FAQ & History

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need to know a lot about pollinators before I volunteer as a UMN Bee Lab Pollinator Ambassador?
A: No. During your training, you will learn everything you need to know to help people help pollinators. Bring your enthusiasm and your willingness to learn!

Q: Am I limited to using materials from the UMN Pollinator Education Toolkits?
A: No. However, other materials need to be approved by UMN Pollinator Ambassador Leaders before they are presented publicly. 

Q: Once through training, do Pollinator Ambassadors need to prepare their own PowerPoint presentations based on the training content provided? 

A: No. Pollinator Ambassadors do not need to develop their own content from scratch. Program leaders can provide you with slide sets that correspond with the Pollinator Toolkit materials, as well as general pollinator information slide decks. You are welcome to adapt these presentations as necessary for your presentation topic, but please share them with Elise and Elaine for review prior to presenting. Contact Elise or Elaine for any of our pre-made slide sets. 

Q: Am I allowed to develop my own presentation content using other sources, such as Doug Tallamy (for example)? 

A: Yes! You are allowed to create your own pollinator education slidesets to use in a presentation, but you must approve them with Elise and Elaine. 

Q: As a volunteer, what kind of events will have the most impact? Tabling vs. presentations? Libraries vs. nature centers? 

A: These different events have different types of impact. 

Tabling is a great way to potentially reach lots of people, but you have limited time with each person, so the depth of what they carry away is less. However, there are more likely to be people that weren't even thinking about pollinators at all before, and you have a chance to get them thinking about them for the first time. That is huge.

Talks provide an opportunity to get into greater detail than tabling, but the audiences tend to be more self-selected, i.e. it is people who are choosing to come to a talk about pollinators, so they already have some idea that pollinators matter. Given that shared base, you can launch into more details about the action steps needed to help them.

Libraries often will be a more generalized crowd than the nature center crowd and may need more explanation for things like why native plants are important or the importance of including climate action in pollinator protection. There is value to reaching all of these different audiences. However, the presentations that you prepare can be catered to either include more background on why it is important to care, or more details on how to help, if you are speaking to a crowd that is likely to already want to help.

Past Pollinator Ambassador Achievements

A collaboration between Bee Squad, Urban Ventures, Urban Roots, Monarch Joint Venture, the University of Minnesota Bell Museum of Natural History, Pollinate Minnesota, and the Mississippi River Green Team, the Pollinator Ambassadors program began in 2016 with funding from the UMN Healthy Foods, Healthy Lives Institute. In 2016, the program trained 6 youth from Cristo Rey Jesuit High School. These participants learned about honey bees, participated in bumble bee surveys, and learned about pollination in food systems. Two of the participants were hired by the Bee Squad in 2017 to help with outreach. In 2017, the Bee Squad received funding from Target Corporate to continue Pollinator Ambassador programming and we expanded the number of youth participants to 20 by connecting with the Mississippi River Green Team. These youth participants were trained in beneficial insects, pollinators, bumble bee surveys, and were able to connect to a Bee Arts project where they experienced the intersection of art and bee pollinators.

In 2019, we trained 45 youth participants including students in Rochester, MN. We partnered with instructors from Monarch Joint Venture and Pollinate Minnesota to broaden our content. To support educators throughout the state of Minnesota, we created pollinator outreach toolkits. In 2021, we sent 200 kits to pollinator educators across Minnesota. Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) and trained an additional 15 youth.

In 2022 and 2023, we trained 59 6-12th grade science/agriculture teachers. Participants learned about the diversity and importance of Minnesota pollinators from bee and butterfly experts from the University of Minnesota and Monarch Joint Venture, gathered data for public participation in science projects including The Great Sunflower Project, iNaturalist, and the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project, and conducted their own pollinator research to prepare them to lead students in outdoor ecological investigations.

Check out the video that Pollinator Ambassadors made with Independent Film Project MN about their experience learning about pollinators.