On the evening of October 8, 2026, a corner of the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum will turn from cattle barns and antique tractors to something far smaller and, arguably, far more consequential: the bees. Ashley Rohde, Ph.D., of the New Mexico State University Department of Biology, will present "Save the Bees, Save Ourselves: The Buzz on Pollinator Conservation," the opening lecture of the museum's 2026-2027 Culture Series. The talk begins at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
The Culture Series is a monthly program hosted by the Friends of the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, a nonprofit that supports the state-run institution through fundraising and educational outreach. The series has long been a fixture in Las Cruces, drawing audiences to the museum's theater for lectures that range across local history, science, agriculture, and the arts. Past installments have covered subjects as varied as the legend of Victorio Peak's buried gold and the rise of New Mexico's craft beer industry. The 2026-2027 slate keeps that eclectic spirit, moving from Rohde's pollinators in October to cotton gins in November, a living-history Frontier Christmas in December, soil in art in January, southern New Mexico's geology in February, the region's oryx in March, astronomy in April, the museum's refurbished theater in May, and drones in farming in June.
Rohde's appearance fits the series' habit of tapping New Mexico State University faculty, and her subject is one she knows from the inside. Her research has focused on bumble bees, the large, fuzzy, mostly ground-nesting natives that pollinate everything from wildflowers to tomatoes and peppers. Much of the public conversation about pollinators over the past two decades has centered on the domesticated European honey bee, the species kept in hives for crop pollination and honey. Native bees, by contrast, went largely unstudied for years. Rohde has worked to close that gap, co-authoring research that used genome-wide markers to test the status of two putative species of North American bumble bees. Her published work describes how bumble bee populations have declined in recent decades under pressure from habitat change, climate shifts, pathogens, pesticides, and introduced species.
That framing matters in a place like southern New Mexico, where agriculture is both an economic pillar and a cultural inheritance. The museum itself exists to tell the story of farming and ranching in the state, a history its own materials trace back thousands of years. Pollinators sit at the intersection of that history and the region's ecological future: without them, orchards, chile fields, and the wild plants that hold desert soils in place all suffer. The title of Rohde's talk makes the stakes plain, linking the fate of bees to our own.
The venue has its own story worth knowing. The New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum opened to the public in 1998. Today it sits on 47 acres on the southeastern edge of Las Cruces, at 4100 Dripping Springs Road, and operates under the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Its main building holds more than 24,000 square feet of exhibit space, along with a theater, a mercantile, and event areas, while the grounds include barns for sheep, goats, and cattle, a greenhouse, and historic farming and ranching machinery. It is, in other words, an institution built to connect the present generation to a long agricultural past, which makes it a fitting stage for a lecture about the tiny creatures that keep that past and future growing.
For anyone curious about pollinators, the October talk is an easy entry point: no ticket, no fee, just a seat in the museum's auditorium at 7 p.m. More information is available through the museum and the Friends of the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum.
It is a modest evening in a museum best known for its livestock and its plows. But the subject is anything but small. As Rohde's research suggests, the fate of the region's bumble bees is bound up with the health of its farms, its wildlands, and the people who depend on both, a connection the talk's title captures in six words: save the bees, save ourselves.