Tag Archives: native bees

New Summer Game- Pollinator Bingo!

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Summer pollinator Bingo board!

We are entering the heart of summer, with blue skies, rising temperatures, blooming flowers, and growing gardens. As some of us are taking this time to relax in the bounty of our gardens and in whatever shade we can find, our pollinator counterparts are in the middle of their busiest season. The pollinators are out in full force, and it seems almost impossible to turn around in a garden without spotting a new butterfly, bee, or beetle. So for those among us who want to engage even further with the friends visiting our gardens around this time of year, we have the perfect game for you: Pollinator Bingo! 

Our Pollinator Bingo-or should we say BEEngo- is a healthy mix between Bingo and a scavenger hunt! 

Here’s how to play:

  1. Select the Bingo Card you will use 
  2. Download it, or print it out, and get it ready to be filled out 
  3. Keep your eyes open for these visitors in a garden. When you spot a pollinator on your Bingo card, mark that pollinators square. 
  4. Once you fill an entire row (horizontal, vertical or diagonal) you’ve won your BEEngo!  
  5. Extra Credit Challenge: Try to black out the entire card! 

We hope you have fun playing Pollinator Bingo outside, exploring and enjoying the natural world in some way. Good luck BEEngo players! 

Pollinator Bingo Board 1Download
Pollinator Bingo Board 2Download

Below, we included some pollinator spotlights, so you can get to know some of the species on your Bingo card a little better!

Pollinator Bingo Spotlight List:

  1. Tribe Eucerini, Longhorned bee

Eucerini, also known as long-horned bees, are favorites among our lab members. They are the most diverse tribe in the family Apidae, with over 32 genera. These bees are solitary and ground-nesting. What makes them distinct and a lab favorite are the long antennae the males are known for and from which they get their common name. The females are also recognizable, as they have long hairs, known as scopae, on their hind legs, giving them the appearance of wearing very thick pants. 

Photo by Svea Bruslind

2. Species Papilio machaon oregonia, Oregon Swallowtail butterfly 

As with any in the Swallowtail family, Papilio machaon oregonia, or the Oregon Swallowtail, is big, beautiful, and eye-catching. It was officially named Oregon’s state insect on July 16, 1979. It is native to the northwest and is only found in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and sections of British Columbia. For the purposes of Pollinator Bingo, any Swallowtail will count for its space. Keep an eye out for the Oregon Swallowtail and others, and see how many different species you can find!

Photo by Cara Still

3. Family Syrphidae, Flower Fly 

Hoverflies, flower flies, and syrphid flies are all different names for the flies within the family Syrphidae. Syrphid flies come in a wide variety of sizes and colors, with some that resemble wasps and others that look nearly identical to bees. Most syrphids, however, can be found with some kind of striping on their abdomen.  Syrphids are essential to any garden as they help with pest control and pollination. Some people are surprised that flies are pollinators too, but hopefully, this list can illustrate the wide variety of pollinators out there! 

Photo by Devon Johnson

4. Species Trichodes ornatus, Ornate Checkered beetle 

Trichodes ornatus, or the Ornate Checkered beetle, is an interesting species, as during the early stages of its life, instead of pollinating, it feeds on pollinators. These beetles will lay their eggs on plants such as yarrow, sagebrush, and asters. When these eggs hatch, the larvae attach themselves to a visiting bee, usually a leafcutter bee. They will then be transported to the bee’s nest, where they will eat the provisions left there for the host larvae before eating the host larvae and burrowing into nearby cells to do the same. As an adult, the Ornate Checkered beetle will feed on pollen but will not miss an opportunity to snack on other visiting pollinators when foraging for pollen.

Attribution © LapisOre some rights reserved (CC by lapis_the_mothman iNaturalist user)

5. Species Calypte Anna, Anna’s hummingbird

Calypte Anna or Anna’s hummingbird should be a familiar sight for many of us. This rambunctious bird is a permanent resident along the Pacific Coast, staying year-round through winters instead of engaging in migration as other species of hummingbirds are known to do. Males of Anna’s hummingbird are pretty talkative, often vocalizing with a buzzy song. The males have a brilliant red head with a green body, and the females have similar green plumage, but without the red coloration on their face and neck. 

Attribution © selwynq some rights reserved (CC by selwynq iNaturalist user)

How attractive are native wildflowers to gardeners?

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For my dissertation research, I am studying which native Willamette Valley wildflowers are most visited by pollinators and natural enemies for use in home gardens and urban landscaping. I’ve previously shared preliminary results from my field study on our blog, namely pollinator abundance and richness. For a refresher, here are summaries from 2017, 2018, and 2019.

Initial survey

Determining which of these flowers are most attractive to insects is only half of the equation — I also want flowers that are attractive to gardeners. To investigate this I developed two surveys — thanks to anyone reading who took them!  The first simply asked gardeners to rank the aesthetic appeal of my study plants, as well as how likely they would be to utilize them in their home gardens. This allowed me to get a baseline understanding of how appealing these flowers are for use in home gardens and landscaping.

As you can see in the figure below, many of the plants most visited by bees (highlighted in orange) were the least attractive to gardeners (Fig. 1), while plants gardeners liked the most (e.g. Iris, Columbine) were hardly visited by bees. However, its notable that many of these native wildflowers ranked around a four on a 1-5 scale, showing that these flowers do have a high potential appeal for use in landscaping! 

Figure 1: Gardener ranked aesthetic appeal of study flowers on a scale of 1-5. Orange bars note plants that were consistently highly visited pollinator plants. N=587

Follow-up survey

The follow-up survey consisted of a subset of ten flowers most visited by bees, and again asked respondents to rank the aesthetic appeal and likelihood of planting for each of these flower species. Then, they were shown facts about and images of bees that visit each flower species, and asked whether they viewed each plant species more favorably, less favorably, or the same. Finally, they were asked to re-rank how attractive they found the flower species and how likely they would be to use the species in their garden, both on a scale of 1-5.

Gardener acceptance

This second survey showed a remarkable increase in gardener acceptance of pollinator friendly native plants after being educated on plant-pollinator associations. Over 80% of respondents stated that they viewed Clarkia amoena as more attractive after gain, and over 60% of respondents viewed Phacelia heterophylla, Madia elegans, and Gilia capitata as more attractive (Fig. 2). 

Figure 2: Percent of respondents viewing flower species as more attractive after learning about pollinator associations. N=184.

Likelihood of planting

After learning about the benefits these flowers provide to pollinators, gardeners were also more likely to plant all ten flower species (Fig. 3). Notably, they were 40% more likely to plant Phacelia heterophylla, (a species that ranked as the least aesthetically appealing overall in the first survey). As a whole, they were also over 20% more likely to plant Solidago canadensis, Clarkia amoena. Similar increases were also observed in likelihood of planting Oreganum vulgare and Nepeta cataria. Many of the plants that showed a smaller percent change are species that started out with a higher aesthetic appeal (e.g. Gillia capitata, Lavendula intermedia, Aster subspicatus), meaning gardeners were already very likely to include these plants in their home garden before learning about the ecological benefits they provide. 

Figure 3:  Percent change in respondent’s likelihood of planting each top pollinator flower after learning about the pollinators associated with each. N=184

Ecological beauty

What does this all mean? This suggests that although native plants are frequently denounced as being less attractive than showy garden species, many home gardeners are still willing to use native flowers in their landscaping. Additionally, this lends credence to the concept of “ecological beauty” – that many gardeners are willing to utilize plants that will increase the habitat value and wildlife diversity in their yards. 

2019 Native Plant Field Season Update

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I’m thrilled to announce that this summer I completed the third field season of my study. This is slightly bittersweet – while I’m excited that we are done with hot fieldwork, I will miss chasing bees around the farm and the view of Mt. Hood. I’m incredibly thankful for this third season of data, as it will help account for some of the temporal variation inherent in ecological studies. In fact, pollinator communities in particular tend to be highly variable both within and across field seasons. Having three seasons of data will hopefully allow us to identify more reliable patterns of pollinator visitation between my study plants.

Lots of lab work remains, as I’m tackling the insect samples that we collected with the bee vacuum. With the help of a dissecting scope, I’m attempting to identify the each specimen to at least the taxonomic level of family to get a sense of the broader insect communities associated with each flower species in my study. It will be several months before I can share this species-richness data, but in the meantime I have bee abundance data to share with you!

Aaron and Lucas in the native plant study site, in 2017. You can see the 1m by 1 m plot in the foreground by Aaron, a second one near Lucas, and a few more in the distance.

As a refresher, we performed timed pollinator observations at each plot. This consisted of observing each blooming plot for five minutes and counting all the insects that landed on open flowers. Bees were sorted to “morpho-type” (honey bee, bumblebee, green bee, and other native bee). Though this doesn’t give us species-level information on the floral visitors, it allows us to understand which plants attracted the most pollinators overall, and allows us to detect any patterns of visitation between honey bees, bumblebees, and solitary native bees. Below is a summary of some of the highlights.

2019 overall bee abundance by plant species:

  • Origanum vulgare, Lavendula intermedia, and Eschscolzia californica were top five bee plants in 2019, just as they were in 2018.
  • In 2019, Phacelia heterophylla and Solidago canadensis jump into the top five, while Nepeta cataria and Gilia capitata fall out of the top five. It should be noted that Nepeta was the sixth most attractive plant, with about the same visitation level as Solidago.
  • Again, similar to 2018, it appears that honey bee visitation was driving the high visitation rates of the popular exotic garden species (marked with a red asterisk), while native wildflowers were being visited more frequently by native bees.
  • I’ve included the 2017 and 2018 overall abundance graphs as well, for comparison. You can see that the overall abundance was higher in 2019 for the two most popular plants, at about ~25 bees per observation period!

2017 overall bee abundance by plant species:

2018 overall bee abundance by plant species:

Since honey bee visitation drove the high abundance of many of the top pollinator plants, I took honey bee visits out of the data set and made a new graph, to compare which plants were most attractive to native bees.

2019 native bee abundance by plant species:

As you can see above, honey bees are excluded from the analysis, the top five most popular plant species completely reshuffles.

I’ve included that 2017 and 2018 native bee abundance data below for comparison.

2017 native bee abundance by plant species:

2018 native bee abundance by plant species:

Please stay tuned for more updates on the bee species richness we collected in 2019, as well as data on the other insects (pests and natural enemies) that we collected!

Unpopular Opinion: Saving Honey Bees Does Very Little to Save the Bees

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Although I have been studying garden bees for the past three years, I was never focused on honey bees. From a biodiversity point of view, they are not very interesting to me. They are non-native and abundant. In fact, honey bees were the most abundant bee species that we collected in Portland-area gardens (332 individuals collected), even though we took great care not to collect more than one individual per visit, when hand-collecting.

Some of the 300+ individual honey bees that we collected from Portland area gardens, even though we took great care to not hand collect more than a single individual honey bee per garden, per site visit.

Honey bees, which hail from Europe, are only one of 20,000 bee species, worldwide. In North America, there are 4,000 species of bee. In Oregon, we have between 400-500 species of bee. From Portland area gardens, we have documented 86 species of bee (with our 2019 bees still awaiting identification).

Unlike some native bees, honey bees are not at risk of extinction. Compare this to bumblebees. We found 17 species of bumblebee in Portland gardens, two of which (12%) are at risk of endangerment or extinction, due to declining populations: Bombus fervidus and Bombus caliginosus. Across North America, more than 25% of bumblebee species are thought to be at risk of extinction.

  • Frontal view of Bombus fervidus, a threatened bumblebee species that can be found in Portland area gardens.
  • Dorsal view of Bombus fervidus, a threatened bumblebee species that can be found in Portland area gardens.

By focusing ‘save the bee’ campaigns on honey bees, we may be neglecting the bee species that really need our help. In fact, researchers have started to call out organizations and advertising campaigns that promote feel good stories about honey bee conservation as a form of ‘bee washing’. You can visit www.bee-washing.com to learn more about companies that promote their product or organization as being bee-friendly, in a less than genuine way.

Researchers have documented at least seven different ways that honey bees may harm native bee species (summarized in Cane and Tepedino, 2016):

  1. Honey bees monopolize and deplete nectar and pollen from local plant communities, which can reduce native bee reproduction.
  2. By depleting local plant resources, native bee females have to devote more time and energy to fly and find new resources, which also reduces native bee reproduction.
  3. Unlike honey bees, most bees are solitary, which means that they do not live in colonies and they do not have a queen. Solitary females who have access to fewer floral resources produce fewer daughters and more sons. Since female bees are needed to maintain a population, this skewed sex ratio can slow population growth and recovery in native bees.
  4. When females collect less nectar and pollen, they have less food to feed their young. These bees grow up to be smaller, and are more likely to die over winter, compared to well-fed bees.
  5. The longer a solitary bee mom is away from her nest, the higher risk that parasites and predators will attack her unguarded young.
  6. Honey bees can physically block native, solitary bees from preferred pollen hosts.
  7. Honey bees have many diseases. Some honey bee viruses have been found in native bee communities. Researchers think flowers that are visited by both native bees and honey bees are analogous to an elementary school water fountain: a place where repeat visitors can pick up a pathogen.

Please note that I am not suggesting that you extinguish honey bees from your garden. What I am asking, instead, is that you take the time to learn about and to notice some of the other 80+ species of bee that you might find in your garden. My group is creating a ‘Bees of Portland Gardens’ guide that we hope can help you in this journey. In the meantime, there are some great guides that are currently available. One is Wilson and Carrill’s ‘The Bees in Your Backyard: a guide to North America’s bees’. This book is available at Powell’s City of Books, as well as on Amazon. The second is August Jackson’s ‘The Bees of the Willamette Valley: a comprehensive guide to genera’. This free guide can be found online.

The first step to saving something you love is to be able to recognize it and to call it by name.

References

  • Cane and Tepedino. 2016. Gauging the effect of honey bee pollen collection on native bee communities. Conservation Letters 10: 205-210.
  • Jackson. 2019. The Bees of the Willamette Valley: A Comprehensive Guide to Genera. Self-Published, Online: https://tinyurl.com/y4qfssrl.
  • Wilson and Carrill. 2016. Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America’s Bees. Princeton University Press.