By watching and recording the bees at sunflowers in your garden, you can help us understand the challenges that bees are facing.
It takes less than 30 minutes.
It's easy.
Free Sunflower seeds for planting.
No knowledge of bees required!
Enter your bee counts online or send us your paper form.
We would love to have you join us; let’s help our most important pollinators together!Next yearIf you already are a participant. We'll send everyone an email this winter to confirm your mailing address. We are planning to get seeds out in late March or April.
If you are new to the sunflower project, click here and we will add you to our list for spring.
Thanks for joining. Please, spread the word, we'd love to get as many people as possible planting sunflowers!
GreatSunflower.org
Seeds are ready to ship! Please confirm your address.
Tue, 02/24/2009 - 22:26 — Gretchen Lebuhn
Hooray for Pollinators and Sunflowers in 2009! We are ready to mail out seeds!!
We’re pretty sure almost everyone needs the smile of a sunflower in their yard this year!
There are two things we need you to do to help us mail out seeds. First, log in, confirm that you want seeds and re-enter your mailing information. You can do that here. Last year, we got a lot of letters back because the addresses were incorrect so, please double, triple and gosh, quadruple check what you type. Apparently having a formal addressee will also help so, please give us a name for mailing. Everyone who has checked back in by March 10, will get mailed seeds. Even if you just signed up, please check back in and confirm your mailing address and add the name of the addressee.
If you can’t remember your password, click on reset password and we’ll walk you through a reset.
Second, we have expanded the garden description form so, please take a minute to tell us about your garden. We ask you to put an address in for the garden because many people have different mailing addresses than garden addresses. Do remember that you can register more than one garden if you have a school garden and home garden for example. I think this is a great way to get started thinking about planting this spring! These are some of the variables that we think are influencing pollinators at particular sites so, we want to know more about things like how developed the area is around your house and what type of habitat is there.
We can no longer mail seeds outside of the US and Canada. If you’d like to participate, we are putting a list of places that have the annual Lemon Queen sunflower available outside the US and Canada on the website. If you find a supplier, email us so that we can spread the word. We would love to have international data and hope that next year we will get some funding to mail seeds around the world.
Our next newsletter will cover the changes for this upcoming year that you can choose to participate in, including getting pollinator photographs from your sunflower, taking some data on the phenology of your sunflower and expanding our plant list to include a few perennials. If you get to planting before our next newsletter, please write down the date you planted your sunflower seed. We’d like to keep track of that this year.
As you all know, non-profits are struggling this year. We currently don't have a budget that allows me to staff responding to email. If you can post to the forums, I will do my best to respond there. I'll be in Brazil talking about pollinatros from the 7th-14th of March so, I'll be checking back in after that.
Thanks so much for joining us!
Gretchen
The Queen Bee