(upbeat music) Tom - This week on Arizona Illustrated, Tucson is home to one of the most diverse bee populations in the world.

We'll introduce you to a collaborative dedicated to studying them.

Jennifer - Because many of our bees are not well studied here in the Sonoran Desert, many of them have never had their DNA sequenced before.

Tom - A new gallery in Tucson for Black artists.

Laura - We were getting input from local artists that it was really hard for them to get visibility and we wanted to see if we could help with that.

Why are we waiting for them to want us?

Why don't we just do it ourselves?

Tom - An intimate performance from cellist Theodore Buchholz.

Theodore - The cello teaches us how to give, how to take, how to respond, how to ask.

The cello teaches us how to beg.

Tom - And our desert plant series continues with an introduction to the desert fern.

It doesn't have any thorns or prickers, so it has a really nice soft feel to the touch, which makes it really ideal for someone's yard or a home setting.

[Music] Tom - Hello and welcome to another all-new episode of Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We join you today from Las Milpitas de Cottonwood.

This six-acre farm is a project of the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona.

And they provide education and support for locals who like to grow their own food.

[Music] And here to tell us more about the garden is one of the gardeners.

This is Natalie Granados.

And Natalie, thanks for your time today.

Tell us how this labor of love is benefiting you and your family.

Natalie - So when I first started gardening here last year, it was March 2022.

And it definitely has played a big role on my mental health.

I'm growing my own food.

I'm putting my love into it.

And therefore, you know, I'm putting that love and effort back into myself, by growing what's in season.

I started here knowing nothing at all.

And now I have my own garden.

Right now I have serrano peppers.

I have some jalapenos, some poblano peppers, basil, corn, tomatoes and tomatillos growing.

Just being able to watch them grow from that little flower into like the actual produce is just mind-blowing.

And just being able to pick it off is the best.

[Music] Tom - And now meet the man who manages Las Milpitas Community Garden.

This is Chris Lowen.

And Chris, how does the garden fit into the grander scheme of the Community Food Bank?

Chris - Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people will be surprised to know that the Food Bank has a farm or a garden associated with it.

But I think it really represents the more all-encompassing view that the Food Bank takes when tackling the issues of hunger.

And so, you know, out here we're helping to provide access to healthy food and create leadership opportunities and really like provide just another stair step out of hunger.

We have a six-acre farm.

And the North three acres is mostly community garden plots.

The South three acres is much larger plots for people who want to grow and sell at the market.

We have, let's see, I don't know, all manner of birds and bees and trees and shrubs.

The community aspect is really, I think, what makes this space unique.

Tom - Well, Chris, thank you for inviting us in.

Chris - Thanks for coming out, it was great to have you.

Tom - Terrific place.

This small farm plays a part in our next story.

The Sonoran Desert is thought to be home to the greatest bee diversity in the world.

Now, bees are critical to our ecosystem, yet there are many species that have never been studied or even identified.

Enter the Tucson Bee Collaborative, a partnership designed to stimulate interest in Tucson bees and empower future scientists to do real-world research.

(gentle music) (Jennifer) I teach introductory biology, and we were using a technique of DNA barcoding already in our laboratory, and I thought we spend the money to do this analysis.

Wouldn't it be beneficial if somebody could actually use our results?

So I thought, who has samples that they might need identified?

And I thought of my two entomologist friends and called Wendy and Kim, and they said, oh, yes, we have some samples that you could identify, your students could identify.

And that's how we started the Tucson Bee Collaborative.

My name is Jennifer Katcher, and I'm a biology instructor here at Pima Community College, and I am one of the members of the Tucson and I am one of the members of the Tucson Bee Collaborative, one of the founders.

(Kim) I'm Kim Franklin.

I am the conservation science manager at the Desert Museum.

In the Tucson Bee Collaborative, my role is the researcher, the scientist who has a lot of questions about bees.

So the most fundamental question is just what is the bee diversity of the Sonoran Desert?

(Wendy) I'm Wendy Moore.

I am an associate professor in the Department of Entomology and the curator of the University of Arizona's insect collection.

And I'm one of the founders of the Tucson Bee Collaborative.

(Tanner) I'm Tanner Bland, graduated last semester with a B.S.

and ecology and evolutionary biology from U of A. and now working for Wendy Moore at the University of Arizona insect collection as her laboratory coordinator.

(Jennifer) The Tucson Bee Collaborative is a group of folks that are interested in identifying bees for conservation efforts.

You can't conserve something that you don't even know is there.

(Kim) We are designing research, sampling bees in different locations throughout our community.

This is our first site Las Milpitas, and we sampled here consistently for two years.

And then there's three other sites.

(Tanner) Most bees, 97% of all bees are solitary ground nesting bees, and they're single moms who provision their own eggs.

They don't live in hives.

There's not thousands of sisters living together.

And the Sonoran Desert hosts roughly 2000 species of these solitary ground nesting bees.

(Kim) I have about a dozen volunteers.

Almost all of them are also docents at the Desert Museum.

A lot of them are retired scientists, and they want to give back.

They wanted to be involved in scientific research that contributes to conservation of biodiversity.

And so each volunteer sort of finds their own niche in the work that we're doing.

So some people prefer to be out in the field doing the sampling, and some people prefer to be in the lab doing the pinning and labeling and the identification pieces.

And some of the volunteers focus on the educational piece.

Over the past six years, seven years, we've collected about 30,000 bees.

All of those bees have been pinned and labeled, carefully curated.

And the bottleneck is being able to identify all those bees.

And so the students, that's where they come in.

(Jennifer) When we think of bees, we always tend to think about honeybees, but we're talking about native wild bees.

Many of them are much, much smaller than a honeybee, and they can all look alike.

So it can be difficult to identify them by their morphology, by their shape.

So looking at their DNA sequence can help us to identify them more conclusively.

The first step is that the Desert Museum will provide us with a bee leg, which is where we extract the DNA from.

And the students will grind it up with a very tiny mortar and pestle and go through some chemical steps to extract the DNA.

We send off the samples to be sequenced at a facility, and then they return us the list for each bee of how many A's, T's, G's, and C's and in what order they are.

And then from that, we can use a series of computer based tools including the Barcode of Life Database to analyze the DNA and determine the species.

So the Barcode of Life Database is an international effort to represent every species on earth with its DNA in this database.

you can really understand more about the diversity of life if you can look at the similarities and differences between the DNA sequences.

(Wendy) Here we are at the University of Arizona's insect collection.

As the curator of the insect collection, my primary goal is to acquire DNA barcodes for native bees in the Sonoran Desert region, to build molecular identification resources and tools for researchers to use around the world.

We've built the capacity to take pictures in high definition of specimens so that you can also see them, see their structure.

Connecting those high resolution images to the DNA barcode is really where some great diagnostic tools can be built.

(Jennifer) Because many of our bees are not well studied here in the Sonoran Desert, many of them have never had their DNA sequenced before.

And especially when we first started this project.

In many cases, my students were the first to ever publish the DNA for that particular species of bee.

(Tanner) I was a part of this sort of foundational class, a course based undergraduate research experience, a CURE that Wendy Moore was offering.

I was planning to be a botanist before that, and then once I took that class with Wendy, it kind of hooked me into these really tiny bees that live here that I'm super fascinated by.

(Jennifer) One of the benefits of participating in research early in one's academic career is that you feel like a scientist.

You become connected to the scientific community.

They recognize in this project an opportunity to use their science for good.

That information directly feeds into conservation efforts.

[Clapping] One of the things that I like best about the Tucson Bee Collaborative is sort of the flattening of hierarchy in the project.

So when we go out into the field, what we see is students that are in Community College.

We see U of A, students that are undergraduates, graduate students, research professors, research scientists, all working together to collect and identify bees.

(Kim) We're in the center of bee diversity in the world, and so why not study bees?

We don't know even the species that occur here.

Tom - Blue lotus, a water lily native to North Africa, grows along the Nile.

In ancient Egypt, it symbolized the triumph of wisdom over suffering.

A new art gallery dedicated to raising the visibility of Black artists in Tucson is called the Blue Lotus Gallery.

Laura Pendleton Miller says that like the Blue Lotus, Black artists have risen from harsh environments to bring beauty into the world.

[MUSIC] Critical race theory being under attack we have AP African American studies being attacked and we continue to be left out of a history of a country that we built.

We think it's important to have other ways then to get that story across.

We're hoping to utilize this gallery and the artists to do that as well.

My name is Laura Pendleton-Miller.

I'm president of the board of the Blue Lotus Artist Collective, a local gallery that was designed to showcase Black artists.

My name is Amber Doe and I'm proud to be one My name is Amber Doe and I'm proud to be one of the artists featured in their inaugural show.

A lot of my work is a mixture of conceptual but also historical basis.

A lot of it has to do with American experience, particularly Black women in America.

George Welch, Black artist of the community.

My inspirations come from my experiences, experience with others and basically with nature and how forces come together, coloristically you might say.

Through the heart, soul and spirit.

My name is Allison Miller.

I come from a family of artists.

My dad's a painter and he taught me how to paint.

He was my high school art teacher.

I wanted to make him proud teacher.

I wanted to make him proud so I kept doing it.

What I paint is to elicit a certain reaction, especially from Black people.

I really like watching them feel joyful when they see some of the images I'm referencing.

We were getting input from local artists that it was really hard for them to get visibility and we wanted to see if we could help with that.

Originally we met in January of '22 with the purpose of trying to figure out how we as active community volunteers in the arts could encourage the existing institutions to show more Black artists.

We got to a point where we thought, "Yeah, why are we waiting for them to want us?

Why don't we just do it ourselves?"

We had so many gifts along the way of people who stepped up and volunteered to do things.

So it was really a synergistic effort.

One of the local artists, Willie Bonner, came up with the suggestion that we be called Blue Lotus Artist Collective.

It is a flower that grows out of muck into great beauty.

Blue Lotus Artist Collective, the acronym is BLAC.

I identify as a Black woman.

In the past, seeing Black women in media was always really specific.

Maybe they were slave women or Jezebels or maids.

So I like to find images where we are celebrated a little more outside of that, specifically representing Black queer life from the 90s, which wasn't really spoken about.

We feel that it's a great opportunity to educate, especially at a time like now where we feel like not just as Black artists, but as Black people we're being left out of the story.

And we have these artists who are telling that story.

This particular piece behind me, The American flag, is sort of inspired by my grandfather originally.

He lied about his age to serve in World War II.

And when he came back to the United States, he faced a lot of challenges that were very unique to sort of what was going on in racism at the time.

So I wanted to do something dedicated to him and my grandmother.

It's actually her linen that I did this piece on, and it's to reflect sort of what it's like to be an American, but not completely seen as fully American.

I have this series of paintings that depict forces and experiences in my life that are in categories.

And this is the African series called Distant Relations.

It's about memory.

And for all of us who've not been here all their lives, that distant relations are from other countries, other cultures that have merged here and became sort of new experience here.

I don't see necessarily specialness every time I look into my own work.

I see it as just a material form of storytelling.

In the corner, it's indigo, which is a crop along with cotton and rice that my uncle had done the research and found we were actually slaves on a plantation that was based in indigo, cotton and rice production.

So I thought it was really important to tie that element into the actual piece and have a sense of sort of my ancestral connection with what's happening in sort of modern times.

I use mother of pearl shells to sort of indicate the traveling across the ocean.

And then within the stripes, I have an interpretation of the Middle Passage.

So the other piece is called God is Non Binary.

And I wanted to sort of acknowledge the people that came before me in that space, how they utilized the yucca plant for fabric, for baskets, for food, and the sort of ways that women continuously reuse things and have to reuse skills.

And it sort of shreds us at the end of the day.

So the slip looks a little shredded.

When they look at my work, I'd like them to look at themselves through my work, therefore finding transcendence, something above what they knew a minute or two before they looked at it.

I would love people to walk away with a sense of interrelatedness with the environment around them.

I try to bring natural elements to a lot of my pieces to tell another layer of the story.

I wanna make sure we're thinking about things, not just from a human perspective, but in terms of an ecosystem.

- We have a lot of plans.

We're daring to dream big.

We're still at that embryonic stage, but we're looking at it from a perspective that it's wide open.

I hope that the community will take the cooperative into account when looking at the culture as it expands, diversifies, and becomes much more global in its intent.

Blue Lotus is such a new and exciting space to sort of bring local artists to the larger community within Tucson and the greater Arizona area, sort of shine a light on the Southwest.

So it's a wonderful new space to be a part of.

Tom - The gallery had its soft opening last spring.

They'll have their official opening on November 3rd, 2023.

And for more information, you can go to bluelotusartistscollective.com.

Theodore Buchholz is Associate Professor of Cello at the University of Arizona's Fred Fox School of Music.

We had the privilege to sit down with him at the Health Sciences Innovation Building for an exclusive performance.

And as you'll see, Buchholz has a special relationship with his instrument that comes through in his craft and in the way he approaches life.

[sound of endpin gently piercing wood floor] [sound of fingers on strings] [begins playing Bach cello solo] There is something about classical music that appeals to me.

The incredible sense of structure in the music.

It makes order out of chaos.

For me, playing the cello is all about the quality of the sound.

There's something about the cello.

It is visceral.

The range of the instrument is very similar to that of the human voice.

There's something healthy, something deep, something rich.

Every day, one's cello is almost a different instrument.

It responds differently.

It speaks clearer or less clear.

It sings in different registers of the instrument differently on different days.

And all of this adds up to, not just one voice speaking through the instrument, but really a whole symphony of ideas coming through the cello.

This is a dance with the cello.

Some days you have to lead it this way to coax out a sound, and some days you just have to listen and let it take you where it's going to.

Let it teach you.

That challenge is a bit of Mt.

Everest, always wanting to climb that mountain better and better.

So we're working with in some ways a living being.

The cello teaches us how to give.

How to take.

How to respond.

How to ask.

The cello teaches us how to beg.

Learning the instrument is learning how to best negotiate with something else.

You know you're playing really well, when you can feel the instrument vibrate back underneath your fingers.

You hear the full compass, the full range from top to bottom of the cello.

You feel the instrument resonate.

You feel the body of the instrument in some ways fight back against you.

You feel the bow pulling against the string.

There's always a sense of trying to pull the sound out of the cello.

Every time we approach it, there's something new, something different, something that we're trying to re-explore, perhaps because we ourselves have changed In the meantime.

I think the greatest life lesson from learning an instrument is that we never finish learning.

We never cross the finish line.

There's always more we can do.

There's always more that we can make better.

And the only way to not get better is to stop striving.

Learning an instrument is all about trying to find the best version of ourselves.

Tom - Theodore Buchholz is also founder and director of the UA String Project, a weekly music workshop for K-12 graders who otherwise might not have access to music lessons.

You can learn more about this important program at stringproject.music.arizona.edu.

While many people think of our desert as a rocky, barren landscape, the fact is there are thousands of plants that are native to our region or are able to grow here.

Next, we introduce you to a small tree from the legume family that's popular here for its foliage and other attributes.

(Alex) My name is Alex Arnold, and I'm a horticulturist here at the Desert Museum.

This is one of our favorite trees here at the museum.

It's Lysiloma watsonii.

Also known as a feathered tree, a desert fern, tepeguaje It goes by many names.

The most common name here in Arizona for this tree is the desert fern.

And people call it that because the leaves, as you can see, are almost fern, like in appearance.

These little pinnate compound leaves are a bit longer and almost willow like than many of our other legumes, like a palo verde or a mesquite or an ironwood.

Besides looking fern like they even feel almost fern like.

We love it here because unlike so many other legumes in the area, it's unarmed.

And that means that it doesn't have any thorns or prickers.

So it has a really nice soft feel to the touch, which makes it really ideal for someone's yard or a home setting.

Technically deciduous.

However, here, and especially in the Tucson Valley, it's essentially evergreen.

It might lose its leaves during a cold winter and then resprout in the spring.

But for the most part, and especially with the mild winters we've been having, they tend to be evergreen.

This species of Lysiloma occurs everywhere from northern Sinaloa, all the way up to the Rincon Mountains, just outside of Tucson.

But the center of its range is pretty much the whole state of Sonora.

Down in the south, you'll see 30, 40 foot trees of this species.

By the time you get up to the northern limit of its range, they're only a few feet tall.

Here at the museum and in the context of within Tucson, though, you'll see them about this height, 25 feet tall, sort of a mid-size tree for us in this area.

It is drought tolerant.

In the case of this tree, it means that with minimal irrigation, it will do just fine.

However, it can take irrigation.

Like I said, it occurs all the way down into Sinaloa, in the tropical deciduous forest where they get a lot more rain.

So if you want it to grow larger, you can irrigate it more and it won't suffer from overwatering.

It's a great wildlife plant.

It makes a really pretty round poof ball catkin flowers in the spring and early summer that attract a wide variety of insects, bees, wasps, a number of butterflies.

Birds often use it for nesting.

It is all around a great wildlife plant.

It's great for narrow spaces.

I plant them in my side yard.

It's an excellent source of shade, or it provides a micro habitat for planting other things underneath it provides great leaf litter for mulch.

Being a legume, its roots fix the nitrogen.

So it's all around a really beneficial plant.

Tom - Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

We'll see you next week for another all new episode.