The Pollinators Pavilion occupies a prominent role at the entrances of Old Mud Creek Farm and Hudson Carbon at 67 Pinewood Road, Hudson, NY. It is visible from the busy Route 9 and seeks to elicit awareness from the farming, cultural and educational communities in the Hudson Valley for the vital role of native pollinators in supporting our ecosystems. Pollinators Pavilion contains 320 cast Ductal ® UHPC panels, each with a hole for 30-50 nesting tubes and a cavity housing all the monitoring technology. The architects placed 152-millimeter-long nesting tubes of diameters from 3-9 millimeters in cardboard, bamboo, glass, wood and other substrates into the panels. A 152 millimeter nesting tube can accommodate 3-6 egg cells. The Pavilion’s curved surface can be considered a grid that allows testing of nesting preferences: panels test a variety of nesting tube substrates, nesting tube aperture sizes, orientations to the sun, and nesting heights from the ground level. From the first operational season of the Pollinators Pavilion (August 2020) the architects installed 2 cameras powered by a solar array to operate 4 hours a day, taking 3 pictures per minute and generating about 50,000 images per month. The Azure training models, developed from the collections of Dr. Jerome Rozen at the American Museum of Natural History, document the following species: Osmia, Megachile, Lasioglossum, Heriades, Hylaeus, Halictus and Bombus. Our insect identification models were presented at the Microsoft AI for Earth Summit (June 2020) and selected for the AIA Conference on Architecture (June 2020).
