A keen observer of nature and an avid "bee watcher", I am interested in learning to identify indigenous bees and the flowers they forage on. As an amateur naturalist and an artist, I am preoccupied with studying, sketching and painting wild bees, especially those in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada.

I have been especially inspired by and actively involved with BorderFreeBees, a long-term public art/science initiative, and in this vein, I use the creation of wildbeeart as my way to bring attention and awareness to wild bees and their needs. Using a method of presenting larger-than-life, realistic wild bee encaustic portrait paintings, I hope to help people in the community stop and truly notice bees, become curious about their names, and in the process of doing so, begin to care about the plight of these other pollinators, and engage in necessary action to help conserve them.