151. Interview with native bee researcher and performer Dr Kit Prendergast

Hello everybody and welcome to Let's Talk SciComm, my very favourite place to be because we talk to amazing people who communicate about science to all sorts of interesting people in different ways and of course it's also my favourite place to be because I get to hang out with my colleague and my friend Dr Michael Wheeler.

Hello Michael.

Hey Jen, I am doing very well and I am very excited for today's guest.

Because we're talking about bees and we love talking about bees, right? So I think our guest today, I think she is probably the most charismatic advocate for bees that you're ever going to meet.

So her name is the Bee Babette.

So we're talking a native bee ecologist, a taxonomist, a conservation biologist and a science communicator.

She is also known as Dr.

Kit Prendergast, but, you know, let's stick with Bee Babette because that's such a cool name.

So Kit's pathway into science was really a mixed one like my own.

So a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Science.

And I think that blend of creativity and a scientific approach to life has really come to define her career to date.

So from what I understand, she fell in love with bees back in 2016, drawn in by macro photography and bee hotels.

And we've talked about bee hotels with our friend Clancy.

And Kit went on to complete her PhD at Curtin University as a prestigious forest scholar.

And her research then was looking at native bee biodiversity and pollination networks in cities, how we can better conserve native bees and, of course, the very contentious issue of how introduced European honeybees affect our native species.

And from what I can gather, since then, Kit has been unbelievably prolific.

So we're talking more than 80 peer-reviewed papers now.

She's worked across universities, but also governments, not-for-profits, consultancies.

She's currently doing a postdoc at the University of Southern Queensland.

She led a federally funded project using bee hotels to try and help native bees.

cavity nesting bees recover after the big 2019-2020 bushfires.

She's also described two brand new species of bees, one which she named after her dog, which we have to come back to talk about that.

But I think obviously, as always, the reason we're so excited to speak with Kit is not just the science, but the science communication.

And Kit is someone who I reckon has basically thrown out the rule book recently.