Bernie Paquette was easy to identify among the people enjoying Richmond’s Volunteers Green on a sunny spring afternoon. Amid the sunbathers, dog walkers and Frisbee players in the park, the wild bee enthusiast was the one wearing red kneepads, crouching like a baseball catcher behind home plate and pointing a 35-millimeter camera lens toward the ground.
Surrounded by a lush green lawn speckled with dandelions, the barren patch of sand that Paquette had chosen seemed an unlikely spot for photographing bees. But when the nearby Winooski River overflowed its banks in July 2023, he explained, the sediment it deposited in this field became prime habitat for the blood bees, cellophane bees and red-tailed mining bees that were poking in and out of holes or darting about in search of mates. Meanwhile, nomad bees were sneaking into other bees’ ground nests to lay their own eggs.
“It’s kind of cool to watch them dig in the sand like dogs,” Paquette said, his camera shutter chattering away. “When people think of bees, they only think honeybees and bumblebees. You’re missing out on the bigger picture, folks!”
In the past few years, Paquette has helped to bring that picture into sharper focus. An amateur naturalist from Jericho Center, he spends as many as eight hours a day photographing wild bees and other insects, then uploads the images to iNaturalist. The free, crowdsourced social network allows citizen scientists to identify and document plants and animals by location for research and conservation.
Since discovering this passion five years ago, Paquette, who goes by the iNaturalist handle “bugeyedbernie,” has logged more than 28,500 observations of more than 2,000 species. Of the approximately 350 bee species native to Vermont, Paquette has observed and photographed 114 of them, including 104 in his own backyard. One species he discovered in his garden, the mock-orange scissor bee, had never been previously documented in the state. About the only species Paquette doesn’t photograph are common houseflies and honeybees, the latter of which aren’t Vermont natives.
Paquette’s equipment isn’t fancy. He shoots with an entry-level 35 millimeter digital camera. Its hefty macro lens requires him to get close to his subjects but results in professional-quality images, which he willingly shares with anyone who wants them, including researchers. After up to eight hours a day photographing, he’ll spend another two to three hours cropping the images, then uploading the ones he likes to iNaturalist.
“I have 70,000 pictures on my computer,” he said. “I can’t save them all.”
Paquette is now on a mission to get other people, especially young people, as buzzed about bee and bug watching as he is. When he realized that there was no word equivalent to “birding” to describe the practice of observing invertebrates, Paquette coined his own: “inverting.”
“Seeking insects is like treasure hunting, and observing their behavior is like going on a wild safari.” Bernie Paquette
Paquette maintains a blog, called VT Bug Eyed, where he publishes his inverting-inspired articles, photos, comics and short stories. He also hosts free “backyard bug safaris,” during which he’ll visit people’s property for an hour or two to identify and photograph the flying and crawling critters living there.
“Seeking insects is like treasure hunting, and observing their behavior is like going on a wild safari,” he said. “It’s not about getting out a textbook and finding all the answers. It’s thinking about what you’re observing and asking why.”
Paquette’s wild bee chronicles are all the more impressive given that he has no formal training as a scientist. After 35 years of working at IBM in Essex Junction, the Winooski native retired in 2010. In 2016, he joined a nature walk hosted by Alicia Daniel, a University of Vermont instructor who founded the Vermont Master Naturalist Program. The experience inspired him in ways that his work at IBM never did.
“I wish that I’d been able to do something as a career that was like this,” he lamented. “This is the real thing.”
Paquette rarely answers questions directly or succinctly, including a seemingly easy one about his age.
“I am old enough to have children and grandchildren yet young enough to have a curiosity that requires direct sensory experience,” he wrote in one of his many emails I received one morning. Paquette is nearly as prolific at emailing as he is at photographing bugs.
“He’s a character. Half our office gets his emails,” Spencer Hardy said with a friendly chuckle. The Jericho farmer runs the Vermont Wild Bee Survey for the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. “But he’s sharp and doing things no one else is doing and asking good questions.”
Hardy sees a lot of value in Paquette’s documentation of wild bees, which are likely suffering the same population decline as honeybees. However, no one can say for sure, he noted, because no one was counting wild bees in Vermont until the mid-2000s.
“iNaturalist is now the largest data source for wild bee records in Vermont,” he added, “in large part because of Bernie.”
With his scruffy white beard and cornflower-blue ball cap, its brim dirt-smudged from years of digging in the garden, Paquette gushes with childlike exuberance about his discoveries. When recounting a story, he often flits from one topic to the next, like a bee gathering nectar. During our Richmond outing, he occasionally stopped mid-sentence and dropped to his knees to aim his macro lens at whatever flying insect caught his eye.
“Probably not identifiable by species, but definitely a miner bee,” he surmised, squinting through the viewfinder. When asked if there’s a bee on his bucket list that he hopes to spot one day, he replied, “It’s kind of far-fetched, but if I saw a rusty-patched bumblebee, I would—”
“You see him pop his head out of that hole?” he blurted suddenly, interrupting himself. “Isn’t that cool?”
Paquette lives in a 19th-century house off Browns Trace Road with his partner, Maeve Kim, a retired teacher, gardener and avid birder.
“I never paid attention to insects until Bernie and I hooked up about eight years ago,” she said. “It’s totally opened my mind.”
Kim learned, for example, that one pair of chickadees will consume 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to raise a single nest of eggs — a relationship that many birders don’t fully appreciate.
“A lot of people love birds but hate bugs,” she said. “You’ve still got people poisoning their lawns to kill them. And they wonder why they don’t have birds in their yard.”
About five years ago, in an effort to make their own yard more bird-friendly, the couple brought in as many native plants as they could. Paquette transplanted dozens of trees, plants and shrubs from his South Burlington house near the airport, which was about to be torn down. He now keeps a growing list of the more than 200 species they’ve put in, from alder and allium to witch hazel and yarrow. Their boggy and wild garden features 22 fruit-bearing plants, including, Paquette pointed out, the crabapple tree the couple planted for their commitment ceremony a few years ago.
“I’ll try not to tell a story about every plant,” Paquette said while we wandered the garden, then did so anyway.
“He has incredible energy. I don’t know how he does it,” said Donald Miller, a professor emeritus of zoology and ecology at Vermont State University. Miller, 92, taught for nearly four decades at what was then Lyndon State College. He met Paquette on a birding walk in South Burlington almost a decade ago, and the two have been friends ever since.
“I’ve always been amazed with his enthusiasm [for]working with natural history but especially with bees, which are among the more challenging categories of insects to work with,” Miller said. What makes them so challenging?
There are so many wild bee species, he explained, and they’re inherently difficult to identify because their anatomical structures can be hard to detect. “And, of course, they sting,” he added.
Yet, in his five years of watching bees, Paquette has never once been stung. Maybe he’s just lucky. Or perhaps the bees sense that he poses no threat.
While Paquette spends his winters poring over entomology research papers, he never claims to be an expert himself. He relies on other iNaturalist users, including an academic in Singapore, to confirm his identifications. His goal isn’t to memorize insect taxonomy or convince others to do so.
Instead, he prefers sharing the fascinating factoids he’s discovered through inverting: Some bees can recognize human faces; you can’t stare down a jumping spider; and bumblebees have been known to roll a ball around for no other reason than to play with it.
Last summer, when the couple’s buttonbush bloomed, it attracted more than a dozen species of bees, hoverflies, moths and wasps. From nine in the morning until dusk, Paquette sat quietly beside it, observing and photographing the insects as they took in nourishment.
“I was in heaven; no need to go looking for insects, they were all coming to me,” he wrote to me in an email. “They had little interest in me, but we were all together at the same diner.”
Contact Bernie Paquette at bernie.paquette@yahoo.com to make an appointment for a free backyard bug safari on your property or a bird and bug walk with him and Maeve Kim at a local birding hot spot. vtbugeyed.blogspot.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Going Apian | Citizen naturalist Bernie Paquette spreads the joy of spotting wild bees and other bugs in one’s own backyard”
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This article appears in The Animal Issue 2025.
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