250 - Garden bees of Portland (in English)

250 - Garden bees of Portland Mixdown 1

Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] The Oregon State University Extension Service, This is Pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and people like you who are making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators. I'm your host, Dr. Adoni Melathopoulos, Associate Professor of Pollinator Health in the Department of Horticulture.

Is there anything more delightful than having a good cup of coffee and walking out to your garden to all the plants that you've planted and seeing a wide array of bees visiting the flowers? I don't think so. I think that is the pinnacle. But of course, you always run into this problem. It's like, which bees are here?

Who are they? It gets kind of complicated. And that's where my next guest comes in. You may recognize my next guest because Nicole Bell was the host of the last episode of [00:01:00] Pollination. She's switching, uh, seats with Jen Hayes, who is our interviewer this week. If you recall. Nicole is also at the Oregon State University Garden Ecology Lab.

Uh, she's a master's student and, um, she's developed a guide that you can use and filter to identify the bees in your backyard in Portland, Oregon. Uh, this builds on research that her supervisor, Dr. Gail Longolato did in serving the, uh, uh, wild bees in Portland gardens. What I particularly like about this episode is hearing Nicole talk about her inspiration for this work in Opening up the world of wild bees to all of you.

So let's turn things over to Nicole and Jen and the Garden Ecology Lab this week on pollination.

Jen Hayes: And welcome to pollination. I'm [00:02:00] your guest host today. My name is Jen Hayes and I'm a grad student in the Oregon State University Garden Ecology Lab and here

Nicole Bell: with me is Nicole Bell and I am also a graduate research assistant at the Garden Ecology Lab too.

Jen Hayes: And where

Nicole Bell: are we right now? We are sitting in my childhood backyard on the back patio, and it is 75 degrees and sunny going into the second week of October.

So we're enjoying looking at some small carpenter bees, some queen bumblebees, and just the sounds of the garden.

Jen Hayes: Beautiful. So we are here to talk about bees. which is something we do pretty much every day. Every day. But today we're going to focus on bees that are found in Portland gardens and a guide that Nicole made [00:03:00]about them.

So let's start from the beginning. Nicole, how do we know what garden bees exist in

Nicole Bell: Portland? So we know about Portland garden bees because of a study that took place actually before I ever became a member of the Garden Ecology Lab. And this study was done by my wonderful advisor, Gail Angelotto, and other collaborators.

And they sampled Portland area gardens in June, July, and August of 2017, 2018, and 2019. And these gardens were mostly home gardens, but they also sampled a public demonstration garden too.

Jen Hayes: Uh, will you tell us about how the bees were

Nicole Bell: collected? Yes. So, they used two sampling methods, which is quite common for bee studies.

The first of which was Pantraps. [00:04:00] So, these are a passive collection method. You fill, um, a little bowl that's painted blue, yellow, white with water and wait for bees to fall into them and then collect them later. And the second method that they used was a aspirator, which was attached to a little jar. Or a vial, depending on how big the bee was.

And they use this to prevent damaging ornamental plantings, um, in comparison to an aerial net, which is another hand collection method, but it can cause a little more, uh, visual disruption.

Jen Hayes: And for those of you that don't know, an aspirator is essentially just a rubber tube that you, um, suck air into in order to pull little bugs off

Nicole Bell: of flowers.

Yes, and I've actually never gotten to see one in action. So that's definitely on my bee bucket list.

Jen Hayes: Amazing. [00:05:00] Um, and how many bee species did they find in the Portland Gardens?

Nicole Bell: Yeah, so with the help of Lincoln Best, we identified 67 bee species within those gardens in the Portland metro area. So pretty awesome.

Jen Hayes: And will you tell us a little bit about why Portland was chosen as a site for this study?

Nicole Bell: Yeah. So first and foremost, Portland is an urban area and bee communities can differ between urban areas, natural areas, agricultural areas, and so forth. And this was the first comprehensive study of Oregon's garden bees.

So really sought to learn more about. What the bee communities are like, what bee species are here, and we did that by also sampling gardens in a variety of landscape context. So some of these gardens were very much urban core, a [00:06:00] garden surrounded by concrete buildings, other impervious surfaces. Some of them were by the forest edge.

Some of them were in suburbs, so it gave us a really comprehensive look at not just Oregon garden bees as a whole, but also those bees in gardens located in different areas around the city.

Jen Hayes: So, our advisor, Dr. Gail Ingelotto, has published a paper documenting what was found in the study. Will you tell us a little bit about what you did to

Nicole Bell: expand on her work?

Yeah. So, Gail and her team created the backbone, the foundation of this work. They collected the data, and they're really the science. behind this project. My goal was to create a document designed and written for the public so they can learn about the bees that they see in their yard, on walks, in their community garden [00:07:00] plot, and more.

Because when science becomes accessible, it also becomes meaningful to a broader audience. So part of how I did that to organize the guide was to categorize bee species and their functional traits. So bees have a variety of functional traits, and I'll give you a couple of examples. So one of those functional traits is preferred nesting substrate.

Bees nest in a variety of places like soil, cavities, they excavate in wood. And so one of the things we wanted to do was see Which bees nest in cities?

Jen Hayes: So, in addition to listing the functional traits for each of these bees, what else is in the guide and how can people

Nicole Bell: access it? So, there's actually two [00:08:00] parts or two guides that I made about these bees. One of them is completely online. And the other one is a downloadable PDF, which could be read online or printed.

And both of them are totally free as well, which I love. The iNaturalist guide is fully online. So, if you're a visual oriented person, this is a really great one to use because it has a photo for every bee species and we also included interactive filters. So, like I just mentioned, the functional traits we have, body size, nesting substrate, the bee's diet, all sorts of things, color, fuzziness level, everything you can imagine.

And you can filter for these and also stack the filters. so I could see the large bees and also the fuzzy bees at once. And the second guide is the written guide, the written [00:09:00] PDF, which contains more detailed species and genus level descriptions and tips and tricks on how to tell particular bees apart and more information on why bees matter.

So I really think that the guides complement each other and they're really great to use in tandem. So you can pull up a picture of a bee, say Bombus vosnocenskii, the yellow faced bumblebee, and then you can also pull up the written PDF to read the species description all about that bee. That's

Jen Hayes: super cool.

Um, what information do you think might be particularly helpful for people who might be new to observing bees?

Nicole Bell: I think that the iNaturalist guide, or really my, my intention behind it, is to help people narrow down what type of bee that they just saw. Because I know for me, when I entered the bee world, I had [00:10:00] no idea how many colors And really how many sizes, I think that was the biggest thing for me, how many sizes bees come in.

And I had this vision in my head that every bee looked like a bumblebee or a honeybee. And that couldn't be farther from the truth. So that was my main goal, is to get that message out there and share with everyone the diversity of bees that we have, even within a city landscape.

Jen Hayes: And is there any information that you think might be helpful for bee friendly

Nicole Bell: gardeners?

Yeah, if you read the guide, talk a little bit about plants, um, and planting for bees in the sense that if your goal is to create a bee refuge, you want to have both forage, so food for bees, nectar and pollen, and you also want to have nesting resources. So those could be sites in the soil, pithy stems for cavity nesting bees, [00:11:00] things like that.

Jen Hayes: Amazing! So, what do you think your favorite part of the whole process of making these guides was?

Nicole Bell: My favorite part would have to be when I got to visit the gardeners back in June of 2023. Because like I said, I wasn't even in the lab when the sampling took place. So when I first started on this project, I was really looking at the data and a list of names.

And being able to visit Portland and not only put a face to the name of the people that allowed us to come in and sample their garden. And then... and learn about bee communities, but also talk to these gardeners and learn about their motivations and why they became interested in gardening for bees was really special.

And it motivated me too in my work. So definitely my favorite part. And

Jen Hayes: is there anything else that you want people to know? [00:12:00]

Nicole Bell: Yeah, first and foremost, it's okay to do less. in your garden. I think Jen and I can both agree on this. Um, we talk about it a lot that it's good to leave some, some messy spaces could be bare patches of soil again for nesting, um, native plants and really, um, you know, allowing some, some weeds, quote unquote weeds to grow in your lawn, um, to provide forage for bees.

There's lots of ways. And, um, you don't have to do it all at once, but it's also okay to, um, to do less and leave some messy spaces.

Jen Hayes: Okay, well, thank you so much for sharing this information. Once again, my name is Jen Hays and I was here with Nicole. And we're from the Garden Ecology Lab. Have a wonderful day.

Andony Melathopoulos: Thank you so much for [00:13:00] listening. Show notes with links from each episode are available at the website, pollinationpodcast. oregonstate. edu. I also love hearing from you, and there's a form at the website where you can pop in and say hello and give me feedback. If you want to support the show, remember to leave a rating on iTunes, Spotify, or whatever podcast mothership you use.

And finally, if you have the means and you want to help support my lab's effort to document bee biodiversity in Oregon, visit OregonBeatles. org and follow down to the donate button where you can make a tax deductible donation to the Jerry and Judith Paul Native Pollinator Endowment. Every little bit helps.

See you next episode.