusual bees, including several species previously unknown from the Northeast Kingdom. Although Jody is an avid iNaturalist user, she also delights in sharing the wonders of her remarkable garden and yard with neighborhood children and anyone else who ventures by.
Several decades ago, Andrée Sanborn had an intense spider phobia, but ironically it was a Barn Orbweaver (Araneus cavaticus) that caught her eye and launched her into arthropod photography. “I went back and back, with tighter and tighter shots. I fell in love. I overcame the phobia. I moved on to any arthropods I could find,” she explained. Once she developed a photographic interest in arthropods, her late husband would assist her in spotting and identifying the many “wonderful miracles living mostly invisibly” around their house in Barton. Since 2013, she has shared her photographs on iNaturalist and BugGuide, documenting at least 1,000 species in Orleans County. This year, she and Jody added malaise traps to their yards to help a PhD student studying ichneumonid wasp systematics. This fall, they both plan to help sort out any bees that were accidentally collected and donate them to VTBees, enhancing their already-unique dataset for a region of the state where we have precious little knowledge of our bee fauna.
VCE’s Community Scientist of the Year Award recognizes the accomplishments and dedication of volunteers who contribute to our science and conservation work. You can learn more about becoming a community scientist by visiting vtecostudies.org/what-we-do/community-science.
