146 - Shelby Kilpatrick - Checklist of Pennsylvania Bees (in English)

Speaker 1: 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. I'm sure many of you noticed there was this paper that got a lot of attention early last month. It was titled, An updated checklist of the bees of Pennsylvania.

I was really intrigued by this paper on a number of grounds. I thought, for one thing, we've had a number of podcasts on this issue of making an inventory at a state or national scale. Remember we had Hollis Woodard talking a little bit about a national framework for monitoring native bees and Lincoln Best about the Oregon bee atlas, Linda Hardison talking about the Oregon floor project, Chris Marshall talking about the importance of museum specimens. So this paper really seemed to encapsulate a broader conversation we've been having here on Pollination.

And I was really excited and delighted when the lead author agreed to have a conversation with me about the paper, Shelby Kilpatrick. Shelby is a graduate student in the Lopez, Arubae, and Heinz lab at Penn State's integrated pollinator ecology program. Her current research project includes this updating of the checklist of bees of Pennsylvania. And you'll hear at the very end she's also working on investigating the evolutionary history of the squash bee. In this episode, you'll hear about how complicated and complex a process it is to get a checklist why it's not a straightforward process, but also how useful these checklists can be once they're assembled, not only in terms of things like tracking bees that are coming into the state from elsewhere, but also in figuring out maybe there's some species that have been neglected or parts of the state that have been overlooked and not surveyed in a while. Also, I'm so glad to announce our first winner of the Oregon Bee Project Ball Cap. It's to a listener in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose favorite episode is with Joe Wilson and the bees in the backyard. So please visit the Pollination Podcast website at pollinationpodcast.oregonstate.edu

Fill out the survey. It's real quick. It's really useful information for us.

And you can enter to win to get the next ball cap. OK, without further ado, the checklist of the bees of Pennsylvania. OK, well, I'm welcome to Pollination and I'm just looking behind you and you've got a massive stack of insect drawers.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for having me on today. And yeah, so this is part of my personal insect collection that I maintain with my boyfriend as well, Ryan Sucking.

Speaker 1: And he mentions bees and beetles. He's got beetles. He's got bees. We've got it all. Well, I'm really glad to have you on the show. And I was really excited to see that Pennsylvania now has a checklist of bees for the state. And that is part of your graduate work. Why is a checklist important? What is a checklist? Sure.

Speaker 2: So a checklist is basically an account of the different species found in a specific area. And so it gives us not only a list of species in that state or maybe a county or different biogeographic region, but it lets us know how they're distributed within that as well. And then you can annotate checklists by providing more information about when those species can be collected, maybe some of their natural history or biology. And so this kind of gives us a nice starting point for different studies on those species in this case within the state of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 1: All right. And I imagine something like a checklist is once it's established, it's kind of a living document. As you say, the annotations can be filled out and more information can be added. But really, it's like, I guess, a starting point to any serious effort to know the native bee fawn of a state. Certainly.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it gives us a baseline. And so in this case, we actually updated a checklist that was published in 2010. Right. And so that gave us a good starting point. We were able to build from there by adding species that have been reported in the state since then from other literature, as well as new data that was available from lots of different sources.

Speaker 1: Now, I guess for a listener listening to this, it says, well, how complicated can this be? There are all sorts of specimens in a museum. Can you explain the various obstacles associated with taking historic records and specimens and turning them into this checklist?

Speaker 2: Sure. So one of the first things to do when you're creating a checklist, I found is really to outline what type of data you're going to pull from. Are you going to do a literature review?

Are you going to pull from museums? What databases might be available online? What ongoing projects might you be able to acquire data from? So we had a lot of data contributors as part of this checklist in particular.

And so kind of once you figure out that, you know, sort of where you're going to build from your data, then you get into reviewing that data and assessing the quality of it. And there are several challenges that kind of come from that. And one of the biggest ones is making sure that the species and the specimens have been identified preferably by someone who knows betaxonomy. There are a few groups in particular that are really difficult to acquire or can be easily misidentified or we just don't have updated materials. And so I review for things like that.

Do we know who identified it when it was identified? And then an additional sort of concern is that when you're getting all of this data, it's coming in different formats. And that might be because different collections or different projects are using different ways to record their data. And so you have to ask a lot of questions sometimes with people who compile that information to understand what these columns in this Excel document or the CSV document mean and fill in some of that information as well. There are some standards for that like Darwin Core has standardized terms that you can use.

Speaker 1: Let's loop back around to that. But just the starting point is the material you're starting with. So it's not just museum specimens. It's not like you go to the central museum on campus, but the specimens may be everywhere. First off, they may not be even in Pennsylvania. They may be in Washington or some other place.

Speaker 2: Yes. And so the initial checklist of these in Pennsylvania was based on about 13,000 specimens located in 20 different insect collections. Most of those insect collections were in Pennsylvania, but some of them are the bigger institutions, places like the Smithsonian, and American Museum of Natural History, that historically have had a lot of the material deposited. And so what I was able to do because a lot of the collections that are pertinent to this region had been studied already, was sort of build from there with that checklist as a baseline. I did try to trace some of that material just to try and re-identify it. And that wasn't always possible with these collections based on the information that was available for those specimens. But then, yeah, it gave us plenty of other places to start like figuring out what new information we could really add to build that up.

Speaker 1: And you also mentioned the other obstacle is that somebody may say they have this species, but you don't recognize the person who did the identification. They may have been a graduate student who this is their first chance at taxonomy or it might have been an authority on that. So how did you prioritize that?

Because I remember the number of some were like 370-something species in Pennsylvania. How did you prioritize knowing which one you had to really get in and slew carefully and which ones you had to be a little bit, you could let pass a little bit easier? Sure.

Speaker 2: So for that, I was really fortunate to have multiple co-authors on this project. In particular, Jason Gibbs was able to provide a lot of his experience on what species could commonly be misidentified or maybe wouldn't be readily identifiable, as we might hope, just based on the resources available. And so anyway, he kind of reviewed the initial checklist of 372 species.

And then have I identified new species records out of all the material that I was reviewing? I would kind of run those by him as well. And just we would flag things that looked like they were out of range geographically like they wouldn't make sense really to have in Pennsylvania. We would flag things that we didn't recognize the name of the taxonomist. And in some cases, I might try to reach out to those individuals and figure out, yeah, what were they using to identify and see if they can provide some information there.

For anything that seemed like it was really uncommonly collected, we also tried to double-check just to make sure that we were really getting the right information and being accurate with that. So it's sort of this multi-step, lots of conversation and reviewing along the way to build this.

Speaker 1: I imagine you've had to become a bit of a historian as well because there have been so many revisions of how people understand the species that have been organized. You must have a sense of all those layers of history of people trying to figure out diversity of bees.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So one of the things too is getting into the synonyms that different species have been known by over time and are now recognized as a single thing.

Speaker 1: Oh, synonym, just like the common usage of it, it's just like two words that mean the same bee. Exactly. Gotcha. Yep.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and so depending on the literature that you're reading, you might see these old names and then having, you know, it's nice to have these taxonomic treatments of different groups, because you can easily understand what they apply to you now or how different authors have treated them over time. It's kind of a lot doing it with about 430 species now in Pennsylvania, but you get, I've got a really nice sense of how that taxonomy has changed over time with some of the groups and how it's still evolving today as we begin to understand more about them.

Speaker 1: That's amazing. That's really a remarkable perspective to have. So tell us a little bit about what you found and what were some of the surprises and yeah, give us a little overview of the bees of Pennsylvania. Sure.

Speaker 2: So right now there are at least 437 species of bees known from the state. Most of them are native, which is pretty awesome, but we also have 23 non-native species. So things that have been introduced either on accident to North America or intentionally, usually for crop pollination services.

Speaker 1: I suppose that's both surprising and reassuring in some ways. We have still a lot of native species, but it is kind of shocking to think that people think about honey bees and leaf-cutting bees as being old-world bees that have been brought over, but that there are 23 of them. That's probably a shock to most people.

Speaker 2: Definitely. Yeah. And it's even more extensive when you look at how many have been introduced to North America or worldwide, I want to say, or over time. I want to say it's over 50 at this point.

Okay. Yeah, there's quite a few. And I think most of our non-native species are also in the family Mechakylidae, which includes things like your resin bees and leaf cutter bees. They seem particularly prone to being transported. And yeah, so that's sort of in terms of numbers what our biodiversity looks like in the state. We also have five species at least that are of conservation concern. And so this includes our endangered lombosifinus, the rusty patched bumblebee, as well as three other species of bumblebees and an epioloides species.

Speaker 1: Well, so the other thing I guess that could be surprising is how they're distributed across the state that they're, you know, these records as they start to come in, a lot of them have location information so you can kind of boil it down to the county level. What did you find when it came to the county level? Surveying. Sure.

Speaker 2: So most of the county-level distribution records are in terms of biodiversity, our highest numbers for recorded tend to be in the eastern part of the state. And so western Pennsylvania is sort of this gap area that I'd really like to see filled in with additional surveys over time. And it's also not to say that those, you know, species that have been reported from other counties aren't in those other counties. It's just that based on the data we looked at, they haven't been reported from there.

Also, early on when I started this project, one of the things that I did was I took the original checklist data and their county-level distribution and I mapped that and almost immediately noticed that the counties that had the highest numbers of species reported from them were the places that we have really large insect collections and entomologists are actively collecting. I suppose, eh? Yep.

And to some extent that's still reflected in this checklist as well. So if Center County is where Pennsylvania State University is, Adams County, which is on the southern border of the state, is where David Binninger, who was also one of my co-authors, has been surveying bees for about a decade. And so because we had really intensive sampling, long-term data set from his lab, their county, Adams County is now very dark on the map.

Speaker 1: So in addition to sort of the potential sort of un-uniformity of surveying and also that there, you know, were able to have these five species of concern in the state, is there anything surprising that you found in doing the checklist and going through what were some of the things that sort of either of, at least to the scientific community were fascinating or do you personally that you were kind of like, huh, that's something I didn't expect? Yeah.

Speaker 2: So I think one of the fun things about going through the data for me was just how many species had been reported from, say, decades, even a century ago on the previous checklist, were reported as recently as 2018. There's a lot of things that we still had, but again, because most of the original checklist was based on these historical collections, you know, it made it seem like they just haven't been caught in a while. Now, there are still things like that in our data.

There are still some species, but I think that gives us an opportunity to really target why haven't we seen those species lately. Are they specialists? Are they only available at certain times of the year?

Maybe we're just missing them because we're not in the right place at the right time. So that was one of the interesting things. Initially, I was also really surprised at how frequently I was finding new state records and being able to verify them. Really?

Speaker 1: Without, without even surveying, there are state records that just have not been forgotten.

Speaker 2: Yeah, but maybe they were mentioned, so about 30 of them, so we had 79 new state records compared to the previous checklist, and 30 of those had been reported in the literature.

And sometimes when those authors published their paper, they noted, hey, we found this new state record, or this was a new county record for this B. But oftentimes, you know, about half of it at any time. Probably about half of it.

For everyone that was reported, there was one that wasn't reported in the literature. And that's clear. Okay. Yeah.

Things, like, great wording. And so, but then, you know, there were an additional 49 species that had never been reported in the literature up until now. And maybe they were on Bug Guide or iNaturalist, but they just hadn't been picked up in any other studies to date. So that was really exciting just to see some of where, you know, the community, not just the research community, but also the general public who's interested and excited about these and wants to know what they have in their backyard as documented.

Speaker 1: I suppose this raises the question of what the checklist can do. Like, you know, it's always nice to know who's here. I always love picking up a, you know, a bird book and saying, oh, here's a document that sort of shows me all the birds that live in the Aram in. But I imagine it's also a kind of tool that can be put to use.

And the one example that you had is, you know, you may have a bee that shows up in the literature, and maybe it has a very restricted host plant preference or whatever. And you haven't seen it for a long time. And the question is, is it here or not? Like, you wouldn't know that, I guess, unless you were able to go back through the literature and kind of find a record of it in the past. Tell us a little bit about how this checklist you envisioned being used by stakeholders across Pennsylvania in the future. Sure.

Speaker 2: So a few different things. One of the things I mentioned earlier was just filling in gaps, especially in the western half of the state or these counties and areas that really haven't had much research done on them, especially in recent years. It would be really great to see more collection data from those areas. This checklist can also be used to, yeah, target specific species that we know may be experiencing declines or threatened for other reasons, so that we can better understand whether are they truly in decline in the state or maybe are populations of some of the other species increasing or remaining stable. And so that can give us different ways to provide recommendations for conservation if we can really understand what's going on with those species and implement and then monitor conservation over time. And then we can also assess how non-native species in the state are becoming distributed and how those have the potential to either positively or negatively impact native bee communities.

Speaker 1: I imagine the other part of it as well is that those annotations that you have, that is you go through the literature, there are probably details about plants that these bees, you know, there's probably, you probably have this broad view of the bees of Pennsylvania just by kind of reading the literature and the, gleaning the little notes out.

Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. And we do have a lot of specialists, pollen specialists here in the Northeastern U.S., in particular in Pennsylvania. We also have species of bees that are collectively parasitic on other bees. And so one of the probably kind of classic examples is the Epea Loides plosilis, which is not only a collective parasitic feed, but it's collective parasitic on a pollen specialist.

And so I just really think that's a cool interaction. And because it's a species of conservation, it's a species of conservation concern because not only does it rely on this other bee species, but it ultimately is relying on this other plant as well. And so yeah, I really think that if we can narrow down the list of, you know, species that we haven't seen in a long time, a lot of them may be specialists, and then we can learn more about them. Or even the ones that we haven't seen in a long time that aren't specialists are really trying to understand why that's the case.

Speaker 1: You know, I've got one last question that I wanted to ask you before we take a break, and that is, I'm thinking about all the people, there's lots of interest in collecting bees for various studies, often ecological with a focus in mind. You've been on the tailpipe end of that, of seeing all sorts of data coming in in all sorts of forms, and you did talk about standardization of data. If you had one message, let's say we have some graduate students or researchers or just amateur naturalists out there in terms of how they need best practices for collecting data, what do you want them to know?

Speaker 2: Data is very important, especially with specimens, because if you have a specimen but you don't have the data that goes along with it, unfortunately, it's often not scientifically useful.

And so I guess the data aside kind of comes into play in two places, right? When you're collecting a specimen, make sure you have notes, you know, where, when, how you collected it, who collected it, any sort of information that you can attain to go along with that as a record. But then when you're either databasing a collection or working on a publication, follow standards, keep metadata, so data about your data so that it becomes clear when you pass that off to someone else who may be unfamiliar with your project or your paper when you ultimately publish it, is able to pick it up and understand where you left it. And I will say one of the things that really helped me later on in this project, because I was dealing with data from a lot of different places and there wasn't a way to get it all into a single format at that time, is talking to your university. University librarians, because oftentimes they are involved with, yeah, making sure that data is formatted correctly, it's going to be available even when the new version of Excel comes out 100 years later or whatever. So making it open and accessible is also important.

Speaker 1: I guess people, that's the thing is when you are making collections, like the ones that you have behind you, they will be useful to people 100 years from now. And that if you had it on a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk and it's sitting, that may not be retrievable in the future so that data has to be archived in a way that someone like you 100 years later, imagine there are people collecting, there are specimens probably that you looked at from the 19th century and records and that they had you in mind when they were collecting, maybe not.

Speaker 2: And that's really one of the wonderful things about being in a collection or working with specimens is that you are a part of history, you get to know who collected it and imagine what the world was like at that time and the place that they were at and think about when you are collecting specimens for your own projects or just as a hobby, which is a lot you never know, right? They are going to end up in a collection somewhere and you never know who is going to come along later and find them useful. It may be 10 years from now, maybe 100 years, but that's a really valuable resource.

Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break and we'll come right back. I have three questions I ask all my guests for you. Thanks so much. Okay, we are back. We have these questions. We ask all our listeners, we ask our guests. We ask our guests these questions and the first question I have for you is somebody who's been going through, imagine, mountains of literature. Is there a book recommendation, a book that you find really useful?

Speaker 2: One of my favorite books that I use all the time when I identify bees is The Bee Genre of North and Central America, which is by Mitchner McGinley and Danforth in the publisher of 1994.

This is a really nice guide just to key things to the genus level before you start moving into a specific species identification. I really like it because it's very well illustrated and I learned a lot about how to use it at the bee course as well and get through some of the trickier couplets. The illustrations are really...

Speaker 1: I can see you have a spiral-bound copy because you cannot get this book anymore. You have to know somebody to get a bootleg PDF or something.

Speaker 2: I was fortunate I had a friend to share the PDF with me so I could print my own. This one hangs with me. I know that McGinley has been the one who prints copies for the bee course and so it's also possible that if they get enough orders. Maybe something to ask about. I don't know how widely this is fairly...

Speaker 1: He's going to get a bunch of emails now. I heard on this podcast in Pennsylvania is recommending that we all email you.

Speaker 2: Feel free to email me. I can share it.

Speaker 1: I remember there are two things about it that are great. We're talking at the break of Bees of the World where you really have everything in there. This kind of constrains it down to North America and Mexico. It does have great diagrams. It also has a funny... I haven't heard the key

Speaker 2: which... Yeah, there's multiple places to start. I usually just go straight into the main key at the back but there are places to start with shortcuts up at the front which is nice. Even though some of the taxonomy is now slightly out of date so there are some genera that have been moved around it's still really easy to track that.

Speaker 1: Fantastic recommendation. That's awesome. Okay, so the next question... You can always go on eBay and look for a used copy there folks. They're hard to find though. Yeah, talk to your libraries. That's right. Get through your library. Okay, so the next question I have for you is do you have a go-to tool for the kind of work that you do?

Speaker 2: So lots of different things but especially microscope. Just a standard. A standard dissecting scope. But in particular one with a ring light. I've really found using multiple different scopes throughout my time as an entomologist that when you use the ring light it sort of diffuses the light over the specimen instead of being forced directly. This is important because it allows different structures that tend to just get washed out or totally obscured by glare to then be seen with the light divided by the ring light.

Speaker 1: A light that kind of goes right on I guess you would call it the nose of the scope right at the bottom and it allows... So it's going to just... It just makes that nice even light right over the specimen.

Speaker 2: Yeah so it kind of fits around the top of the microscope like where you're viewing down through. And so yeah it sits right over the specimen and I think you can get them for each equally online. And a lot of... So like we have a microscope that came with one but they can also be added probably onto ones that you may already have.

Speaker 1: Let's say we have some beginners out there who are looking at a microscope lighting setup. Because you can get things cheap. When does it get sort of... What's... What would somebody expect for sort of decent work for working with native bees?

Speaker 2: Not that much. I'm trying to think of the breakdown. I think I've seen ring lights for about $20. I know that I've heard that Ikea used to have a nice light setup that you could get like they were Goosenecks.

Speaker 1: Oh yeah, our taxonomist Lincoln Best bought them all and he had like four of them on his scope at home which is pretty funny. Nice.

Speaker 2: He's lucky. I don't think they make them anymore.

Speaker 1: That was good timing. Well no, I have to point out because you know there are very expensive scopes and lighting systems but it strikes me that there... You know you can also... There are ways to get a fairly good resolution without having to break the bank. As you can under $500 have something quite good.

Speaker 2: Yeah, so and that's what I look forward to. So if we're looking at specific microscope recommendations, AMSCOPE would be a really good company I think to start because so far as I've found their quality is similar to Olympus but really low cost. So for example, some of the ones that we have are like $200 to $500 and this is again my personal collection and that I use at home all the time.

And so yeah, it's not that expensive and if you're going to be using it and only wanting to look at these or just any other insects close up, that's a good place to start.

Speaker 1: Fantastic suggestion. Our last question is do you have a favorite pollinator it must be hard with 400 and some species that have passed through your brain but...

Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, and over 20,000 worldwide. So I have a lot of favorite bees. So one of my favorites, especially right now is the squash pea so you Sarah Pepinapus Brunosa, but also the related squash peas so others in the subgenus Pepinapus and others in the subgenus Cina Fossa. And yeah, so I really like them because they're really cute. They're wonderful to see in squash and pumpkin flowers, especially now that we're hitting summertime, they should be coming out.

And they're pretty widely distributed so you Sarah Pepinapus Brunosa throughout North America but the different species of squash bees are all throughout the Americas and I'm pretty excited that the other chapters in my dissertation, a couple of them are going to focus on this group of bees and trying to understand their natural history.

Speaker 1: Oh that's fantastic. We're looking forward to that work and I will remind listeners that there is an episode with Jim Cain talking about squash bees. Really it's worth taking a listen to.

There are such fascinating bees. Fantastic. Well thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today and we're really looking forward to it, we'll put a link in the show notes to the checklist, and good luck with the rest of your thesis. You're really knocking it out of the park.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much and for our conversations today. It's been wonderful.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. The show is produced by Quinn Sinaniel who's a student here at OSU in the New Media Communications Program and the show wouldn't even be possible without the support of the Oregon Legislature, the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, and Western Sarah. Show notes with links mentioned on each episode are available on the website which is at pollinationpodcast.oregonstate.edu

I also love hearing from you and there are several ways to connect with me. The first one is you can visit the website and leave an episode-specific comment. You can suggest a future guest or topic or ask a question that can be featured in a future episode. But you can do the same things on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook by visiting the Oregon Bee Project. Thanks so much for listening and see you next week.