Dr. Kit Prendergast, also known as Bee Babette (@bee.babette_performer on Instagram), is a native bee researcher, science communicator, and performing artist. She began researching native bees in 2016 after designing a PhD project focused on native bees in the urbanised southwest Australian biodiversity hotspot, including the complex and often contentious impacts of the introduced European honey bee on native bee communities. This research was conducted under a Forrest Research Scholarship.

Since then, Dr. Prendergast has conducted research across a wide range of topics, including urbanisation and bees, honey bee impacts on native bees and pollination networks, bee hotels, public education, bee nesting and foraging ecology, fire ecology, and taxonomy. She has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles and has received numerous awards recognizing her contributions to both science and public outreach in native bee conservation.

Dr. Prendergast has described two native bee species to date, Leioproctus zephyr (named after her dog, Zephyr) and Megachile lucifer. In addition to her research, she is an artist who creates native bee-inspired artwork, available through Bee Babette on Redbubble and TeePublic. She is also a performing artist and creator of the award-winning science circus comedy show The Birds & the Bees, which explores pollinators through performance.