62 Sam Droege and the Bee School (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've been literally dying to have a question-answer show here on Pollination, and my opportunity presented itself last week. It was the final day of the second session of the Oregon State University B School, our native B taxonomy course, and students assembled in the pollinator garden at lunchtime, and our lead taxonomist with the Oregon B Atlas, Lincoln Best, gave Sam Droge a call, and the students were able to ask. Sam Droge is a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey's Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, and he has been a real pioneer in developing tools for citizen scientists to go out and survey the biodiversity of the United States.

In fact, a lot of the tools he's developed, like his YouTube channel or the collaborative handy B manual, have been really important for our volunteers. So let's head down to the OSU Pollinator Garden to hear some of the questions from the students in the B School.

Speaker 2: Well, we have Sam Droge here today. This is the last day of the Oregon B School, part of the Oregon B Atlas. And so we're going to do a Q&A with Sam Droge with the USGSB Monitoring Lab in Maryland. So I'll have our volunteers state their name, and where they're from, and ask their dying questions for Sam, starting with Linda.

Speaker 3: Okay, this is Linda Zall from St. Helens, Oregon. And I'm in the Master Beekeeping Program and also in the Master Gardening Program. And so being a backyard beekeeper and a master gardener, people want to plant all kinds of bee plants in their garden, yet they plant a lot of non-natives. So what is a good non-native plant that people love in their garden that we should plant more of?

Speaker 4: So you're specifically looking for non-native plants. Is that the question?

Speaker 3: That's right because a lot of master gardeners are not thinking about native plants. Of course, we want to encourage that. But what would be a good non-native one?

Speaker 4: Yeah, well, you know, there's probably some specific West Coast things that I'm not going to be aware of, but a good class of non-native plants to have in your garden that also are great to have in your kitchen too are a lot of the herbs, oregano, lavender, and the mints. All those are generically attractive to bees. And so with the non-native plants, you can get a lot of bees coming into a good number of different kinds of plants. But think of them as sort of bird feeders for the crow and sparrow bees. So like in the middle of the city, you can put out a bird feeder and you get lots of birds, but you're not getting flamingos, warblers, and shearwaters. You're getting crows, chickadees, and the things that don't need our help.

But we love having around. So the same thing is going to be true of these non-native plants. So you can read about that from Xerxes in terms of some of their recommendations, including non-natives, but the herbaceous ones are really good. Fruiting trees are also good because they need pollination to begin with, particularly the ones to avoid would be ones that have doubled blossoms that are primarily for show, where they're creating flowering cherry kinds of spectacular views. And they're avoiding the fruiting bodies. The crabs and the crab apples are really good, generic spring-fruiting trees that are awesome for Andrina, and osmeas in the area support a lot of things. And that's why apple orchards really don't need honeybees because all the native bees in the area, if there's good habitat nearby, see those blooming apple trees and they move right in. Those are things that come to mind. I think a general looking and observing of what bees are going to some of the non-native plants is a worthwhile effort, particularly because I'm not going to know what some of the plants are in your region that might be planted that we wouldn't be able to find for sale out here. But I've given you a couple kind of generic groups of plants that are good.

Speaker 2: Wow, thanks. That was great. Here's our next question.

Speaker 5: Hi, Sam. My name is Sarah Johnson and I'm actually an assistant instructor for B School. I am a Bumblebee conservation biologist and slash ecologist. And I'm starting a PhD at Simon Fraser University in the fall. And I find that a very common question is what is your favorite bee? So I wanted to be a little bit contrarian and ask you, what is your least favorite native bee species?

Speaker 4: Well, I'm going to tell you my favorite group, which will give you a little idea about how I work my favorite group is Nomada because they are so incredibly difficult to figure out. And there are so many mysteries as to what the species levels are. And I don't know how far people have gotten into identifications, but you probably know that many of the Nomada species out west are just big question marks, you know, they fall into categories, but the species lines are difficult, the same is true out East.

There are lots of things that need names that don't have them and lots of things that have mysteries around them like anything that's a bidentate. Nomada group thing, I don't identify, I only identify one species. But when we look at their molecules, we see that there are actually tens of species in there, but that the groups at this point don't make, I'll air quote some around sense in terms of what the patterns mean in terms of morphology. So they're more or less unidentifiable in some parts.

And the others are just that kind of a gift to nerdiness where you have to spend a lot of time looking at the hind tibia CT and other really small details. Other than that, I guess I do sometimes look at vast oceans of lazy blossom dialectus group species as a burden. You all can relate to that if you're doing bull surveys, which many people do because usually, it's about half the species are dialectus group things. But with all this, you know, after a while, you start realizing I can identify good chunks of these, and then others I push aside. And that's my strategy when identifying a large group of bees is I identify everything by sight that I can on the first pass through and then set aside anything I have even a little bit of a question about because by going through all the specimens initially, rather than struggling with any odd one that comes up, I usually get a feel for how common the different morphotypes that I can identify are, and that's often turns out to be very useful. And then other times you'll realize like, oh, that unidentifiable female thing. Here are some male things that oh, and I understand what what that species is. So that's a real helpful way of dealing with the identification of a whole community of bees is is really slice off the easily identified ones first and then iterate that process until you're down to the mysteries that you have to pass on to someone else or take to a museum. When I'm working with people, I say you are only allowed to work on a species or a specimen for five minutes. If you haven't identified it in five minutes, put it down and do a different specimen, because, at that point, your return is less and less for the amount of effort that you have. If you haven't had the realization of what it is within five minutes, then it's going to be exponential, an exponentially longer period of time to get to the answer. So better to always move on to other specimens and come back over and over again to the harder set and that sort of workflow. Usually, you gain experience by going through all of those quickly. That will help with the final realization for some of the others.

Wow, I didn't I didn't really really come up with the individual species group, but I would say dialects are sometimes there's just overwhelming numbers. And it's like, can I just have a few more mega Kylie?

Speaker 2: Thanks for that great answer, Sam. It provides some really good strategies for dealing with the tragedy of dialects.

Speaker 4: Right. Here's Nate. I should also say, that out West, you have a little bit more difficulty because there's a greater proportion of unidentified species. I don't, for example, I don't bother, except in really super obvious cases, to identify the males, even though we have reasonably good guides from Jason Gibbs for the Western, I mean, for the males, they're still really tough. And in a way, they're not nearly as critical to separate as the females. They're less common. They tend to be just more or less a generic kind of nectar-sipping wasp rather than something that gives you as much insight as the females. So that's my excuse for not doing the males. Here's our next question.

Speaker 6: Hi, I'm Nathan Schulte from Portland. And my question is related to monitoring. And so there are a lot of protocols out there related to monitoring for pollinators and bees, particularly around citizen science. And I'm wondering, is there valuable data that can be gathered from protocols in which you do not end up killing and collecting the bees?

Speaker 4: The short answer is yes. We now have a guide that is downloadable and I can send links if people don't have them already to the Bee Genera of Maryland that's all through binoculars. So just like the butterfly people, I'm sure there are some butterfly folks in the group who do their identifications of butterflies through binoculars and that's been highly successful. Initially, I didn't really think you could do that same sort of thing with bees but someone gave me a pair of butterfly binoculars and I realized that a lot of the characters, you know, maybe not all the, like the first flagellar segment compared to the second kind of thing but some really detailed characteristics, even wing venation, are available to the person who just wants to look at these things through binoculars. So it's a skill set, you know, just like looking at birds and butterfly watching is too but the nice thing is that a lot of them are right at eye level and they don't really, they certainly are way better than birds which, you know, you have to get up early, you have to learn all their songs, they fly away when you come and here you are with bees that, you know, don't really get going till about nine if that and are only out on sunny days and are on flowers and don't tend to flush and they're far more abundant in terms of their absolute numbers.

So that's one thing to look at. Additionally, you know, you can do things with photography and we're working on a system now where you would catch bees in nets and then generically, let's call it put it into some kind of container or pipe that has a flexible tube at the end and then allow the bees to escape out that tube but then trap them. This would be for small bees, trap them and photograph them. And the idea is if we can work this out, you can then do mark-recapture kinds of things but not have to Superman handle the bees. So all that said, if you really want to get large-scale monitoring data, then almost everything is going to point to lethal kinds of techniques because you just can't pull in the sample sizes that you need unless you have some well-crafted many, many, many person types of protocol that would, you know, look at these binoculars would be a lot of training or would be taking pictures which would be a lot of equipment.

So in most cases, you're going to want to end up with or need to, let's say, end up with using some kind of trapping technique as the core. And the reason is that when you're doing any kind of observer-based thing, whether it's bird watching or whether it's butterfly watching or be watching, the observer is making a lot of choices like I'm going to stand here, I'm going to use that net on this thing. If you're doing netting, you might look at things that say, I'm very fast at a net, and other people, like if you gave a room full of people, even if they're anemologists nets, some people will catch unbelievable numbers of bees and other people will catch nothing at all. So you have these observer-influenced biases that creep into the data. But when you're using traps, then the trap does the trapping and not the observer. So statistically, you end up with almost all large-scale kinds of monitoring techniques using a lethal technique. Then there would be exceptions for maybe individual species or some kind of situation where you can gather a lot of observer data for, say, a Carpenter B or some event where you get lots of participation. Mostly that doesn't work well, because you can't get enough people to do whatever it is you're looking for and they're all located in the middle of cities. Then the second thing to think about is whether there are biological reasons to look at, well, what kind of impact does lethal sampling have on populations? I've got a little write-up because this comes up all the time.

I'm glad to send it to you. But the bottom line is that there's no real evidence that any kind of lethal sampling leads to population, permanent population loss, or even short-term population loss the following year. Yes, you've eliminated a set of individuals, but we've done a few calculations and the average acre in the east, the Mid-Atlantic, where we have a lot of data, is producing something on the order of 20,000 bees a year. In the Mid-Atlantic area, excluding a couple of significant states, are pumping out 2.2 trillion bees. So then all of a sudden the several thousand bees that you collected are insignificant in the biological scheme. There's a bunch of other things to consider.

Again, if someone emails me, I can send out the little write-up that looks at those lethal versus non-lethal techniques. But that's sort of my, you've got a bunch of my core points there. I went on and on, I'm sorry, but that's something that I know that people have struggled with.

Speaker 2: Okay, here's our last question.

Speaker 7: Hi, Kristy Van Royen from Oregon Tech in Klamath Falls. I have a question about education. So I do a lot of community education events and help out. What are a couple of the main things you'd really like for the general public to know about our native bees?

Speaker 4: I would say the main thing. There are a couple of societal things. And basically like, look, they're not going to sting you to death. And no one's allergic to any of the native bees, including bumblebees.

They don't sting except bumblebees and only when their nest is threatened. These are things you already probably have nailed, but these are things that are generically of concern to the general public. So it's always good to address them because they will ask you anyway. But the bigger picture that I focus on, because I give a lot of public lectures to and I hear the questions, is to emphasize that they, whoever I'm talking to, that they have a role to play in the saving of bees. And that it's not really an issue about Monsanto or chemical companies or some far-off entity that's doing something bad to bees. It's really people like themselves who have made decisions, a whole series of decisions on how they manage their landscapes.

So depending on the landowner, even a person who has a little postage stamp size plot has lots of opportunities to replace lawns and to replace non-native evergreens and things like that with blooming native plants. And so I emphasize that I'll assume that things are pretty much the same as here in the Mid-Atlantic about 40% of all the native pollen-carrying, so I'm ignoring the parasitic species, the native pollen-carrying bees are highly specialized, that they're only gathering pollen from the plants in a family level or lower to their young. So if you don't have willow, then you don't have a whole series of bees that only go to the Salix group.

If you don't have a puncha, then you don't have a whole bunch of bees that are cactus specialists and on down this long interesting list. I tell them, don't worry about it, blooming from native plants in your yard throughout the year is 85% of the best job you possibly could do. And I also give them a couple sort of things to think about, which is that on average, this is, I'm waving a big hand here, that on average a new bee, a baby bee, is fed by the product of pollen and nectar from only five flowers. So one nice clump of perennials of fill-in-the-blank is something that could support a whole bunch of bees. And so I want them to look at their yards, their landscapes, and certainly, if they're a large landowner, as how to integrate back into native habitat, particularly if they're adjacent to it, and make the places they live into these bee-friendly, but even much more than that, to really naturalize their landscapes within the bounds of what's acceptable for their community. And on that topic, which comes up, of course, all the time, I say, look, you know, if you just stop mowing, that's actually a good thing, but your neighbors will mow your grass when you go on vacation for you, and you'll just create all kinds of problems. The key and people actually have done studies of this, the key is to keep everything that's man-made trimmed out, like your house has to have traditional plantings and traditional edging, sidewalks edged, the street edge, the driveway, trees, and the fence line, and then everything else is given how people perceive their environments. They see that you are following the agreement of the community, which is you're taking care of your place. They don't know why you're leaving everything else and having this kind of crazy garden, but you have not abandoned it. You're taking care of it. You did it on purpose. You've kept certain things neat and tidy. We're okay with that.

Speaker 2: Well, thanks for answering all of our questions, Sam. We're going to sign off.

Speaker 4: Okay, good seeing everybody. Maybe I'll see you on the field.

Speaker 1: Hey, thank you so much, Sam. You bet. 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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