Marin team designed the Honey Bee Haven

When Jessica Brainard picked up a pint of Häagen-Dazs ice cream at a Sausalito 7-Eleven in 2008, she added a link to a chain of events that culminate tomorrow with the official grand opening of the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven at UC Davis.

Brainard was featured in a Marin Independent Journal article that detailed how she and three other local landscape designers followed a link on that fateful ice cream carton, leading to their having a substantial role in the creation of the half-acre garden that will raise awareness about the plight of the honey bee.

Interpretative planner Brainard, landscape architect Donald Sibbett, landscape architect Ann F. Baker and exhibit designer Chika Kurotaki won the garden design competition and a year's supply of Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Their winning design plan (pdf) can be viewed online.

The team designed the garden with:

Honeycomb Hideout, a space with large-blossomed plants and an over-sized honey bee sculpture that gives visitors a sense of a garden from a bees-eye point of view

Waggle Dance Way, a path on which visitors can meander through a natural landscape

Pollinator Patch, full of berries and fruit trees

Save-the-Bee Sanctuary, which tells the story of how bees pollinate much of America's food

My Backyard Garden, with perennials and a lawn substitute, which illustrate how almost anyone can make a garden bee-friendly

Nectar Nook, shows how to create a natural-looking oasis for bees with native and drought-tolerant Mediterranean plants

Langstroth Lane, a walkway with a pair of trellises that gives visitors the sense of entering and exiting frames of a bee box

"It was really important to give visitors an emotional connection to the plight of honey bees," Brainard told reporter Debbie Arrington. "We wanted them to understand how important they are to our food production and to our life. This garden celebrates that and provides practical examples to promote bee-friendly backyards."

The garden, planted last year, already houses a vast diversity of bees, including bumblebees, carpenter bees, leaf cutters, borer bees, mason bees and sweat bees.

The grand opening event, free and open to the public, is from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 11, at the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility, Bee Biology Road, University of California, Davis. More information is available in a news release by Department of Entomology writer Kathy Keatley Garvey.

The honey bee haven at UC Davis.

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