Geum triflorum, Prairie Smoke
Artist: Sarah Red-Laird
Title: Bee Habitat in Cyanotype 17
Location: J Bar L Ranch, Montana, Mountain Meadow Study Area
Project: Coexistence & Bee Habitat Regeneration in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem
Flower: Geum triflorum, Prairie Smoke
Bee: Bombus, Bumble bee
Materials: Cyanotype
Field Season: 2023
Composed: 2025
The Artist
Sarah Red-Laird is a melittologist, artist, conservationist, and founder and co-director of the nonprofit organization, Bee Regenerative.
She spends the colder months living near her Southern Oregon art studio and “field season” in Montana and South Dakota in her campervan/bee lab studying bees, bison, cattle, and the plants and soil that connect them.
She works with cyanotype to create images of the flowers and charismatic mega and mini-fauna she studies.
Sarah lives her life outside of the bounds of convention to be close to the natural world where the sky is big, the water talks, the air hums, and the ground rumbles with buffalo bellows. Through her art, she hopes to bring you closer to this world, as well.
The Piece
I can’t look at this flower without thinking of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who.
I suppose that’s fitting. My formative years were steeped in Seuss’s tales of environmental activism, of kindness toward all things large and small, of finding the bright side when everything else looked grim. Those themes have a way of surfacing under almost everything we do at Bee Regenerative.
The flower in this print is Geum triflorum, prairie smoke — also known as old man’s whiskers, three-flowered avens, and purple avens, depending on who is looking at it. Pink-purple, bell-shaped flowers nod downward in threes on each stem. Once pollinated, the flowers tip skyward and the styles grow into long, plumose, smoke-colored awns. A whole mountain meadow of them in late summer looks, from a distance, like wisps of pink smoke rising out of the grass.
I pressed this flower in 2023, on a mountaintop in the Centennial Valley of Montana, at the J Bar L Ranch. It was the first season of our work there — a pilot summer of reconnaissance and informal sampling before the formal monitoring plots went in the following year. I was being eaten alive by black flies the whole time — which is why I didn’t sit for a full monitoring day — but I did get to watch bumble bees working a patch of prairie smoke before I gave up and came back down. I couldn’t wait to come back to that spot, and we have. It has since become one of the richest pieces of bee habitat in our entire study.
Prairie smoke is not, by global counts, a rare plant. It is still listed as secure across most of its range. But its range has been quietly contracting for a long time. The grasslands it loves have been plowed under for cropland in much of the country, and where they remain they have often been overtaken by introduced cool-season grasses — smooth brome especially — that grow in such thick mats they outcompete the native forbs underneath. Prairie smoke holds on where the prairie is still in good condition. At J Bar L, where the land is managed with low-stress livestock handling and other stockmanship practices to coexistence with wildlife, it is thriving.
Prairie smoke is also edible and medicinal. Indigenous peoples across the Northern Plains and Rocky Mountain West have long boiled its roots into a tea used to treat sore throats, applied as a wash for sore eyes, and folded into poultices for wounds. Like so many of the plants I press, it is most fully itself when it is allowed to participate — in a landscape, in a relationship, in a slow conversation between hands and place.
The Bees
The bee on this print is a bumble bee — a member of the genus Bombus, the group that effectively built the world’s pollinator imagery. Soft, fuzzy, oversized; loud in flight; tolerant of cold weather in a way honey bees are not. Bumble bees thermoregulate, vibrating their flight muscles to warm up before takeoff, which lets them fly at temperatures that ground every other social bee. That trait is why they dominate the bee fauna of high-elevation montane meadows like the one this flower came from.
Most bumble bee colonies are annual. A single overwintered queen emerges from a duff pile in the spring, finds an old rodent burrow or a dense clump of grass tussock, and lays her first batch of eggs. Workers raise the colony through summer. By late summer the colony is producing new queens and males, the new queens mate, and then everyone except the new queens dies before winter. The next year’s colonies — the next year’s pollination, the next year’s everything — hinges on those few hundred queens making it through the cold months underground.
Two field seasons of monitoring at J Bar L since this print was made have begun to tell us how good a job this ranch is doing of holding on to those queens. The first full survey, in 2024 and 2025, documented sixty-nine native bee species across the property — one of the highest single-ranch counts in our entire monitoring network. Eight of those sixty-nine are bumble bees. Three of the eight are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List: Bombus fervidus (the golden northern bumble bee), Bombus californicus (the California bumble bee), and Bombus occidentalis (the western bumble bee, currently under consideration for federal endangered-species protection). All three are declining sharply across western North America. All three are here.
The most-recorded bumble bee on the ranch is Bombus huntii, Hunt’s bumble bee — a black-headed, orange-banded species that is common in this part of the Rockies and very likely the species working the prairie smoke in this print. The most consequential, though, is the one we found two of, in the summer this print was made, in a mountain pasture co-grazed by cattle and grizzly bears. Two Bombus occidentalis workers, on the side of a Montana mountain, in a system that openly invites a top predator onto its own grazing land. That is the kind of data point that motivates everything else we do here.
The bumble bee on this print, whoever she is, was working prairie smoke in the company of grizzlies, wolves, beavers, and cattle. She is, in a small way, a record of what becomes possible when ranchers see the land as kin.
The Process
The “cyanotype” process was developed by British astronomer and chemist Sir John Herschel in 1842. It’s a photographic process that uses iron salts to create a deep blue image. Initially developed for reproduction of his own scientific notes and drawings, it was popularized by his friend, Anna Atkins, a botanist who published a book illustrated with photographs using the cyanotype process, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
My attraction to cyanotype printing may be related to my affinity for the scientific method. Though the subject of each piece is steeped in story and complexity, the image itself cannot be manipulated by perception. It simply is a print of simple reality.
This is the hook. As humans, we crave simplicity.
But agriculture is not simple, it’s complicated, complex, and contextual.
The striking cyan-blue entices the viewer to the piece and then invites a deeper inquiry.
I hope each viewer makes the journey to my website to learn about Bee Regenerative’s work with bees on agricultural landscapes and also where to connect with me as I travel around the country speaking on the beautifully complicated connections between bees, bison, cattle, ourselves and everything in-between.
The Work
Beginning in 2023, Bee Regenerative began a multi-year collaboration with the Anderson family of Montana and the three ranches they collectively manage — J Bar L in the Centennial Valley, and the Anderson Ranch and Grizzly Creek in Tom Miner Basin. The question we’re trying to answer is whether ranching built around coexistence with native predators — wolves, grizzly bears, beavers — can also be ranching that supports robust, diverse native bee communities.
The question started for me in 2018, at a workshop called “Range Riders: Coexisting with Predators” at the EcoFarm conference. I had spent a year as a student in the University of Montana’s Wilderness and Civilization program a decade earlier, and I knew the long, painful arc of the conversation around wolf reintroduction in the Northern Rockies. What I didn’t expect was to spend that workshop sitting in the back row listening to Hilary Zaranek talk about what happens to a landscape when ranchers stop trying to kill the predators and start learning to live among them. Beavers come back. Riparian zones recover. Aspen come up where the elk used to mow them flat. The whole trophic system slowly knits itself together again.
Walking out of that workshop, I had one question: do the bees come back, too?
Three field seasons in, the answer is increasingly yes. Across the three Anderson-family ranches we have now documented 118 native bee species — and thirteen species of bumble bees, four of them species of conservation concern. We have confirmed twenty-seven specialist bees that can only complete their life cycles in the presence of specific native plant communities. We have spotted Bombus occidentalis, the western bumble bee — declining catastrophically across most of its former range — in a high mountain pasture that the Anderson family deliberately co-grazes with grizzly bears.
Hannibal Anderson, one of the family’s third-generation ranchers, said it well in an interview with NPR a few years back: “I don’t see the world as a place where humans just get to trump everything else. I consider it a really fundamental responsibility of being human to serve the ecological integrity of wherever we live.” What we are documenting at J Bar L, the Anderson Ranch, and Grizzly Creek is what that sentence looks like at the level of a bee community.
Your support of this card supports that work. Three field seasons in, the data is starting to answer a question that has not yet been asked at this scale anywhere else: could coexistence ranching be one of the keys to native bee conservation on western working lands?