Sunday RoundUp: Eggs-actly
Easter Egg Hunt at Ives, the Occidental Fools Parade, native bees, and a veteran Sebastopol postal worker wins a coveted award
Easter Egg Hunt at Ives Park
This year’s Easter Egg Hunt at Ives Park was the usual joyful melee of kids and parents. The hunt is divided into three sections—age 0 to 3, 4 to 6, and 7 and up—so everyone gets a fair shot at getting a few eggs.
Sebastopol Kiwanis member Bruce Nachtigall is the man in charge of organizing the Easter Egg Hunt in Ives Park each year. He’s not quite sure how long the club has been hosting this event, but he says it’s been going on the whole time he’s been involved in the local Kiwanis, which is almost 47 years.
Nachtigall said it’s all-hands-on-deck for this popular annual event. He estimated that 27 or so Kiwanians worked together to put on the event this year, stuffing 250 plastic eggs with treats and coupons, boiling and dyeing 300 hard-boiled eggs, and scattering those, as well as hundreds of candy eggs, across the lawns at Ives.
He gave a shout out to Screamin’ Mimi’s and Sebastopol Cookie Company for providing the little coupons for a free ice cream cup and a free cookie that go inside the plastic eggs. Petaluma Egg Farm provided most of the eggs for dyeing.
“It’s just such a super event,” Nachtigall said, “It’s what we’re all about at Kiwanis. We’re here to help kids as much as possible.”
All in all, it was a great family event on a beautiful, bright blue day, but I got a call from Nachtigall a few hours after the event; he had noticed a significant change from previous years.
“We were down in attendance by about 25%,” he said. “Two reasons for that: one was competition from Forestville, as well as Santa Rosa, and the other is perhaps more significant—the lack of our Hispanic neighbors. It was so glaring. It’s hard to see that.”
Sebastopol postal worker joins the Million Mile Club
Vivian Vanessa Pollio became a member of the Million Mile Club on Saturday morning, April 4. According to the United States Post Service, “The award recognizes drivers with 1 million miles of driving or 30 accumulated years driven without preventable incidents. It is a trademark of an expert driver and is recognized as the nation’s highest award for professional safe driving. Recipients receive a plaque with the Million Mile Club emblem, the NSC logo and an engraved personalized nameplate.”
Pollio, who lives with her husband in Santa Rosa and has one daughter, has been working for the post office for 32 years. For 25 of those years, she’s worked the same route in Sebastopol. “Route 3. It’s the area between Willow Street, all the way up to Hayden, Blossomwood, Jewell,” she said.
“People know me very well,” she said. “I get invited to parties.”
Asked what she likes most about her job, Pollio said, “Customer service. For me, it’s very important. I want my customers to feel special. I just love everything about it. I love the walking. I love just interacting with people, making sure that the mail is accurate and making sure that they get all their packages, always with the smile. I feel it’s important to make everybody feel special, and especially my older customers. I have a rapport with them,” she said, slightly tearing up.
This isn’t Pollio’s first award. When she was first working in Sebastopol, she helped save someone’s life on Covert Lane. “I recognized he was having a medical emergency; I called 911 and they came and saved his life. I stayed with him the whole time.”
Asked about the funniest thing that’s ever happened to her on the job, she said that a few times when she delivered a certified letter—that’s a letter that has to be delivered by hand to a real person, not just left in the mail box, she said, “I’ve had a couple of customers come out, um, inappropriately undressed.”
Clowning around at the Occidental Fools Parade
Photos by Rollie Atkinson
Corrections
Corrections from our article on Mike McGuire: McGuire is no longer Pro Tem of the California Senate. He stepped down in November 2025. Also, there are eight Democratic candidates on the ballot, not 10. There are 10 total candidates, including two Republicans.
Fun facts about local native bees
By Bob Burke
Kelli Cox and Carol Ellis, justifiably known as the “Native Bee Ladies,” captivated an audience of more than 40 people at the Quarterly Gathering of the Atascadero / Green Valley Watershed Council on March 21 at the Community Room at Burbank Heights. The Native Bee Ladies are longtime members of the Sonoma County Beekeepers Association, an organization that focuses primarily on the western honeybee, Apis mellifera. But what really gets Kelli’s and Carol’s wings vibrating is California native bees.
There are over 3,600 kinds of native bees in the United States, and half of them can be found in California. The Bee Ladies said that in a typical wild garden in Sonoma County, you should be able to see about 40 different native bees. In a manicured garden, not so many.
The amazing bee facts just kept coming and coming:
Tomato plants are pollinated by bumble bees, who use buzz pollination to shake the pollen off of the flower. There are usually between 50 and 200 bumblebees in a single nest. (Western honeybees will have thousands in a single hive.)
Goldenrod is one of the best host plants for native bees.
Mason bees can pollinate about 95% of the plants they visit, while honeybees can pollinate only about 5% of the plants they visit.
Leaf-cutter bees cut out circles and ovals from the leaves they visit, each shape having a different function in building their nest tunnels And if you want to see the cutting in action, you better be sharp, because it takes only about 5 or 10 seconds for them to complete the cut and fly off with the small piece of the leaf.
Squash bees mate inside squash blossoms. The females return to their nests after mating, but the males stay in the blossoms and sleep there overnight.
Six mason bees can pollinate an entire fruit tree, but the same job would take a few hundred honeybees.
Carol highly recommended the PBS documentary, My Garden of 1000 bees, in which wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn set out to record all the bees he could find in his tiny urban garden in Bristol, England.
Find out more at https://sonomabees.org.
“We were down in attendance by about 25%,” he said. “Two reasons for that: one was competition from Forestville, as well as Santa Rosa, and the other is perhaps more significant—the lack of our Hispanic neighbors.” A gut punch.