Eschscholzia californica, Bombus
Sarah Red-Laird
Bee Habitat in Cyanotype 98
Trisaetum’s Coast Range Vineyard // McMinville, Oregon
Eschscholzia californica, California Poppy
Bombus, Bumble Bee
Cyanotype
Collected Summer 2021
Composed 2023
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
The flower in this print is Eschscholzia californica, California poppy — one of the most recognizable wildflowers of the American West, the official state flower of California, and a plant that gets briefly very famous every few years when the right rain year lights up the hills of Bear Valley and the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve and people pile in by the thousands to stand in the orange.
Long before the superbloom Instagram era, California poppy was sustenance, ceremony, and shelter for the Indigenous peoples of what is now the West Coast. The Chumash, whose ancestral homelands run from south of Santa Barbara up through what is now San Luis Obispo, used the plant medicinally and in food — and they told stories about it.
“Lizard described to Coyote the California poppies out on the islands: ‘When you see it, it is as if the sun itself is on the ground.’”
(From Chumash Ethnobotany: Plant Knowledge Among the Chumash People of Southern California, by Jan Timbrook.)
Like all poppies, this one operates on the rhythm of the day. The flowers open in direct sun and fold their petals back into the bud each evening, then re-open in the morning. To press a California poppy you have to catch it at the moment it is most open, which is to say at the moment it is most generous. That is something a cyanotype, also made of nothing but a flower and the sun, knows how to honor.
The print you’re holding was made from a flower picked in the summer of 2021, on a south-facing edge of Trisaetum Winery’s Coast Range Vineyard in McMinnville, Oregon — a property the winery and I have been slowly turning into one of the most pollinator-friendly vineyards in the Willamette Valley.
If you live anywhere on the West Coast: cover your property with this flower. They will give you a quiet burst of joy every June, and the bees a burst of nutrition through the most arid weeks of a Western summer. California poppies are the succulents of the flower world. The more you ignore them, the better they do.
The Bees
The bee on this print is a bumble bee — a member of the genus Bombus, the soft-bodied, oversized, deeply familiar bees that anchor the pollinator imagination for most of us. Bumble bees thermoregulate, vibrating their flight muscles to warm up before takeoff, which lets them fly at temperatures and in early-morning conditions that ground the honey bees. On a cool spring morning in the Willamette Valley, the bumble bee is usually the first one out on the poppies.
California poppy, like all poppies, is a pollen-only flower. It produces no nectar. The brilliant orange bowl is a single-currency advertisement — pollen, in volume, on offer to any bee equipped to gather it. That open architecture, paired with the absence of a deep nectary, makes the California poppy one of the most democratically accessible flowers in our region. Almost any bee that can land on it can use it.
In over four field seasons of monitoring at Trisaetum, we logged exactly that kind of community on the property’s California poppies. On a June afternoon at the Ribbon Ridge vineyard in 2021 I watched three different bee groups working a single cal poppy planting at once — bumble bees (Bombus spp.), small carpenter bees (Ceratina spp., tiny and dark and metallic, nesting in pithy stems on the vineyard margins), and sweat bees (Lasioglossum spp., glittering green at close range, the most diverse bee group on the property). Across the years, honey bees (Apis mellifera) and yellow-faced bees (Hylaeus spp. — slender, almost hairless, more wasp-shaped than bee-shaped) round out the picture. Five different bee groups, on a single open flower, on a vineyard managed for them.
The community as a whole is larger than that one June afternoon. Across the 2020–2023 field seasons, our taxonomist Sarah Gardner identified 44 native bee species at Trisaetum from 2,554 specimens netted and trapped on the property. The community spans six bumble bee species — Bombus appositus, B. fervidus, B. griseocollis, B. mixtus, B. nevadensis, and B. vosnesenskii — two of which (Bombus appositus, the white-shouldered bumble bee, and Bombus fervidus, the golden northern) are listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. It includes specialist bees that only fly with specific host plants: Eucera amsinckiae, a long-horned fiddleneck specialist, and Melissodes clarkiae, a clarkia specialist. And it includes Andrena anisochlora, a rare and newly described Oregon mining bee that I first photographed at the Coast Range vineyard in 2021, on a tiny pink Erodium flower near transect 19.
Whichever bumble bee made it into this print, she belongs to a community of more than forty species that this vineyard, year after year, is proudly hosting.
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
Trisaetum Winery and Bee Regenerative collaborated on the Bee Friendly Vineyards program from 2019 - 2023. The collaboration started with a question from James Frey, Trisaetum’s co-founder and winemaker: what if bees can make a better wine?
James’s thesis is that a wine is an expression of place — that the microbiology of the place, the wild yeasts and bacteria and fungi that live on grape skins and in the soil and on every leaf in the vineyard, is what gives a wine its character. And his hunch was that bees and the other flitting, flying insects that move through a vineyard might be part of how those microbes get distributed and stirred. They are pollen-dusty, they are honey-sticky, they touch every flower; they might, he suspected, be doing some of the work of dusting up the microbial community that ultimately ends up in the bottle. I added a corollary: above-ground floral diversity drives below-ground microbial diversity, and a richer microbiome in the soil should show up, eventually, in the fruit. A possible win for the bees, a possible win for the grapes, a possible win for the wine.
Trisaetum had just joined 1% for the Planet and could have simply written a check. Instead, James and I built a multi-season, data-informed project together. I collected bees and flowers. James tracked the wine. Dr. Jenifer Walke, a honey bee microbiologist at Eastern Washington University, helped think through the microbiome thread. The vineyard’s management decisions were shaped by what we learned along the way: wildflower seedings along fencerows and headlands and swales; reductions in chemical inputs; reduced or eliminated tillage in and around the rows; less mowing; cover crops chosen to bloom in the windows when the wild flora wasn’t.
Over three field seasons (2020–2023), the project documented 44 species of native bees across Trisaetum’s Coast Range and Ribbon Ridge vineyards. The Coast Range vineyard, where this print was made, was the highest-diversity bee site we monitored — and the site whose soil also showed the highest microbial diversity in the project. A wild Oregon iris (Iris tenax) came up inside the vineyard during one of our visits there; a botanist friend confirmed that I. tenax will only grow in undisturbed, biologically active soil. The vineyard, in a small way, was vouching for itself.
Your support of this card supports that work, and the broader Bee Friendly Vineyards program — at Trisaetum and at the growing roster of partner vineyards across Oregon and beyond. We believe a vineyard can be an ecological refuge. The bees, when given the chance, agree.