Before we learn more about your work, Mark, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how your career path led you to UL Lafayette?

I did my PhD at the University of Tennessee, with Dr. Jen Schweitzer and Dr. Joe Bailey. I was mostly interested in how within-species genotypic variation in dominant plants affected insect communities, with a focus on pollinators. Later I moved to Rutgers to work in Dr. Rachael Winfree’s lab, where I worked on two major projects. The first involved applying the ecological Price equation to existing pollinator datasets, and the second was a field study asking how many bee species are needed to provide pollination to multiple wildflowers across many sites and years.

Can you tell us a bit about the Cajun Prairie habitat? What are its primary threats or causes of loss, and are there active efforts to conserve or restore it?

The Cajun Prairie is a grassland habitat between the swamps of the Atchafalaya basin and the Louisiana-Texas border. It once covered over two million acres, but it has been nearly extirpated, with less than 445 acres remaining as pristine habitat. Most of the habitat loss was driven by agriculture, specifically rice and sugarcane. At least for the past 20 years, there has been an increased interest in restoring prairie habitats. Federal (USGS) and state (Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries) agencies have invested in studying the plant communities of intact patches to inform what good restorations should look like. A local group, the Cajun Prairie Habitat Preservation Society, has established and maintains a few restored prairie sites. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Ecology Center has a “Pure Native” project that grows and distributes local genotypes of native plants.

What existing information (i.e., checklists, published gray or peer-reviewed literature, or general knowledge) and infrastructure (i.e., museum collections, taxonomic expertise) is there on the Cajun Prairie related to native bees?

The Cajun Prairie is an extremely understudied habitat. Historical collections are sparse, and the only recent, focused collections have been done by either USGS or my lab group at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. To our knowledge, there are only 650 collection records from the Cajun Prairie, 580 of which were collected by my lab group in the last two years. These collections were led by Andrew Buderi (co-author of this post), who deserves credit for enduring low catch rates and very difficult weather conditions.

What are your goals for better understanding the bee communities within the Cajun Prairie? How are you using bee inventorying, surveying, or monitoring techniques to achieve some of those goals?

One of our basic research interests is understanding the Cajun Prairie as one part of a habitat gradient that stretches north from the Gulf of Mexico. The prairie transitions into flatwood, and then upland, pine savannas. Understanding how plant and bee communities change along this gradient is an active area of research for my lab group. Since so little is known about the bee communities of this region, our sampling and observations are currently focused on building knowledge of the bee community, which can be improved over time. In terms of applying our research to ongoing restoration efforts, we would like to understand which bee species are important for the pollination of the plant species that are indicators of healthy, restored prairie habitats.

Hi MaLisa! Part of our work at the RCN involves connecting with and learning more about ongoing bee monitoring efforts across the US. We were excited to find the Ohio Bee Survey! Before we learn more about your work, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got to where you are?
 
I am the State Coordinator of the Ohio Bee Survey along with the assistance of Denise Ellsworth and Dr. Karen Goodell. I have previously worked as the State Coordinator of Ohio Dragonfly Survey. I graduated from The Ohio State University with a Master's of Science in Entomology and Marietta College with a Bachelor's of Science in Biology. I have worked on many research projects including urban pollinator habitat management, bee floral use via pollen analysis, ladybeetle richness, mangrove restoration in abandoned shrimp farms, among others.
 
How did the Ohio Bee Survey begin? What are its goals?
 
The Ohio Bee Survey is a statewide project with the goal of documenting what species are present in Ohio. The state lacks an attempt to document and list the species of bees, so this is the first organized effort in the state to do so. We also hope to get better floral use data by associating bees with the plants they are foraging. This project is funded through the Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and The Manitou Fund.

What are some lessons you learned about running a bee survey from your experience with the Ohio Dragonfly Survey?
 
The Ohio Bee Survey and The Ohio Dragonfly Survey are very different beasts. With dragonflies, it is much easier to photograph specimens to get a confident species level ID. We have an estimated 170 species of dragonflies and damselflies in Ohio, whereas we expect to get well over 400 species of bees in the state. I had the approach the bee survey from a very different method of recruitment, in part because the bee survey relies so much on lethal specimen collection so that we can actually verify the IDs. For the dragonfly survey, I was able to just do various presentations across the state and recruit people to photograph dragonflies periodically and upload them to iNaturalist. With the bee survey, we wanted a full season of data from set sites where we knew people would commit to sample the full flight period. We recruited mostly from the Ohio Pollinator Specialists group run by Denise Ellsworth. That group has already gone through several courses on bees. I have also taught for that course and know that many of them are very dedicated and enthusiastic about bees, so it made sense to bring them on board. I also made sure that people had to fill out forms and respond to individual emails at least twice to verify they were responsive and willing to commit. That seemed to have worked out, as we got a 90% return rate on the bee bowl sample kits!
 
We also recruited people from county extension agents so that we could get better statewide coverage of people. We tried to get at least one kit shipped to each county, and ended up shipping kits to 87 of 88 counties in Ohio!
 
Can you tell us about the methods you use to conduct the Ohio Bee Survey? Who does the sampling, and how and where does sampling occur?
 
We have two main methods, with bowl traps in 2020 and then targeted sampling for specialist bees in 2021-2022. Over 155 trained volunteers and myself set bowl traps the first summer. The bowl traps were set out for 24 hours ~weekly pending weather at their pre-selected sample site.
 
Then in 2021, we switched over to collecting directly from flowers to attempt to target specialist bees. The targeted sampling involved 40 individuals from the Ohio Pollinator Specialists group who were already were trained on netting and collecting bees, so I only had to do a quick refresher course over zoom on how to collect specimens for our project. The targeted sampling is from anywhere in Ohio that the floral targets of that month exist, with the caveat that they have to make sure to get permits for each site in advance. I also helped people get permits, though many of them already worked with their local parks and had permits before starting this project.

What do you do with the specimens collected? What are some of the most exciting specimens you’ve encountered?
 
Specimens will be deposited at the Triplehorn Insect Collection and also the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. We are still processing our specimens, and will be publishing a paper on the cool bee finds soon. I was excited to find interesting bycatch in our bowl samples, so we also have students working on hover fly (Syrphidae) and robber fly (Asilidae) specimens that got accidentally fell into the bowl traps. For our blog updates, I would also photograph cool other bug finds and post them with natural history tidbits for our volunteers. We found things like Forcepflies (Merope tuber), tiny Vertigo snails (Vertigo sp), Big-headed ants (Pheidole sp), and even bristle millipedes, all of which are fun finds for an entomologist.

You share weekly updates on the Ohio Bee Survey blog. Can you share some about the role of outreach and communication in your work?
 
Communication is key to volunteer specimen collections. There is no way I would have been able to make it out to 150 sites on a weekly basis. Initially, the blog had a few goals: 1) remind collectors weekly that the project is still ongoing and they should consider collecting, 2) keep volunteers engaged, learning, and excited to participate, and 3) keep my supervisor updated on progress given everyone was working from home given the ongoing pandemic. I would have needed to email my supervisor with progress updates anyway, so I figured it made sense to let everyone in on the progress updates.
 
I also used the blog to announce more resources and guides. Our volunteers love new resources, so we put out an Ohio Field Guide to Bees and also a Guide to the Specialist Bees of Ohio that anyone can have printed. Both guides are meant to encourage more collecting and detailed study by our volunteers.
 
Once the collecting period was over, I kept updating the blog to inform the collectors of the sorting and identification progress. That way they would get regular updates on our progress, instead of wondering what happened to all those bugs that they collected. It also helped cut down on individual emails to me asking for updates on their samples, as they could just search for their name and read the blog updates.
 
The sorting and pinning process took much longer than I had hoped, as we had initially planned to have group pinning parties to get everything pinned quickly. Alas, the ongoing pandemic made it not safe to have large gatherings, so having limited numbers of volunteers in the lab and sending out weekly updates was a consolation prize. Many of the volunteers commented how much they enjoyed the content of the blogs, so I tried to keep them going.
 
Our blogs can be found here: https://u.osu.edu/beesurvey/
 
Project takeaways:

As predicted, the bowls caught a lot of bees, primarily the smaller bees like Lasioglossum, Ceratina, and Calliopsis. We were able to get everything pinned through the help of volunteers and student workers, but it was a lot of specimens. One surprising thing that I noticed was the sheer abundance of Calliopsis in our bowls, especially considering many of those same sites are regularly photo monitored. For some reason, we are rarely seeing Calliopsis alive in Ohio, but if you looked at the bowl data, you would think they are one of the most common bees in Ohio. So there is some discrepancy from what we see actually flying and what we are catching in bowls. If anyone has more information about why we so rarely see Calliopsis flying, I would love to hear it!

Hi Michael! I want to mostly dig into your recent paper on global bee distributions that was published in Current Biology. But first, can you tell us a bit about yourself? Where do you work and what is your day-to-day life as a bee researcher like?
 
Thanks for having me. Always happy to chat about bees. Right now I’m a President’s International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI) funded postdoctoral researcher working on bees in Beijing at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. I did most of my bee work in North America, especially the southwestern deserts, but have been in China for about three and a half years now. It’s probably very different from what most people think of China as, and it’s more similar to life in the USA than one might expect. I live in a bit of a shoebox but it’s an expensive area, though still very cheap when compared to western megacities. I live about a kilometer from the institute so I just walk to work. As the institute is located near Olympic Park on the north side of Beijing there’s actually a decent bit of green space nearby and, though urban, it’s not too urban. Sometimes I’m able to escape to the park for collecting or peacetime missions to visit my pet Anthophora villosula (sister species to the better-known European Anthophora plumipes) nest aggregation under a very heavily trafficked bridge located over a busy thoroughfare. Happily, I have not yet been detained for loitering in a fenced-off area under that bridge.
 
It gets pretty busy when I’m in the office. Things happen fast in China and you always have to be ready for whatever might come your way. Recently, most of my days involve jumping from task to task trying to gradually push several projects toward completion. It’s kind of like that carnival game where you compete with others to get a horse or something to the end of a race by shooting water at it, except I have to shoot all of them at the same time and there’s no one else with a water gun. This might sound scarily hectic to some but it’s working out alright for me so far. There are downsides, a lot of the paperwork is of course in Chinese and hard to navigate for me, but people have always been helpful with that and it’s really something you have to expect when living in another country. There are a lot of short deadlines, though, and it’s not uncommon to be asked for something like two pages of writing due basically immediately to be able to apply for a grant (it actually happened last week). But the funding is very good and there are plenty of resources foreigners can apply for even as a postdoc. Practically, I’d rather have short deadlines on a grant I have a chance at than months to prepare for a grant with a 5-10% success rate. I certainly can’t complain. I’m happy to chat with anyone who’s thinking about making the move to China, we could definitely use more bee researchers here.

How did you end up in bee world, and what are the research questions you find most interesting?
 
I always knew I wanted to work on insects from an early age, so I majored in entomology for my undergraduate study at Cornell. I must admit that I was initially more interested in sociality research than in taxonomy and biodiversity, and I was much more interested in ants early on (don’t tell anyone). Funny enough, it was honey bees that initially got me interested in bees, via conversations and lectures from Tom Seeley and Nick Calderone. Come my junior year, it was time for me to settle down on a subject, having dabbled previously in spiders, katydids, and invasives, and I was lucky enough to join Bryan Danforth’s lab, working closely with Mia Park on bee biodiversity in apple orchards (a fortunate sidestep from honey bees, I now believe). That’s when I first got into specimen databasing and bee identification, along with some basic molecular work. From Cornell, I’ve worked in the labs of a number of other bee people, including Sean Brady, Sam Droege, Terry Griswold, and now Chao-Dong Zhu. I’ve worked on taxonomy and systematics, various bits of evolution, some behavior, recent dabbling in macroecology… the unifying theme behind all of this is the bees, and knowing more about them than most people, but I’ve also recently got more involved with conservation work in collaboration with Alice Hughes, and that kind of applied work is definitely very rewarding as well.  
 
These days, the questions I’ve been asking in my research seem to change a lot depending on the day and the specific manuscript I’m working on. If I had to sum it up in a sentence, as the reader might prefer I do by now: I want to know why bees live where they do, how they do so, and what we can do to help them. More broadly, I’m also interested in how we can make taxonomy (the discovery and description of new species) sustainable in the current academic climate, and the proper usage of biodiversity data for understanding distribution patterns.

Can you tell us the story behind your recent study on global bee distributions? What motivated you to do the work and how did you assemble the team of researchers who co-authored the study?
 
There’s a lot to unpack there. I’ve always been very interested in the distribution of bees and drivers thereof, and I know many of the others on this project are too. John Ascher and I had been talking for years about the importance of basic distributional and life history data, and about how few others seemed to recognize the value of data generation and sharing. In general, beyond bees, there are just far too many studies out there that uncritically leverage public distributional data or “expert” range polygons and then perform “global” analyses in journals that start with Sci* or Nat*. The best-available-data arguments I’m sure authors would mount to defend themselves simply amount to BAD arguments. By working with lacking, incomplete data, people are obscuring the fact that there’s so much still unknown in the world. There is still so much we don’t know, and the big issue here is that the people most able to provide this information are those other researchers pay the least attention to, and when everyone is pretending we already know everything we need to then there’s also no reason to fund further knowledge generation. Collaboration is foundational in science but somehow everyone seems to have forgotten the people actually generating the data, so we wanted to do something big that would showcase what you can do when combining real knowledge with cutting-edge methods, to show what science should optimally be like. This is a bit of a lofty goal and I doubt we accomplished much on that track but I hope we made it at least halfway, and that it makes people think at least a few seconds more before they run their models on random, unvalidated data that they just downloaded. Because this kind of work has real consequences, the ranges and richness projections people make might be the only information governments have for prioritizing protected areas or other policies, so we owe it to the organisms we study that we at least do our due diligence and at least try to get it right rather than taking shortcuts for “global” studies in high-impact journals.
 
The actual study took about a year to put together, but that’s on the back of an immense amount of work that others really did to set the stage for this paper. First, there’s decades of work John did documenting bee species richness worldwide, country by country, in many places even state by state or province by province. What he’s done is something special, I simply cannot overstate how important that work was for this paper. At the same time, it would have also been impossible without the technical expertise (GIS wizardry) of Alice Hughes. I could not be more impressed or prouder of how good she is at what she does (which is a rather staggering number of things). Everyone contributed but this project simply could not have happened without those two, and certainly it would have never worked out without the support from Chao-Dong Zhu and his lab.
 
A lot of the initial planning for this paper was done remotely, but it really all came together when John and I discussed matters in person (the third time we’d met, I think it was) at the 2018 International Society of Hymenopterists meeting in Matsuyama, Japan (over sushi, bee collecting, but sadly not karaoke). Alice and I were totally in sync at this point, following many detailed discussions, but it was really hard to convey the whole plan through email or voice calls, so I’m not honestly sure if it would’ve moved past planning if John and I didn’t have that chat in the flower garden of Ehime University (we were frequently distracted by bees so maybe somewhere else would’ve actually been wiser, oh well). What matters is that it worked and that was when I really knew we had the team fully together, when it was really going to happen.
 
Anyways, as for the paper itself, there’s still a lot to unpack (most I’ll drop into the next question!).

Can you summarize some of the “big picture” findings of your study?
 
I’ve emphasized this before but it warrants repeating. I think that our biggest message might be just how lacking biodiversity data are at present. People focus on the patterns themselves, but these could still be greatly refined both at smaller scales and for individual species (rather than for species richness as a whole). Bees are one of the hottest topics in the invertebrate realm, but we still found 1700+ species in the wrong hemisphere (E v W) in public databases. In the countries investigated, up to ~30% of documented species were incorrect. This is incredible. If someone took these data uncritically and tried to map out richness, even super coarse resolution analyses (100x100km, etc.) couldn’t account for some of these errors. This shows that not only do we need more resources for identification and digitization, we need better data stewardship. The pipeline cannot end once new specimen records are online! Methods for correction, and incentives for people to do this are so critically important to getting things right. In an ideal world, taxonomists would be readily employed for their irreplaceable subject knowledge and they could spend some of their time systematically checking and correcting these kinds of data. GBIF and others are doing the best that they can but they can’t be expected to have experts on-hand for all taxa. They are using various top-down methods for error checking and flagging, but these approaches cannot always correct the data and make them usable, often expert knowledge is needed. If there were proper hiring and career incentives to provide that knowledge, this issue would disappear. For instance, it should mean something when someone says in a personal statement that they personally verified and digitized tens of thousands of specimen records, but right now I honestly don’t think it does. In part this is because it’s a complicated matter; how should data be valued? Certainly there’s a qualitative difference between 10,000 Eurasian tree sparrow records from northwestern Europe and 10,000 records of mixed birds from Papua. There are ways these things could be weighted and properly valued but I’ve yet to see real efforts at this. As soon as such a system rolls out, though, we’d have to worry about data ownership much more….
 
Anyways! For the other aspects of the study, I think that this is probably best done with bullet points so the audience doesn’t get impatient. Hopefully this makes it easier for people to cite because I know no one likes having to read past the abstract to cite papers these days.

• Even in North America where >60% of records exist, sampling is very uneven and a small number of extremely well-sampled areas dominate the total.
  
• There are more bee species in xeric and temperate areas than in tropical and other relatively humid places. This might be due to higher turnover in xeric areas, but this warrants further testing.
  
• Global hotspots include the SW USA, Mediterranean Europe and northern Africa through into the Middle East, South Africa, the xeric parts of South America (especially Chile and Argentina), Central Asia, and Australia.
  
• Bee species richness is strongly related to solar radiation, dryness, relatively low seasonality, relatively low wind, and a number of others in our final 18-variable model. But keep in mind that these are at the global scale! So this takes into account a lot of extreme values, and the optimums will often be different from the most extreme values such that something like low humidity is good but not the absolute lowest possible value. Some precipitation is still needed for plants, after all.
  
• Plant species richness and net primary productivity were important for bees too, but only when you downweight areas with lots of tree cover; when not downweighting trees, net primary productivity was actually bad for bee richness.
  
• There should still be MANY undescribed bees in China, Chile/Argentina, Australia (enough that our richness reprojections may not be accurate enough), and maybe north Africa but a lot of people have done work there historically so it is likely better known.
  

 
Of course, there’s a lot more than that in there, so please read the paper if this is all interesting to you.

Moving forward, what are the data that we need to better assess global distributions?
 
There’s still a lot of work to do. The most effective conservation work is typically done at local levels, by local stakeholders, and it takes an immense amount of data to properly plan fine-scale conservation management. (And there’s the obvious need to properly communicate out science and often incentivize conservation for stakeholders.) There are so many factors that can impact bees and we only have accurate data across continents and scales for a minority of these abiotic and biotic factors (aridity and other climate factors, plant resources, etc.). The data for bees themselves are, of course, even worse off, as we’ve shown in the paper. North America is well documented, though there’s always room for improvement, but Asia accounted for only 1% of total unique-locality records. Keep in mind that it took quite a bit of work by many different researchers in North America to bring us to this place, not just in terms of data accumulation but building up the taxonomic foundation on which all of that relies. Many other areas are not so lucky and still an immense amount of species remained undescribed or virtually unidentifiable because of lacking identification resources and reference material. This just makes things even more difficult. That’s not to say there aren’t undescribed species in North America, though, as there are quite a few in the more difficult groups that haven’t seen enough prior taxonomic work. For example, Zach Portman described nine new species of the Perdita subgenus Heteroperdita bringing it up to 22 species and I described seven new Anthophora (Micranthophora) of now 26 total. But, for comparison’s sake, Remko Leijs recently described 26 new Australian species for the subgenus Leioproctus (Colletellus), which previously had only one described species. There’s a lot of work to do everywhere, basically, and some places more than others.
 
This is why monitoring is so important. Right now, we need no-regret solutions that we can take to avoid the decline of bees and other vital pollinators. Some of these are easy and mesh well with other initiatives with bigger pockets (area protection, etc.), but some may conflict with the economy and there it gets more difficult. We know that we should reduce pesticide use and preserve natural areas, but by how much should we reduce pesticides and where, exactly, should we protect? We have to keep in mind that everything is controlled to some degree by economic considerations, that we will always need to find a balance between the conservation-ideal and the conservation-reality.
 
Right now, I think we should focus on defining a set of indicator species that are widespread enough to be compared across sites to better understand change over time; we cannot use every species because many things are too rare, but at the same time, in the USA where >60% of public unique bee locality-species records exist, we are at the point where we can use individual species rather than just total species numbers. Best case, these species can also be identified easily, which could even enable non-lethal sampling for abundance metrics perhaps with non-toxic paint marking to prevent recounts, but for many groups this will be impossible and that’s why we really do need taxonomists going forward. The importance of taxonomy and identification is immeasurable. This is one of the biggest challenges for any inventory or monitoring initiative. If you have thousands of specimens, who will put the correct names on all of them? Who will make sure all the specimens from all the sites are using the same species concepts, basically applying the same names to the same things? We can’t just bin things as “little black bees” or “big bees, maybe Xylocopa idk,” different bees have different life cycles and activity periods, as well as local habitat requirements and many other characteristics. As such, this set of representative pollinators should also encompass a diversity of life histories, so none go unaccounted for. Beyond this, we can still use total metrics such as richness, abundance, or diversity, but if we want to really dig into how species are impacted then we certainly want these types of representative species as well, to help us pull out across-species differences in reactions to anthropogenic pressures. Honestly, anyone can make a statistical test come up significant through various permutations, subsets, etc., and although we know it’s all not what you’re supposed to do, it still happens. And even when I or others call it out as a reviewer, sometimes editors ignore it. By relying on both metrics like richness and actual indicator species, we can get a much clearer view of what’s going on. Where we sample will also be critical, and in general rather than trying to sample everywhere I’m much more in favor of targeting specific ecoregions, habitat types, and maybe even in some cases microhabitats under varying management regimes from natural to agricultural to see how these different pressures impact bees in different areas. In doing so, using these various metrics, we’ll have a much better idea of what areas are most susceptible to anthropogenic impacts.

Why are bees of the genus Anthophora, and the subfamily Anthophorinae in general, so much better than bumble bees?
 
I’m glad that you asked that. I don’t think that there’s any one reason why Anthophora are so great, I’d actually say it’s more that they’re simply better in every possible way?
 
Should I regret inviting you to add extra questions?
 
Probably.

References for further reading:

If you’re interested in the publication this is based roughly on, the paper is available open access here:
Orr, M. C., Hughes, A. C., Chesters, D., Pickering, J., Zhu, C. D., & Ascher, J. S. (2021). Global patterns and drivers of bee distribution. Current Biology, 31(3), 451-458.
 
For more information on data shortfalls globally, both for point data from specimen records and expert range maps, you can look at this paper:
Hughes, A. C., Orr, M. C., Yang, Q., & Qiao, H. (2021). Effectively and accurately mapping global biodiversity patterns for different regions and taxa. Global Ecology and Biogeography.
 
Here’s also a very relevant preprint on sampling and accessibility biases in what point data do currently exist:
Hughes, A. C., Orr, M. C., Ma, K., Costello, M., Waller, J., Provoost, P., Zhu, C., & Qiao, H. Sampling biases shape our view of the natural world.
 
I’d be remiss not to end by advocating greater appreciation of taxonomy. If we didn’t have taxonomists, none of the above papers would have been possible. More information on the challenges taxonomy faces and the need for greater career recognition for generating vital biodiversity data can be found here:
Orr, M. C., Ascher, J. S., Bai, M., Chesters, D., & Zhu, C. D. (2020). Three questions: How can taxonomists survive and thrive worldwide? Megataxa, 1(1), 19-27.
 
Orr, M. C., Ferrari, R. R., Hughes, A. C., Chen, J., Ascher, J. S., Yan, Y. H., Williams, P. H., Zhou, X., Bai, M., Rudoy, A., Zhang, F., Ma, K.-P., & Zhu, C.-D. (2021). Taxonomy must engage with new technologies and evolve to face future challenges. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 5(1), 3-4.

Hi Janene, thanks so much for taking time to chat with us and tell more about yourself and your work. First, can you give a brief description of what your current position is and what an average day on the job looks like for you?

Currently, I am faculty and head of the Wildlife and Fisheries Department at Salish Kootenai College (SKC). During the school year, I teach a combination of field, lab, and lecture classes. I try to get students outdoors as much as possible. We are in the perfect location for on- and off-campus field trips. There are forested areas and a pond on campus, and we are a short drive from montane, forested, wetland, riverine, and grassland sites. I advise students on coursework, career goals, and campus support. I also mentor some student research during the school year and supervise a bunch of student-led research projects during the summer.

Salish Kootenai College (SKC) is a public Native American tribal college in Montana, which serves multiple tribes and is located on a reservation. Can you tell us a bit more about those tribal entities and what it’s like working at a tribal college?

The Flathead Indian Reservation is home to the Selis (Salish), Qlispe (Pend Oreille), and Ksanka band of Kootenai. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) are governed by an elected tribal council. Tribal Council appoints members of the SKC Board of Directors for planning, development, and the formation of goals, objectives, and policies for SKC. Two culture committees, the Kootenai Culture Committee and the Selis Qlispe Culture Committee, guided by culturally knowledgeable Elders, advise tribal entities on projects and policies. The majority of students attending SKC are members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT) of the Flathead Reservation but native students from over 65 tribes have attended SKC as well as students without American Indian or Alaskan Native affiliation. Some of the unique aspects of tribal colleges are the focus on culture and community. Also, our small size allows for more active learning, field trips, and focused advising.

You mentioned in an earlier conversation with me that the tribes are creating a pollinator plan for the reservation. What are some of the aims and methods for this plan?

The CSKT Natural Resources Department Pesticide Program is currently creating a pollinator plan for the Flathead Reservation. According to their Pesticide Compliance/Outreach Coordinator, Brittani Clairmont, "Some of the aims of this pollinator protection plan is to include not only domestic bee species, but also native bee species. Our program is well aware that all pollinators in general are extremely beneficial, but native pollinators in particular." The Pesticide Program Manager, Jasmine Brown, added that their program would like to see more community awareness, increased and enhanced community gardening, and more pollinator habitats in both agricultural and non-agricultural settings. Knowledge gained by native pollinator research will aid conservation efforts for pollinator planning and public outreach. According to Ms. Clairmont, "the pollinator plan is meant to provide people with a clear and distinct understanding of why the pollinators need our help, and the different ways people can help out, even at home".

I’m also really excited about your work on huckleberry pollination, which is focused on flowering phenology and pollinator visitation and involves a partnership between yourself, undergraduate researchers, your fantastic research assistant Rebekah Brassfield, and the tribes. Can you tell us more about that project, including what you’ve done so far and what you hope to accomplish in the future?

Huckleberries (Vaccinium membrenaceum complex) are a keystone berry species in the Pacific Northwest. Their berries support many animals including birds and small mammals, are an important traditional and contemporary human food, and are a primary black and grizzly bear food. However, much of their basic ecology remains poorly understood. We have conducted a variety of research projects to learn more about huckleberry phenology and ecology since 2014.
 
To learn more about the role of pollinators for successful berry production in the wild we set up a field experiment in 2018. We randomly assigned 30 plants to each of the following treatments: net (to exclude natural pollinators) and no additional (human) pollination, net plus additional pollination, no net and no additional pollination, and no net plus additional pollination. We found that the number of berries vary by an order of magnitude across the treatments and conclude that pollinators are essential to the production of large numbers of berries. Using focused assessments of the insects pollinating huckleberries, we determined that most of the floral visitors are bumble bees. Because huckleberries flower early in the growing season and bumble bees are the most common probable pollinators while huckleberries are in bloom, there may be a crucial codependence between huckleberries and bumble bees.
 
We have continuing work on huckleberry phenology and animal visitors. We hope to learn more about the mutualistic relationships of bumble bees and huckleberry plants as well as what other species support forest bumble bees once huckleberry flowering is completed. We have also expanded our work to learn more about bumble bee behavior, spatial distribution, and floral preferences both at huckleberry sites and at other locations on the Flathead Reservation. We are recording observations of the Western Bumble Bee (Bombus occidentalis), a species of concern that is being considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act. We envision that our work will provide knowledge that can benefit pollinator conservation planning.

Can you tell us more about some of the folks you’ve partnered with outside of SKC, who have helped support or advance your pollinator research program?

The primary partnership is with the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes Natural Resources programs through their support of projects, interest in results, and permissions to work on tribal lands. Our primary collaborator is Dr. Tabitha Graves U.S. Geological Survey, Northern Rockies Research Station based in West Glacier, Montana. Dr. Graves initiated the huckleberry phenology and bumble bee research on the Flathead Reservation. She has provided valuable advice on research study design and methodology for many of our projects. She partners with a larger regional project to learn more about the potential effects of climate change on huckleberry phenology. She is overseeing several projects in other parts of Montana involving bumble bees, particularly surveys of the Western Bumble Bee. Montana State University faculty Drs. Laura Burkle and Casey Delphia provided a seminar and training for CSKT and SKC students and staff. Montana bumble bee expert Amelia Dolan is helping us identify bumble bees from photos. The SKC projects have been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Tribal College and University Programs Small Grant for Research, NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates Sustainable Land and Water Resources, an EPA EcoAmbassador grant, and a grant from the Montana Space Grant Consortium.

What are some of the tools, knowledge, or other resources that would benefit your research on huckleberry, or the development of the pollinator plan for the reservation? In other words, as we develop more of a national infrastructure for native bee monitoring, what are some of the components that you’d like to see?

I would like to see the development of and increased access to non-lethal methods of bumble bee identification. Non-lethal methods are especially valuable with the growing concerns about bumble bee declines. We are currently using photographs for identification of captured bumble bees but are aware that results should be viewed with caution. I am interested in learning more about the availability of labs that could identify bumble bees to species using genetic material. I would like to have more knowledge about where bumble bees are nesting, how far they are traveling from their nests, and which flowering species they are visiting. I hope that researchers will continue to create smaller transmitters or other technologies for tracking individuals of small animals such as bumble bees.

Hi Zach, thank you for taking time to answer a few questions. First, can you give a brief description of what your current position is and what an average day on the job looks like for you?

I am the bee taxonomist in the Cariveau native bee lab at the University of Minnesota. That means I am the one who identifies all the bees for many different projects. In Minnesota alone, there are over 400 species of bees, many of which are poorly known and difficult to identify, so that’s what I spend most of my time doing. In terms of an average day, I spend a lot of time at a microscope looking at specimens. Though I also do a lot of work helping out with various projects, especially writing up results for publication in scientific journals.  

What group of bees do you focus on in your research?

I did my PhD research on the genus Perdita, which is an extremely diverse group of bees that are mostly found in the arid areas of the western US. Since then, I’ve broadened my focus and become more of a general bee taxonomist. For example, recently I’ve done research projects looking at a recently introduced bee in the genus Pseudoanthidium as well as uncovering a cryptic species in the genus Andrena. 

Earlier this year, you published a forum article about bee monitoring in Annals of the Entomological Society of America. In it, you outline a major conundrum when it comes to monitoring native bees: that each of the primary methods has its own inherent flaws and biases. Can you briefly describe this conundrum?

The fatal flaw with all the common methods (bowl trapping, vane trapping, and netting) is that they don’t actually measure bee abundance. The reason for this is that we don’t know what proportion of bees from the surrounding community are caught. For example, if you catch 100 bees in a bowl trap, did you catch 1%, 10%, or 50% of the bees in that area? The truth is we have no idea. Further, we don’t know how catch rates differ among the various species and how they are influenced by the environment. For example, do you catch more bees when there are more flowers because the flowers draw bees in, or do you catch fewer bees because bowl traps compete with flowers? We just don’t know. 

As a result, these methods don’t allow you to detect changes in bee abundance, which is one of the primary goals of most monitoring programs.  

This is further compounded by the fact that each method has taxonomic biases. For example, bowl traps catch many more sweat bees (family Halictidae) than other methods. And this is something that has received a lot of study, but only in relation to other methods. As a result, we know bowl trapping catches way more sweat bees than netting, but we don’t know which ones best reflect the underlying bee community. 

Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write this article? 

It actually started out as a mini-rant I tweeted out due to the frustration caused by a project I was working on where I was identifying 10,000 or so Dialictus. Bowl traps catch tons of Dialictus, and for those who aren’t familiar, these little sweat bees are some of the most difficult to identity, to the point where only a handful of people in the US can identify them reliably. These specimens were from a monitoring program that was based largely on bowl traps, And I was just sitting there thinking to myself, “how in the world does this contribute towards monitoring?”

My tweet ended up generating lot of discussion, but I think my main point was misunderstood by a lot of people, since the response from many people seemed to be “I agree bowl traps are biased so we should be using other methods too!” 

So, I ended up writing a long-form rant explaining why all the common methods are flawed and this grew into a full-fledged paper. Luckily, I was able to work with my coauthors, Dr. Dan Cariveau and Dr. Bethanne Bruninga-Socolar, to tone it down a bit from simply a rant about bowl traps and also try and suggest some ways forward. 

There was also another strong motivating factor for me, which is that I felt like there really needed to be a voice representing the scientists who are unhappy with current bee monitoring methods. I think most bee scientists recognize that bowl traps and other passive methods are deeply flawed, but you wouldn’t know that from reading the scientific literature. There’s been a vocal minority of scientists who have been pushing bowl traps as the go-to methods for years and years. As a result, you see tons of well-meaning people and scientists who want to monitor bees who look up the best way to do it, decide to bowl trap, and then end up with tons of specimens with no idea how to identify them, no place to store them, and no idea how to analyze the data. 

So this paper was my attempt to introduce a dissenting voice into the discussion and question the prevailing wisdom that bowl trapping is the best way to monitor bees. 

In your article, you state that “we need to use methods that allow for more targeted collection of data that inform specific monitoring goals”. Can you give a few examples of what this type of strategy might look like?

One of the reasons I focus on trying to do more targeted collecting is because the bottleneck in bee monitoring generally occurs in the identification, storage, and analysis phases rather than the collecting phase. Especially with passive traps, it’s relatively easy to go out and collect thousands of specimens. It’s much harder to get good identifications on those specimens because there are so few people with that expertise. 

So, we really need to step back and think about how to effectively monitor bees without overwhelming ourselves with a flood of specimens. And that means recognizing that we can’t monitor all the bee species. For example, it doesn’t really matter how many Dialictus or Nomada you catch if no one can identify them. 

In terms of scaled-down goals, I think that there are a lot of good possibilities that include monitoring habitat specialists, monitoring focal plants to detect changes in ecosystems, or monitoring a smaller subset of species such as the bumble bees. The overall goal here is to avoid the bottlenecks that we currently face that lead to thousands and thousands of unidentified or poorly-identified specimens that don’t actually inform monitoring efforts and conservation decision-making. 

Why is it important to monitor native bees at large regional (or national) scales? How does this relate to bee conservation?

Large-scale monitoring data are important because they inform other scientists, the public, and policymakers about how bees are doing. I think that the lack of good monitoring data is really hurting bee conservation efforts because it prevents us from making informed decisions about how to best allocate resources for bee conservation, especially in terms of which threats to prioritize and which habitats to protect.

If you were tasked with designing a national native bee monitoring program for the US, what would it look like? Would you target specific focal bee groups, focal plant taxa, and/or focal regions? Would community scientists be involved? What other components would your program have?

In terms of designing a national monitoring program, I think that the first step needs to be to step back and really consider what the goals are and what management decisions will change in response to new monitoring information. 

I think a big problem we have right now is that there is a lot of indiscriminate collecting that falls under the umbrella of “monitoring” but doesn’t actually contribute to monitoring goals.

For a national monitoring program, I would definitely want to focus on a narrower set of bees in order to get good, actionable information, rather than trying to do too much and end up with a lot of poor-quality data. I’m hesitant to recommend specific ways to do this because I think there are a lot of potential solutions that are still being developed. Two methods that I think show a lot of promise are new genetic methods for estimating population size as well as the growing number of community scientists. Especially for bees that can be identified from photographs, community data can provide rapid preliminary data that can help detect declines as they occur, rather than waiting years to figure out that a species has declined after-the-fact, like what happened to some of our declining bumble bee species. 

Lastly, I think there needs to be serious focus and funding for basic taxonomy and natural history work. For so many bee species, they are either impossible or extremely difficult to identify because their classification and identification resources haven’t been updated since the 1950’s or 60’s. Not to mention all the undescribed and poorly known species. And even for the species we can identify well, we know so little about the biology of most of them. That means we can end up in a situation where we can detect declines, but don’t know enough about the biology of a bee to be able to help it recover. Without serious funding and resources dedicated to basic taxonomy and natural history, we’re just going to end up spinning our wheels when it comes to effective monitoring.