Kass Urban-Mead is a pollinator conservation specialist, NRCS partner biologist, and the forests and forestry lead at the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. After working as the mid-Atlantic specialist for several years, she has returned home to New York state, where she focuses on technical assistance, education, and research around managing forests for pollinators. When not working to inspire a love for bees in others, Kass enjoys roller skating, singing shape note music, and tending her garden.
I grew up on five acres near Hyde Park, outside the tiny village of Staatsburg, New York. We didn’t make a living farming, but I was a very dedicated 4-H dairy goat kid, starting with two goats when I was in third grade and growing from there. I milked every day, made cheese, my dad and I cut most of our own hay with scythes. I prepared hard for shows at the county fair. We learned how to slaughter our own chickens and turkeys, and how to manage a pasture. It was really formative for me and my relationship to nature to have this practical food systems perspective, which I think still really affects how I move through the world.
When I left for college at Yale, I was undecided on a major. I had a passion for and interest in studying food systems, but I had never thought about related fields as a career. I took a year off during college to work on organic farms. I worked in Canada and India and also around the Northeast through World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. When I came back to school, I took an entomology class, and it made me realize I definitely wanted to catch bugs. Dr. Marta Wells taught the class, and her passion and enthusiasm were just overwhelmingly contagious. She was so genuine, and a really exceptional person. She took us to Florida on a field trip in the fall because we were trying to get 100 families in our insect collections by the end of the fall semester. I was hooked and decided to major in ecology and evolutionary biology.
I was still approaching insects from an agroecological perspective, and so I joined a honey bee research lab studying the gut microbiome of the western honey bee (Apis mellifera). When that professor unexpectedly chose to leave Yale, I had to scramble to find a new senior thesis mentor. I was stressed at the time, but in hindsight, it was a blessing: I found Dr. Os Schmitz’s lab at the Yale Forestry School, which led me to the Yale-Myers Forest field station, where I began to fall in love with forests and learn about ecological forest stewardship.
I worked in meadows across a forested gradient and started seriously thinking about the role of the forest itself. We have over 4,000 species of wild bees in the United States, and over 700 species in the Northeast, and yet there is a lot we still don’t know about where they nest and overwinter. I started noticing a lot of the bees in my meadows were flying back to the forest, and that there were different species active in meadows with high forest cover nearby. Most of us are biased towards honey bees because of their agricultural role, but the incredible diversity and complexity of these wild bees just completely stole my heart.
I was accepted to the Yale School of Forestry (now renamed the Yale School of the Environment) for a one-year master’s in ecology but deferred from the program to build up more diverse experiences. I spent a summer as a horticultural intern at the Arnold Arboretum, then worked during the year in a plant biology lab in the magical Mediterranean city of Montpellier, France. When I came back to Yale, I spent the year doing research and additional coursework in silviculture and stand dynamics. I had the opportunity to join in on forestry field trips, and I realized I wanted to keep doing research at the interface of pollinators and forest systems.
Wild bees do incredibly important work in our farms and gardens, and the diversity of pollinators can increase pollination services. For crops like apples, tomatoes, and blueberries, wild species are actually more effective than honey bees per visit due to more effective flower-handling behavior! The research community was looking at these wild bees in agricultural systems and noticing frequent positive correlations between healthy pollinator communities and nearby natural habitat. And that’s actually super intuitive, right? If you’re in a healthy and diverse landscape matrix, you’re more likely to have all sorts of “good bugs” spill over from nearby habitat.
I started to wonder about the positive correlations between bees and woody habitat. We think of bees as garden and meadow creatures – so I wanted to know, “Why would they be in the forest?” In 2016, I started my PhD at Cornell in the Entomology Department, with Dr. Bryan Danforth and Dr. Scott McArt. I asked which bees use forested habitats in early springtime and what pollen they collect and looked at how some of them later fly out of the woods to visit crops. At the time, there wasn’t really that much research about how wild bees use the forest, and the natural history of many species was largely unknown.
I took a tree climbing class – a semi-whimsical physical education credit my first fall – and began to design research to look at treetops in spring. My professors were skeptical but supportive. They were like, “If it falls through, you will still have the summer to redesign your project and do other summer research.” I spent the spring tree-climbing in woodlots and forests next to apple orchards in the Finger Lakes region of New York. They were all second-growth, maple-dominated forests with oak and hickory in the canopy. And it worked! I saw a lot of bees visiting forest canopy trees and understory early spring flowers. I found a high diversity of wild bees active in these forests. There was a big activity peak in the understory and then in the canopy from March through April into May, and I tracked that a large number of those species were also visiting apple flowers in May and June. Altogether, these spring forest resources launch a lot of our native wild bees into the season.
The canopy is like this incredible “meadow in the sky.” Over the course of my PhD, I collected pollen from all of the flowers I found blooming in my forests to create a “pollen library.” I would look at the pollen that the bees had collected and compare it to the library for that site and date – I ultimately identified over 300,000 grains of pollen collected by a few thousand bees! I would find pollen on them from understory flowers such as trout lily, spring beauty, and cutleaf toothwort, and from shrubby species such as raspberries. But we also found tree pollen, including oak and sugar maple and cherry and even ash – the bees had visited all of these trees. It turned out that the flowers from canopy trees were a major part of the bees’ diets.
After I finished my PhD in 2021, I started with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation as the mid-Atlantic pollinator conservation specialist. As a Xerces partner biologist for USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), we offer pollinator biology expertise for on-the-ground implementation of Farm Bill Programs like the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). An eligible landowner – whether in forests, farms, or urban areas – can go to the NRCS field office near them and ask about financial assistance programs to support the establishment and stewardship of pollinator habitat. We do an initial site visit to talk about the land manager’s goals and work to figure out the most important biological needs and opportunities for vulnerable pollinators at each site. We then assist the landowner and the NRCS offices with guidelines for site selection, site planning, establishment, maintenance, seed mix design, and plant species list development. I was in that role for three years and got to be involved in a huge number of restoration projects, from the New Jersey Pine Barrens to the densest urban neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Now, I am excited to have recently moved back to the Finger Lakes for a new chapter!
Now my role is to lead the development of Xerces materials on the relationships between pollinators, forests, and forestry. I’m developing educational materials, speaking at conferences, and working with partners to develop habitat assessment and stewardship guides for foresters, land managers, and natural resource professionals. We maintain relationships with researchers to deepen our understanding of life cycles, pollen preferences, overwintering and nesting habitat needs.
Looking through the eyes of a forest bee can invite important questions: Do I have a lot of invasives, or a diverse native understory and mid-story? Do I see host plants for declining bees? Do I see healthy tree regeneration that is surviving deer browse? Is my forest on track to have a diverse canopy in 100 or 200 years? Do I have complexity of tree species and ages? Do I see snags and stumps and dead woody material?
Ultimately, the full community of bees needs forests of all different age classes, as well as openings and wetlands. There are some new analyses out of Rutgers that suggest that a third of the northeastern wild bee fauna are actually mature forest associates, and another third need forested landscapes for part of their lives. One forthcoming project I’m super excited about is “Seeing the Forest for the Bees,” inspired, of course, by Forestry for the Birds, and it’s been wonderful talking about this with Audubon folks. We are excited to introduce people to different charismatic bees that can serve as ambassadors to important forest habitat elements! For example, there’s a trout lily bee that needs its trout lily flower, there are iridescent green sweat bees that nest in coarse woody material, and three different species of cellophane bees that each have a different favorite canopy tree to visit for pollen! It’s thinking like this that helps us manage for diversity. Plus, each of those bees is really cute, which doesn’t hurt.
I want people to know that healthy, diverse forests are an important part of pollinator habitat, and that we always want to take a historically informed and landscape-scale perspective before making a habitat intervention. We should think about what makes sense for the soils, the sunlight, the slope, and the moisture level of a given site. I love helping people convert old cool-season pastures, lawns, and agricultural fields into meadows with high-diversity local seed mixes, but it’s also important to keep forest as forest. We don’t want to be doing significant land conversion in our already highly fragmented landscapes. Instead, we want to be working with what we have and then actively stewarding it with sustainable forestry practices for long-term species diversity, structural and age class complexity, and climate resilience.
I am grateful to have a job that allows me to work in partnership with so many people committed to a healthier world. It’s great to see real change in the landscape and I learn so much from every single project and every single person. And pollinators are endlessly inspiring – it’s a real gift to work with organisms that so many people connect with for so many different reasons. For me, too! Who knew that I’d start with a passion for 4-H dairy goats and follow that thread a few decades later to advocating ecological forest management for pollinators? This work is a wonderful entry point into lots of surprising conversations with folks, and I’m grateful for that.
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