PolliNation Podcast and Lab Update

If you love bees, and you have not yet subscribed to PolliNation, you’re missing out! OSU Professor and PolliNation podcast host, Andony Melathopolous, does a wonderful job assembling a diverse array of guests to talk all things pollinator.

Aaron Anderson recently joined Andony on episode 94 of thePolliNation podcast, to talk about his research on native plants, different insect groups, and gardeners.

Aaron talks about the 100+ study plots that he manages (two of which you can see, below), as well as which plants were most attractive to bees (such as the California poppy, on the left) versus those that were more attractive to gardeners (such as the Oregon iris, on the right).

In other news, our lab group has been very busy. All of the 2017 and 2018 bees from our garden pollinator study have been identified to species (unless they are truly recalcitrant to being ID’d to the level of species).  Gabe has been working with Lincoln Best to identify the 2018 bees.  The 2017 were verified by Sara Kornbluth, and provided a great reference collection against which we could compare the 2018 bees. Gabe has been a short-time member of our lab group, but his expertise has been a huge benefit to our program. He leaves us at the end of April to start field work in the College of Forestry. After that, he heads to UC Davis to do his Ph.D.

For the garden bee project, we have >50 verified species of bees collected from Portland-area gardens, with a few more at the morpho-species level. This summer will be our final year of collections.

This summer will also be Aaron’s final year of field work at the North Willamette Research and Extension Center. This final year will help to resolve some of the differences we saw between his 2017 and 2018 data set.

After two years of amazing assistance in the lab and in the field, Isabella has started an independent research project on campus. She has planted some of Aaron’s study plants in gardens on campus, and is looking to see if bee visitation and bee communities markedly change, when you take them out of single-species plantings (like Aaron is studying) and put them into a garden setting.

Mykl is working to write up his urban soils data for publication. We are also hoping to do a side publication, comparing the soil types that we’re finding in home gardens, and seeing how they align with the types of soils that nesting bees prefer.

Lauren is writing up her capstone paper, and is preparing to defend this term. She surveyed gardeners to try to understand how well they can identify bees from other insects, and how well they knew bee-friendly plants from those that offered few or no nectar/pollen resources to bees.

Signe is taking the data that we are collecting, and working our findings into the online Master Gardener course. The best part of our work is being able to see gardeners put some of our research-based recommendations into action. Signe plays a huge role in translating our work for the general public.

Angelee is a relatively new member of the lab. She comes to us from the OSU STEM Leaders program. She’s learning lab protocols and lending a hand on just about every project. She has been a joy to work with.

Lucas has moved on from the lab, but still helps us with remote data-basing work, on occasion. He was a joy to work with, and I feel lucky that he stuck with us for a few years.

This fall, Jen will be joining our group as a new M.S. student. We will also be close to launching the first course in the online Urban Agriculture certificate program, which is being spear-headed by Mykl. We should also be pushing out a few more papers from our garden work, to join our first concept paper on the value of urban garden bees to urban and peri-urban agriculture.

 

Pollinator of the week: Bombus fervidus

This entry is from Angelee Calder, and undergraduate Agricultural Science student at Oregon State University. It highlights a bumblebee that can be found in Oregon gardens, but that is currently listed as ‘Vulnerable’ to endangered species status, due to documented population declines (Hatfield et al. 2015).

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Dorsal view, Bombus fervidus. This bumblebee was collected from a Portland area garden in August 2018. Photo Credit: Angelee Calder and Isabella Messer

Anterior view, Bombus fervidus. This bumblebee was collected from a Portland area garden in August 2018. Photo Credit: Angelee Calder and Isabella Messer

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When we think of bees, we usually conjure up the image of a cute fuzzy black and yellow puff of an insect. Bombus fervidus, which is also known as the Golden Northern Bumble Bee, looks just like that cute bee stereotype. This bumble bee has a black face, yellow body, and single black band across its body near its wings (Discover Life 2019). Although Bombus fervidus can be found across most of the whole United States, studies have shown that their population numbers are declining (Colla and Packer 2008). This bee is attracted to clover, which is one reason to tolerate (or even embrace) clovers in residential lawns.

We spent 120 hours hand collecting bees from 24 Portland area gardens in 2017 and 2018. In addition, across these two years we set out water pan traps to collect bees for an additional 3,450 hours of passive collection. In all this time, we only collected two Bombus fervidus. Both were collected from the same yard in August 2018. This yard is our largest garden, and it sits adjacent to Forest Park. It could be that this species, known to be in decline, does best with larger patches of habitat, that are close to a natural area.

The Northern Golden Bumble Bee is in the running for cutest bee, so make sure to take a look while he is out foraging. The peak viewing times to catch a glimpse of these cuties May to October (BugGuide.Net 2019).

References

Colla and Packer. 2008. Evidence for decline in eastern North American bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Apidae), with a special focus on Bombus affinis Cresson. Biodiversity and Conservation 17: 1379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-008-9340-5.

BugGuide.Net. 2019 “Species Bombus fervidus – Golden Northern Bumble Bee”, https://bugguide.net/node/view/23135. Accessed February 27, 2019.

Discover Life. 2019. “Bombus fervidus“, https://www.discoverlife.org/mp/20q. Accessed February 27, 2019.

Hatfield, R., Jepsen, S., Thorp, R., Richardson, L., Colla, S. & Foltz Jordan, S.2015. Bombus fervidusThe IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2015: e.T21215132A21215225.http://dx.doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.UK.2015-4.RLTS.T21215132A21215225.en. Accessed  February 27, 2019.