Michaela Liptak is a senior at Roosevelt High School who will be pursuing entomology in the future. Michaela, who also goes by Mae, has always been fascinated by bugs. During band camp, she found two little inchworms that were blue and green. She even has an Instagram page called Bees Every Day.

Friend Izzy Kunsch says, “Michaela has been obsessed with bees and their role in the environment since middle school.”

Ms. Liptak has stormed the town with her project: planting flowers for pollinators to use.

She is doing two different gardens at the Davey Tree Abotreum. One will have flowers you see in a front yard, and the other one will be more of a wildflower prairie. All of the plants used are, as well, sourced from local gardens and businesses!

When asked what her inspiration was, Mae says, “I did work over the summer in natural habitats and learned a lot. I thought it was a really neat way to combine education and restoration by making it available for the students and the teachers to use.”

By doing this project, it will affect the environment positively. Bees are threatened with extinction every day, so hopefully, these gardens will become a lot more popular.

Bees are pollinators. Think back to the Bee Movie, when all of the bees are on vacation because they no longer had to make honey, all of the flowers started to die out, as well as trees and many other plants. Without bees and other pollinators, our world will look like that and will be unable to sustain our lives.

Michaela Liptak says, ” Insects are so important to our environment…not only do they pollinate plants, they act as the base of our natural world, doing a lot of behind the scenes dirty work that we take for granted. They’re our tiny clean up crew in a way.”

“If the  insect populations continue to decline, it’d be like pulling out one block in a Jenga tower that causes the whole thing to collapse.”

“Understanding insects and how they operate helps us better understand things in our society, like disease, and can even help us model things like buildings and vehicles to be stronger and more supportive.”

So, before you swat at that bee, think about the important role they play in this very fragile structure called life.

These little guys are a miracle to this Earth; what can you do to help them?

“According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway, because bees don’t care what humans think is impossible,”-The Bee Movie.