Pollinators need more than flowers. They need healthy habitat. Join us to learn about the best native plants for supporting honey bees and native pollinators in Piedmont North Carolina, along with practical gardening strategies, native plant recommendations, and eco-friendly alternatives to invasive species that can help transform any landscape into thriving pollinator habitat.

Janet Staats

Janet Staats’ beekeeping story begins with a humbling lesson: in 2012, she inherited her dad’s bees and promptly lost them. Without the knowledge to care for them properly, the colonies didn’t survive. But instead of walking away, Janet walked toward her curiosity, and that early setback lit a fire that’s been burning ever since.

After 32 years working in the Duke Immune Monitoring Core, Janet retired in 2020. She dove straight into OCBA’s Introduction to Beekeeping class, rediscovering her love for bees and uncovering the fascinating, complicated relationship between honeybees and their native pollinator neighbors.

Since then, Janet became a certified Orange County Master Gardener in 2022, a Master Naturalist in 2025, and earned her NCSBA Journeyman Beekeeper certification just last year. She also certified her property as a Bird Friendly Habitat through the New Hope Bird Alliance and established a conservation easement with Triangle Land Conservancy – making sure her little patch of the world stays wild. Forever.