Moving to
Washington, DC in 1954, Bedette began to work as an assistant to paleontologists such as
Harry S. Ladd and
Wendell Woodring.
Paleontology Bedette worked for the
U.S. Geological Survey until her retirement in 1988. Her offices were in the
National Museum of Natural History, where she collaborated with its scientists. She collated the Museum's vast collection and created a reference file of index cards for thousands of Cenozoic molluscs, an endeavour that proved invaluable to field researchers who could quickly ascertain if their discoveries had already been described before across the numerous journals of the discipline. She counted the mollusc species and genera described by
William Healey Dall, and calculated the percentage of species among the Pacific fauna. Bedette received the Geological Survey's Scroll of Honor, and the Natural History Museum's Peer Recognition Community Award. Following her retirement from the Geological Survey, Bedette continued to work at the Natural History Museum, where she compiled descriptions of over 7000 fossils and living
scallops. The task was almost finished before her death. The photographs Sandved took were later published in the
Smithsonian Magazine in 1975, ==Later life and death==