I immediately notice two things: We are standing in a vast grid of prairie plots with neatly mowed paths between them, and there are tents – dozens of dollhouse-sized tents.

The vegetation is only about thigh-high – the researchers planted the site in 2018 – but it’s obviously a prairie. I see bee balm, gray-headed coneflower, partridge pea and other common prairie plants. The tents are placed in tidy rows inside some of the plots.

The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign owns this land and is using it as an outdoor laboratory where researchers and students can address agricultural or ecological questions. Entomology professor Alexandra Harmon-Threatt has taken advantage of the opportunity. She is the driving force behind this carefully planned grid.

Two years ago, Harmon-Threatt built this outdoor laboratory by planting more than 80 prairie species here, most of them flowering plants. Her mission is to attract wild ground-nesting bees. She is here to see which bees are showing up and how they’re doing. But that’s not all she’s after.

Harmon-Threatt and her team fan out into the site and get to work. There’s much to do before the sun goes down. “These are 20-by-20-meter plots, and there are 96 of them,” she says as we walk down one of the rows. “This is a large-scale experiment to see if we can manipulate the soil to benefit bees. Specifically, we want to see if we can increase nesting and decrease the presence of pesticides.”