04 Dr. David Lowenstein – Wild Pollinators in Urban Areas (in English)

From the Oregon State University Extension Service, this is Pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and concerned citizens making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators. I'm your host, Dr. Adoni Melopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health in the Department of Horticulture. Our first episode of Pollination was about honeybees in the city, and today we're going to turn our attention to wild bees in the city with Dr. David Loewenstein. Dr. Loewenstein is a postdoctoral researcher here in the Department of Horticulture at Oregon State University, where he's working on improving management around an exotic past brown marmorated stink bug. But before that, he did this fascinating research project for his PhD at the University of Illinois, Chicago, on bees in the inner city. This episode is full of some really great insights about wild bees in the city, as well as stories about people and those bees.

I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome to Pollination. I'm really excited today to have David Loewenstein in my office, and we're going to be talking about pollinators in the city. Welcome, David.

Thank you for having me. Now, when people think about big cosmopolitan cities, you know, my mind inevitably turns to things like skyscrapers, traffic built streets, and nightlife. I'm sure that few think about biodiversity or ecosystems. How did you come about thinking about bee biodiversity and pollination services in a place like downtown Chicago? I grew up in New York City, and I'll profess ignorance about pollinators for most of my life. I didn't know very much about them beyond the fact that the large bumblebees near the bus stop where I took to get to classes look quite scary and large. When I started my graduate work, I worked on a project involving pollination in Pickling Cucumber, and it was a really eye-opening experience. I learned how important bees were to the food supply, and that there are many bee species, not just the honeybee, and that many of these wild pollinators, things that are not managed, they tend to be more efficient at pollinating plants, and they do the job really well. So, this really opened my eyes to the viewpoint, and they're also an interesting system to work with. Pollinators are mobile.

They come in different sizes, different appearances. So when I finished my master's project, I was looking for something to continue work with. I would have liked to do it with pollinators, and fortunately there was an opportunity that came up at the University of Illinois, Chicago, working on a project with urban pollination, and this seemed like a good opportunity to use my experience with pollinators and combine that with some of my background growing up in a city to try to understand the role of pollinators in urban areas and whether they're able to contribute to pollination services in residential gardens. So, it was a neat opportunity, both from the applied perspective of looking at if pollinators can produce a significant amount of fruit through visitation, as well as more basic questions of can pollinators persist in a city, what type of variables in a city make an area good for pollinators?

Well, that's a great story. So you start in the city, you go to the country and learn about bees, and then you come back into the city to ask these questions. I guess there's this viewpoint that maybe I even share is that there's a lot more biodiversity outside of cities than inside of them.

Is that necessarily true? So, city is a unique place because of the type of disturbances within. So in an area outside of the city, you have different types of areas. So you have agriculture, semi-natural areas like prairies or forests, and you have suburbs.

So each of those represents a different entity. And an area like a large monoculture, corn or soybean, is probably not going to be a good area to be a pollinator. You have one crop, it's wind pollinated, so it's not designed to be as efficient for pollinators.

Right. So one of the interesting things about a city is that you have different types of neighborhoods within the city, and in those neighborhoods you have a lot of flowers. People, they want the area to look not just like an impervious surface wasteland, so they put flowers in the ground. And not just soybeans, they put a lot of different flowers.

That's true. In fact, I don't think I've seen soybeans in the areas I've worked with. So when you think about a suburb, the lot sizes are a lot bigger than most cities. So the footprint of the homes might be smaller relative to a city, but what are people doing with their lots?

They're primarily putting in turfgrass, not a good resource for pollinators. Whereas in a city, some of the work that I've encountered is that people are doing a good job with their space on their property and they're putting in a lot of flowers. So when you think about is a city a good place to be a bee? Yes, from the perspective of there are a lot of different types of flowers around, but if you're a bee that needs a certain type of flower, the city is not the place for you because it's very likely that those flowers could be removed if there's construction in the street and a crew is taking those away, or if that plant's just not able to adapt to the higher temperatures or soil contamination. So a city is not a bad place to be a bee, but not necessarily as good as more natural or less disturbed areas beyond the city limits.

Okay, that's really helpful. So we can think of kind of a continuum from what might have been there before the city was even thought of, like there was that kind of a landscape. There is disturbance in outside the city boundary and disturbance in the city boundary, and there is a way in which management decisions, I think we typically think of this in terms of agri-environmental schemes. We think, oh, if we can do different management in agricultural settings, we can increase bee biodiversity.

And I guess what's really interesting about your work is it's got me thinking about, oh, what would that look like if it were to happen in a city? What kind of factors in city and city planning might be important for bee biodiversity? Why do you think we don't think about doing that kind of restoration in the city in the same way we think about doing it in agricultural settings? It's an important concept, and I believe that it comes down to two things, the number of landowners and politics. So in terms of landowners, within an agri-environmental scheme, you're working with maybe a few growers.

There could be perhaps one grower that has hundreds of acres of land, so you only need to work with one individual to find places to put in pollinator habitat. But in a city, each individual home is managed independently. So you could think of each homeowner as a land manager, so you're working with people that have very different perspectives. And there are a fair number of people that do want to help pollinators and would be interested in putting in plants that would be better for pollinators.

But there are also people that do not want to be told how to manage their landscape, and they will put in the turfgrass lawn because that's what they like, or that's useful for them recreationally. So you have a lot of different stakeholders to work with, which makes it challenging to do it at a municipal level. The better way to do it would be at the individual level, perhaps by encouraging individuals to purchase native plants through rebates that they might receive.

The other issue related to politics is cities have a lot, a city is a very difficult thing to manage. There's a lot going on, and pollinators might not be the most highest priority for someone who is in charge of landscaping. I think that pollinators should be a higher priority because of the food production services that they provide for anyone that grows food in their home. If they're growing plants that are insect pollinated, they need bees.

So I think the argument needs to be made, perhaps less so about the inherent value of pollinators in their biodiversity, which is something that's useful ecologically, but more on the economic side, that if you have a sufficient number of pollinators and a sufficient diversity of pollinating insects, you're more likely to have plants that will be self-sufficient, and the gardens that people put in the ground, they're likely to produce food. So I think that's going to be the key argument that needs to be made to encourage habitat enhancement schemes in cities. So also at the municipal level, there are small ways that pollinators' habitat can be enhanced through planting higher quality plants, perhaps at road sites or medians, or mowing less frequently. There are small things that can be very useful at incorporating pollinator habitat in the city. Wow, that's really fascinating, and I think it brings up these whole sets of issues that touch on some of your research, which we'll talk about just after the break. But one thing, just before we go to the break, what kind of like, if we think about you're one of those individual property owners and you're thinking about doing something for pollinators on your property, do you have any sort of general, what kind of factors are going to be important for them to consider, and also on a broader scale? Like if we're thinking about, is it really matter if I do so much on my property when everybody else is growing, has the turf down?

Do we know anything about how these small contributions sort of add up? Pollinators need two things to survive. They need resources to come from flowers, and they need nesting. So for resources, having more resources available, putting more flowers in the ground will be beneficial to more pollinators. So different pollinators require different types of resources. So you might think, well, my neighbor down the street, he has a lot of plants in the ground, you know, the pollinators, let them find resources over there, and they'll visit my two cucumber plants here. But there's some pollinators that they only forage, they only fly over a really small area. So if it's a small sweat bee, for instance, and you're 100, 200 meters outside of that sweat bees foraging range, well, you're going to need something else to encourage more sweat bees to nest in your area.

Not going to get down the block. For larger bees, like bumblebees, honeybees, that's not a problem. They can fly within the entire neighborhood, but smaller ones, yes, they might not make it down the block. And that gets me on to nesting. So bees either nest in the soil or they nest in cavities. And a city tends to be a better place for cavity nesting bees because there's less bare soil that's available. The good thing about nesting is that bees are opportunists, and they tend to find unusual places to nest in cities. So in my research, I've seen bees nest in places like open sidings on people's homes, pipes on the sides of walls, like humidity holes in windows, and even a lawn chair. I think the last one is a terrible idea. I don't know why the will-carder be made a nest in there, but it did.

Even if you're not putting out a bee box, which can be one way to attract cavity nesters, just having structures around or leaving a little bit of bare soil in a corner is one way that you can provide nesting for bees on a small scale. Great. Well, thank you so much. We're going to take a break, and then we're going to come back with David Lodenstein and talk a little bit about your research.

All right. Well, we're back, talking with David. I want you to tell us a little bit about the bee habitat that you encountered while doing your work in Chicago. Was this habitat fairly homogenous from neighborhood to neighborhood? Did it vary?

Tell us a little bit about what you saw. So there tends to be a misconception that a city is an urban wasteland for insects and bees. If you go to an industrial neighborhood, that's probably true. It's just weeds and overgrown buildings. But the unique thing about a city is that it's made up of lots of different neighborhoods, and each of these different neighborhoods varies in terms of its socioeconomic background in terms of the types of plants that are present in terms of income and population density. And the last one, population density, is one area that in my work I found has influenced bee abundance, number of bees in Chicago neighborhoods.

So an interesting thing that came out of my research is that there are actually a higher number of bees in areas that have greater population density. Really? That seems to be counterintuitive in some ways. Yes.

Tell us about that. So if we started an area that has the lowest amount of people per square mile, we run into two different types of areas. One, an outlying neighborhood in the city, and I already mentioned that those are areas that tend to have bigger home sizes, more turf grass. There's less flowers that are available for pollinators. Areas with less people also tend to be more industrial, which again, there's not a whole lot of flowers in the ground.

Now as you get to areas that have a higher population density, people are doing a really good job with managing the green space that they have. So they're putting a lot of flowers in those green spaces and they're putting flowers that are high quality resources for bees. So native and non-native plants like black-eyed susans, purple cone flowers that provide a lot of good pollen and nectar for pollinators. So this population density idea is tied into flowers directly. And in addition to flowers, in some of these more densely populated areas, at least in Chicago, you have a diversity of individuals, people coming from all different parts of the world, large Chinese population, Mexican populations, Eastern European populations. And each of these groups, they're bringing their own cultural perspectives related to gardening. So in some of those communities, gardening is a, people are very passionate about gardening and they put different types of plants in the ground that might be foreign to someone who's not familiar with them, but they, in some lot lots, they'll just have corn growing five, six feet high in the front or lots that are just filled with flowers. And these tend to be more in those medium to higher density areas.

So you get a lot more, let me get this straight. So you get a lot more diversity of people, their planting patterns are a lot more diverse. And so that leads to different kinds of pollinators, I guess. If you have only one kind of flower, you may attract a smaller subset of, is that your idea? Yeah, that's correct.

Okay. Where there's just a lot more different types of flowers in the ground and a lot of flowers, even though there's also a lot of impervious surface. And then to, to close out that relationship probably levels off at some point. Once you reach the central core of a city, there's just not enough open space available for flowers. It's almost entirely the skyscrapers that we think about in a city. And that would probably not be the best place to survive if you're a pollinator. So up to a certain point, higher population density, at least in Chicago, did lead to a greater number of bees. So we're talking something like, I've been to Chicago, so we're talking downtown, not the greatest, but the places like Lakeview, around UIC, those kinds of places were the hotbeds.

And then when you got out to the sort of, out a little bit further, it kind of like started to fall off again. Yeah, that's correct. The Lakeview neighborhood actually was one of them.

And also some of the neighborhoods closer to Lake Michigan, which tend to have more three and four flat story buildings compared to the outline neighborhoods, which are almost exclusively single family homes. Interesting. That's really fascinating. I guess the one thing I was thinking about while we were talking was, when people do this kind of research, how do you get a sense of flowers?

And one of the common techniques I've seen is that people will kind of go down the front street and be able to do the surveys on the areas that, because you don't need the permissions, you can sort of peer into the front yards and sort of get a sense of floral diversity. But when you think about that, is there kind of a difference between the lot? Like, you know, the lot. We were talking about how it's not homogenous across the city, but even within a lot, like the front and the back. Is that an issue? Is that something to take into consideration when doing these kind of studies?

Absolutely. I think if you restrict sampling to just the front yard, you might get a different answer of how a neighborhood is for a pollinator compared to if you look at the backyard too. And I'll mention that I did a few studies with the work in Chicago. And for one of those studies, I did restrict sampling exclusively to the front yards for the reason you mentioned that you don't need to get permission to sample. There was another study where I brought plants to the backyard and I counted all the flowers in people's backyards. And in neighborhoods that are higher in population density, there's some types of homes where there is no front yard, the house about immediately to the street. So if you are going down a block like that, sampling for bees, you might think this is a terrible neighborhood for pollinators.

There's no flowers. But you go into someone's backyard, that's where the green space is located and that's where their lush garden is. Or in some cases, people want to put more of their garden plants in the backyard because they're concerned about dogs walking on their yard or people seeing their plants that they would like more privacy about.

So I think absolutely there are some differences between front and backyards. But if you're logistically limited in sampling for pollinators and you just use the front yard for sampling, I think that's a fair way of sampling. But maybe take a look at a couple backyards just as a comparison to make sure that's not completely biased in your sampling. If you see that the front yards are all bare, but everyone's plants are in their backyard, you might need to rethink how you're asking a research question about a neighborhood's utility for pollinators. I guess this is the whole thing of the trickiness of doing urban ecology.

It's not, I'm so used to going out in an agricultural field and everything's blooming at once. And I just come up with a sampling method, but sampling must be like a whole art when you go to the city. Yeah, that's a, there's very much a whole set of logistical challenges related to urban ecology work, not just with pollinators. So for one of these projects, I had to drive an F-150 pickup truck dropping off potted plants in 30 people's yards. So I had to drop off about 500 plants in a two week period twice in the summer.

So if you work in an agricultural area or outside of a city, you get to your site, you put your plants down, you collect your data, you leave. In a city, to think about, where am I going to park this truck? There's no backup camera in this truck. So I had someone else with me helping. And if there wasn't parking, well, if I was going to park illegally, I needed to make sure someone would watch the truck so they didn't get towed. And then traffic is another huge issue. So I had some sites in neighborhoods that had large commercial districts or near Wrigley Field, the baseball stadium. So a couple of days before sampling, I had to look into is there a street festival going on? Or baseball game. Or baseball game, which I wasn't able to watch when I was sampling.

Unfortunately, no one had a rooftop garden facing Wrigley Field. So thinking about what is the actual path that I'm going to take to my sites and how might that differ. There's a lot of mapping and other nitty gritty details that go into urban ecology sampling that that I don't face when I'm working in areas beyond the city. Let me ask you a question on just those, you have a lot of really remarkable studies that you did in Chicago. One that was, you just touched upon is this taking potted flowers, and we use vegetable or seed production into people's properties and looking at seed set. Were people getting fairly good pollination in their gardens, and what kinds of bees were doing the pollination in this area?

Well, maybe just set it up. Tell us a little bit about this study and then come around to those questions. Yes, so in this study you mentioned, I brought a mobile garden of plants. So that mobile garden. And your F-4-1-5-D that was hard to park. Yes. Although one day I did bring them in a home to Civic because I didn't have the truck, but that's another story.

Okay. So I brought cucumbers, eggplants, and purple cone flowers. Each of those plants requires insect pollination to a different degree, but they all need bees in order to maintain pollination and to produce fruit or seed, and they're all differ in their level of attractiveness to pollinators. So that was a project in which I recruited 30 citizen scientists who received these plants in their yard for three days. So the same type of pollinators could be available and visit those plants around the same time period. The citizen scientists took care of the plants and then brought them back after three days to a greenhouse waited for them to mature. In terms of fruit set and pollination, it was about 40 to 50% fruits or seed set in all of the plants. So if you're a commercial grower, that might not be an acceptable value. 40% could be in the lower end. But the people who had these plants were all homeowners, renters that were gardening for hobby.

So that's not a terribly bad value. And each of the plants had a unique group of visitors to them. So the cucumber had a lot of smaller sweat bees and also bumble bees. The cone flower had a lot of longhorn bees that visited the plants. And the eggplant did not have a whole lot of bees other than bumble bees, which are efficient at buzz pollinating plants.

So let me go this straight. It was different bees. They were in the same spot, but different bees were coming and doing the pollination. That's really remarkable.

That's correct. There was a different bee community visiting each of these plants, even though same location, same type of flowers around the plants. And I think it just goes to show that the differences in pollinator foraging preferences and how important it is to have different types of resources. So pollination is relatively robust across different types of neighborhoods.

Whether in all the neighborhoods, pollination happened in all the plants, all the plants produced fruit. One of the challenges that also might have lowered fruit set is just the actual rearing component. So I was rearing 500 potted plants in a small greenhouse. And as anyone who works in a greenhouse or who is a gardener knows, you could have the ideal environment for bees, the right type of flowers, nesting areas, but the weather might dictate otherwise how well your plants do. So I had powdery mildew that affected my cucumbers. I had aster yellows that killed some of the cone flowers and there were spider mites. So it was a good lesson in some of the challenges that face homeowners and those who are growing food for personal consumption.

That there's a lot of factors that are out of our control. Even if we're producing an environment that is just great for pollinators, there are pathogens and pests that also like the plants equally as much as pollinators for a very different reason. That's an area that I'm also interested in for work. But it was a good eye-opening site for me that growing plants is hard. I did a garden a whole lot before that project. And I do not like powdery mildew. I don't like spider mites after that project. But nonetheless, you learn and adapt that at certain times, if there's too many plants in the greenhouse, spacing is important, moving things around.

So there's a lot of thinking on the fly that goes into some project. Well, I can sympathize with you. As most of the master gardeners in Oregon know, I'm a bee ecologist who's trying all he can to learn about gardening. And I find it so complicated.

I really rely on their expertise to get me through the day. But I just want to, one point that you brought up that I wanted to just get out was, so you have these different kinds of, this insight that different plants have different kind of pollinator communities that can help them. Did you find that in places where there was more diversity, you got overall better fruit set in all of these plants? Are you referring to bee diversity?

If you had a more diverse, it strikes me that one of the lessons would be if you had, maybe there's an argument that you brought up earlier when we're talking about why cities ought to do this. Due pollinator conservation, it strikes me that it's not just a matter of like moving honeybees into the neighborhood because the diversity was really important. Some of these bees came on really high numbers and for example, pollinated your cone flowers. Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the point about honeybees because in this mobile garden study, very few of the pollinators visiting the plants were honeybees.

So I noticed that, that was interesting. I believe it was something about 80 plus percent were wild bees. I didn't look at how pollination varied relative to the diversity of bees in the different neighborhoods, but in all of the yards that I sampled and brought these plants into, there were a couple of different species of bees. Certainly some neighborhoods might have had a 20 or 30 species, other neighborhoods might have only had five to 10, but of those different species, they were from different functional groups. So there was generally always one or two different types of sweat bees, a bumblebee species or two, the honeybee, a long horned bee. So if there's a honey, or bumblebee present in a yard, I'm not sure would have made a difference whether that bumblebee was bombus in patients or bombus grisiocalis, bombus vegans.

So each of them was probably providing a similar service. That's probably a bigger concern for wildflowers that might have more specialist relationships with pollinators. So a lot of the food plants that are grown, there's a couple of different species that can pollinate them well. At least for eggplant, I mentioned bumblebees, for coneflower, sweat bees, and a couple other groups of bees.

So it might not matter exactly how many species are present, but if the right type of bees are present in that neighborhood, if there's five species, or if there's 20 species, if the efficient pollinator species are present, that plant will be pollinated. I just wanna ask one more question before we go to a break. And it's coming back to how we started this part off on cities and their diversity and the things we found in Chicago. When we come out to the West Coast, and we think about something like Portland, or Salem, or Eugene, then do these same principles apply, or do these very kind of, every city's got a kind of specific kind of constellation of little habitats in their own kind of situations. Is it a very general thing, or do you think it's kind of very specific to the city? Across all cities, bees need the same things.

They need food to eat, they need the resources, and they need nesting sites. So certainly that component is not going to differ in Portland, Oregon, or Portland, Maine. What will differ- That was good, by the way.

Keep going. What will differ, at least on the West Coast, is land access. So in Chicago, and a lot of Midwest cities, they've experienced a population decline, and there are a lot of vacant lots in Chicago. In some respects, it's kind of depressing. Going to these areas and seeing blocks and blocks of abandoned homes and vacant lots.

And some of those sites, they do have plants for pollinators, primarily weedy species. But on the West Coast, everyone wants to move to Portland. I moved here, I'm guilty of that too. And there's just a lot less open space. Areas are being developed a lot more. So some of those relationships with open space might differ, and also population density. I think that population density in Portland does not have the same type of gradient in a city like Chicago, where you have neighborhoods full of high-rises neighborhoods with four to five story buildings, single-family homes. Certainly Portland has some high-rise districts, but they're very concentrated in the downtown area. And you have more single-family homes, which are dominant. So those relationships related to socioeconomics and pollinators, they might differ.

And it'd be useful if someone were to quantify them to determine how they might vary based on the type of city and how the city is laid out. Yeah, yeah, of course. Well, thanks so much. Let's take a break and then we're gonna come back and we do this with all our guests. We're gonna ask you about some of your favorite bees and bugs. I just wanna, before we wrap up, just get, I can imagine, you do pollination ecology in the country, you don't see anybody, but you must have saw a lot of people. And people must have saw you carrying an aerial net, these plants in the gardens. You must have had a lot of conversations with people about pollinators that most of us just kind of think about.

I wonder what people think. So tell us a little bit about some of the stories of doing pollination ecology in Chicago. Yeah, this type of work is highly visible research. And when going out and doing urban ecology work, you have to be able to explain what you're doing to many different types of people.

Because the reality is it looks odd when you're walking on neighborhood blocks, your head down, looking at the ground, trying to find bees and just walking on the block back and forth. So absolutely, there were a lot of encounters with individuals across neighborhoods. For the most part, they were very positive encounters. People wanted to know what I was doing.

And then a few cases when they found out I'm not working for the city, I'm not out to collect any taxes, they were even more enthusiastic. There were a couple of people that were highly knowledgeable about pollinators and they knew a lot. But there were a fair number of people that did not even know the difference between a bee and a wasp. So I found my work really useful from an outreach perspective of explaining the relevance of bees for food and that unlike wasps, bees generally have a more positive purpose.

They're less likely to sting you unless you tamper with their nests or you try to catch them aggressively. So for the most part, really positive stories. People were happy to know that there was research going on in their neighborhoods. And in the case of some of the more economically depressed neighborhoods that they're not forgotten and that there are some useful components in nature. And of course there were some difficulties as well. Not very many, less a difficulty, but there was a police officer who was questioning me what I was doing and they tried to sell me a rain barrel at the end. Apparently he runs a rain barrel business.

That is so Chicago. Yeah, it wasn't hostile, more just unusual. And there was only one incident in which someone threatened us. And this was a case when I was working in the front yards. So I was walking on the block, counting flowers on yards.

And in most cases, I did my best not to stray onto someone's lawn. Oh, right. Because that would invite questions.

And that's not a great idea to do that. But I was counting from the sidewalk and the sky came out of a house. Older gentleman in his 80s and immediately told us, get out. We tried to explain what we were doing. We always brought brochures with us to show that we were legitimate and explain what we were doing.

And he wanted nothing to do with us counting flowers on his yard. So we thought, okay, fine. We'll come back in a few minutes because we wanted the data from that block. Second time he threatened to shoot us. Oh no. And I didn't want to find out if he was going to follow through with his threat. Which was ironic that the only time that we were threatened was by an 80-year-old man. There were neighborhoods we went through that were very high crime, open air drug markets in some corners. I mean, if you look at the homicide trackers, you probably don't even want to be there in the first place. But this was a neighborhood that was not one of those.

And he just didn't want his flowers counted. So there always going to be a few people that even if you're not doing anything outside of the law, they just want nothing to do with you. Right, right, right. So just have to keep that in mind that you're dealing with a lot of different types of people. And sometimes you might not get the sample site that you're looking for. All right, young pollination ecologists who are looking to work in the city take note.

Don't go to 88th and Jeffrey if you're looking to count flowers. They're gonna have like a little like iNaturalist is gonna have these little sites like don't go there. Okay, so we asked all our guests these questions. So the first question, and we're gonna compile, we were thinking about compiling these, like some of the books, like we've got a really awesome book list that's coming together that people have suggested. So let's start with books. Is there a book that you really influential, you want our listeners to know about or just just a generally awesome book? Being indecisive, I'm going to mention two.

Okay, great. So one of them is the V, A Natural History by Noah Wilson Rich. That's a nice book that has a lot of pictures and basic background about pollinators and behavior.

So if you're less familiar with bees and are looking for lots of good pictures and basic information, I'd recommend that one. Just one more time. We're gonna put it in the show notes, but I just got a... Okay, The Bee, A Natural History by Noah Wilson Rich.

Awesome, okay. The second one is by Lawrence Packer, Keeping the Bees. And there's another story about how I got this book.

One of the sites that I sampled on, I met an individual who was really avid about gardening and actually became friends with the guy because I went to the same site for the following two years for the Bee Project and for a later project. And when I was finishing up my work, he insisted, I want to buy you a book about bees. This book just came out.

And no matter how many times I said no, he gave it to me. And it turned out to be a really interesting book. It's a good narrative about researchers looking at wild pollinators and stories from around the world.

So this would be a book, if you already have a basic grasp about bees, but you're interested in stories about the people who go out and collect bees and the type of research that they do with some interest, with some good anecdotes, that would be the book I recommend. And Dr. Packer has been virtually everywhere on the planet. Yes, including this book I see on the table right next to me. One with Sam Droge. That hasn't been recommended yet, but I'm going to do a show.

If in the next couple of episodes, I'm just going to like, I've got to, we have to get Sam Droge on the show just because it'd be awesome. So the other question we ask people is if you were stranded on a desert island and you wanted to do bee research, or you wanted to, what are some of the tools that are sort of essential to you? What are the things that you, or it can also be something something you discovered along the way that's like indispensable that people ought to know about? I mine for beekeeping, I have, for example, a milking stool and it is the, it is my, my contribution to the bee world. It's like this milking stool is.

So do you have anything on the order of that in your head? My answer will be a very low tech one. Okay. An aspirator. Aspirator. Nobody's. Okay. Tell us what an aspirator is.

Nobody suggested that and tell us how you use it. So an aspirator is a tool that, that is used for collecting insects. So it has a plastic or a glass jar and then attached to it is a cork and two sides with a rubber tube. So on one side you create airflow. So you suck through the tube and there's a filter and then you put the other end of the, the tube right on an insect. So it's really good for collecting, especially smaller insects right off of a flower. So if you see one visiting on a flower and I want to figure out what it is, I can collect it right there, have it in the jar and I don't have to kill it necessarily.

I can get an, I figure out who it is exactly and then release it. And then for the larger bees, if you try to suck a larger bee through this aspirator, it's just going to stay at the end of the tube, buzz very angrily and fly around you. So instead of using your mouth for airflow, you can just trap the bee with it right over the flower and quickly contain it. And I found that very important for my urban work because I did not want to do lethal sampling along neighborhood blocks. Some of the sites that I was working with, the bees I caught were on the residential side of the street, the homeowners.

And it didn't seem like a good idea to get rid of the bees that were needed so badly in these neighborhoods. So that was an excellent tool. I don't know how you did that, that's awesome. Okay, what a great aspirator.

Yeah. And I mean, even if you don't, the aspirator is not very expensive to purchase, but a small glass jar can do the trick too, especially for bumblebees, but you have to be careful when you're collecting off the flower that you don't take off the flower head in the process of collecting, which can be a challenge for some of the larger bees. But the more you collect bees, the more depth that you can collect them, except for leaf cutter bees, they are nearly impossible to collect. Yeah, they're fast. They do not want to go in the jar.

But that was always a, yes, moment when I could collect one of those. Well, listen, we're going to put a link, a picture of an aspirator and also the books on the show notes. But the last question we have for you is there a bee that you're particularly drawn to when you see it, you're like, I love that bee or it could be a specific bee that you saw one day, a story about that bee. But is there a bee that sort of near and dear to your heart and tells a little bit about its natural history? Agaposteamansplendens, it is a bright green metallic sweat bee.

I think it looks awesome. Whenever I'm showing people pollinators and I show them this really bright green bee, it blows people's mind that we have something like this in most temperate areas of the United States and probably Canada as well. In addition to its neat coloration, it's a good example of sexual dimorphism. The males are all black, excuse me, the females are all green and the males are green with their head and thorax and the abdomen is black and yellow. Cool looking bee, good example of an evolutionary, evolutionary adaptation for reproduction and a top seller when you're trying to win people over about bees and how unique they are.

It's funny, I think it's also the bee Toronto's unofficial bee. Yeah, awesome. Well, this is great, thanks so much for taking time on your busy schedule to talk with us and we're gonna have plenty more podcasts on bees in the city, so stay tuned, maybe we'll pump it together as a series, so thanks so much. Yeah, my pleasure.

Yeah, my pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. Whoo!

Yeah. Whoo! Thanks so much for listening. Show notes with information discussed in each episode can be found at pollinationpodcast.oregonstate.edu. We'd also love to hear from you and there are several ways to connect. For one, you can visit our website to post an episode-specific comment, suggest a future guest or topic, or ask a question that could be featured in a future episode. You can also email us at [email protected]. Finally, you can tweet questions or comments or join our Facebook or Instagram communities. Just look us up at OSU Pollinator Health. If you like the show, consider letting iTunes know by leaving us a review or rating.

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