Transcript
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. When you think about crop pollination in the Pacific Northwest, what kind of crops come to mind? I bet it's something like cranberries, blueberries, cherries, probably not alfalfa seed, but in fact, alfalfa seed pollination is the biggest crop pollination event in the entire region. And it doesn't involve honey bees, but rather two managed species that are a little bit peculiar, the first one, the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee, and the other, the only managed ground nesting bee in the world, the alkali bee. I have long wanted to talk about these two bees with my next guest, Dr. Jim Kane, who's a research entomologist at the USDA, Pollinating Insect Biology Management Systematics Research Lab in Logan, Utah. And just to mark the occasion of this conversation just a few days before at the Pacific Northwest, Summit and Pollinator Conference here in Corvallis, Oregon, Dr. Kane was awarded the WP Stevens Award for excellence in research around pollinators here in the Pacific Northwest region. This is a great episode with lots of tidbits about solitary bee management. I hope you enjoy the episode. All right. I'm so excited to have across from me Dr. Jim Kane from the Logan Bee Lab. Welcome to pollination.
Speaker 3: Good afternoon to you. This is a nice place to be and novel for me.
Speaker 2: We've had a great week. You've been here. There was this summit and conference of the Pacific Northwest bees and you also got a WP Steven Award for lifetime excellence.
Speaker 3: Which is lovely and very gratifying. I'm humbled by it because Bill Stephen here at OSU did some pioneering work with alkali bees and alfalfa leaf-cutting bees that allows us the management we do today for pollination of especially alfalfa seed crops.
Speaker 2: And that's the thing we have not covered much on this episode. We're an Oregon-based podcast and we think a lot about bees and pollination and other pollinators but we really haven't touched this big pollination event that takes place all across the Pacific Northwest in alfalfa pollination. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. When I came from the east I thought alfalfa seeds pollinate eastern United States alfalfa seed pollination I thought well how much alfalfa sprouts can one nation eat? Not knowing that all through the upper Midwest and the West United States all the dairy herds or many of them are eating alfalfa hay. It's an incredibly large crop and it all has to be grown from seed and every single seed of alfalfa that's planted is the result of a bee's visit to an alfalfa flower.
Speaker 2: And what's so big why is alfalfa such a prominent feedstock? Why does it seem to be clover and other things?
Speaker 3: Why alfalfa? It has a broad tolerance for conditions in the West and for arid growth in arid areas. It handles salinated soils a little better in summer. Certainly alkaline soils I should say not salinated. It doesn't do well in acid soils but in alkaline soils where typically the drier parts of the West it prospers and hay the volume of hay the weight of hay you can get off of alfalfa from multiple cuttings is huge compared to other crops and it doesn't eat all the water that something like corn needs for silage where corn silage is a big one for feeding cattle or not cattle dairy cows back in the northeastern U.S. The corn out here is a water hog.
Speaker 2: Okay so you can get a lot of protein and volume with relatively few resources throughout alfalfa. It's so you need a lot of seed to plant all this is a lot of plant material that you're trying to grow each year.
Speaker 3: Yeah I mean it does have the advantage it's a perennial but eventually you're you start getting patchy blank spots in your hay field or you have a bad year for voles in which they clover it or you have a which may have happened this year in the upper Midwest with the bitter cold they've had if there's not a blanket of snow over that it'll kill the crowns and then you need to replace it. Alfalfa is a common name for the queen of forages. It's very versatile that way so for dry places and dry summers it's a great plant.
Speaker 2: So here in the Pacific Northwest and I guess other areas like Canada into California to produce all that hay you need seed production and so there's specialized seed production fields and I guess to set that seed you require a pollination visit tell us a little bit about that
Speaker 3: yeah from many perspectives it's a peculiar crop amongst the crops we have that require bees for pollination. I don't think there's a crop that has unless you count the individual florets on a sunflower head as separate flowers which they technically are but otherwise no crop has more flowers per acre than I know of than alfalfa. Is that right? It's a huge number I won't be able to quote number it's way into the millions per acre.
Wow. And I don't know of any flowering crop I've ever worked with and certainly not the major ones that provide less pollen and nectar per flower so it's distributed amongst a lot of flowers a paltry amount of pollen and nectar per each cumulatively over the field that adds up to a lot. It flowers at mid-summer so day length is maximal and it turns out from my calculations for alfalfa that if it bloomed in the spring there are not enough hours in a day for a female bee to complete a nestle these are solitary bees to complete a nest cell for one offspring they can't cook there are not enough hours in the day to collect the pollen so it's a challenge for those bees and before I get too far ahead of myself another one of its peculiarities is the honey bee is the jack of all trades for pollinating crops and that's why they're so popular for crop pollination because you can go from almond to blueberry to apple to cucumber and honey bees will be a pretty good pollinator for all those and they can be provided fairly cheaply on a perforage or basis. Okay. The alfalfa flower is arrayed like your pea flower in your garden or a bean flower with the anthers down inside what's called a keel petal but it's under like a mousetrap it's under a spring-loaded mechanism with some trigger hairs at the bottom so when the bee lands on that keel petal and probes in for what little nectar is in there the whole column the anthers and or the stamens and the pistols snap up from underneath and hit if it was you or I would hit us in the chin. Okay. Ouch. Honey bees don't like that and they very quickly learn that they can work from the side of the flower and not trip that and that's the pollination effect.
Speaker 2: Oh so they get the that's how you get this beautiful alfalfa honey that's so revered as they go through the side of the flower suck the nectar out but they don't set a seed. They don't trip the flower and it's the
Speaker 3: tripping that was so that whole little column snaps up and smacks against the banner petal the top one and in the case of alfalfa it just sits there that was the pollination event that one tripping and then within a half hour the banner petal coils or curls around that reproductive column and the resources of the flower are no longer available to any more visitors.
Speaker 2: So the just a point I should know this but I don't so the the plant itself is not self sterile. Thank goodness. No. And so the bee is actually just tripping just facilitating this transfer within the flower. Right.
Speaker 3: Oh right. It can be within the flower. There are some gains for our crossing but if we had to depend on out crossing we wouldn't be using alfalfa as our source it would be a very costly production.
Speaker 2: Okay. All right so not honeybees then.
Speaker 3: Honeybees are not going to do the job because a naive honeybee trips about five percent of the flowers she visits of educated honeybees. An experienced honeybee just doesn't trip any except in California settings and by manipulating irrigation such that you bring the planals to the wilting point that tripping action weakens and then they're willing to work them legitimately.
Speaker 2: I was hoping you were going to say an OSU apiculture program educated bee would not be okay so the California bee under certain irrigation conditions.
Speaker 3: Right. Okay all right. And then you quickly restore irrigation before you kill the plant. So it's a well one more time. So under normal turgor pressure, this tripping mechanism is a pretty vigorous snap. I got you.
Okay. And that's how you normally maintain the plant because it's a nice vigorous plant it's got all the water it needs. If you have to pollinate it in a hot climate whereas we'll get to in a little bit the alkali bee and the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee don't perform so well.
So a hot climate the Imperial Valley something like that at the height of summer. You can use honeybees but what you have to do is get your plants up and lush get them flowering get a good stand of untripped flowers and then withhold water irrigation water because it's so dry and the evaporate transpiration is so intense. The plants start to wilt they lose turgor pressure this tripping mechanism also loses turgor pressure so now the snapping becomes much less vigorous it's more flaccid. And then honeybees don't mind it. Oh they'll visit all the flowers and you'll get your seed set going but then you can't just stay that way because now you're going to kill the alfalfa plant. So now you have to restore water establish a whole new flush of bloom then withhold water then let honeybees pollinate again and the meantime your pest problems are accumulating on your alfalfa. So it's a much more management-intensive method for gaining pollination from honeybees on alfalfa.
Speaker 2: Okay so in the outside of that very hot climate you can use other bees. There are other bees.
Speaker 3: Okay tell us about them. One the one who's used most widely and it's portable is the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee. It's a small species in the genus Megakiley that carries its pollen dry and a brush of hair under the abdomen. It came to North America inadvertently from Europe. It was first detected in the late 1940s on both coasts. Where in Europe does it come from? Probably around the Mediterranean or the Near East.
Okay got you okay? Back there in the places where there have been large intense sampling projects for bee fawn it's always uncommon. Where people have tried to manage it for alfalfa pollination it doesn't manage very well. Isn't that something? Here in North America, it becomes a bee that tolerates nesting in close dense arrays of holes. It's a cavity-nesting bee like a hollow hole.
Speaker 2: But it's still a solitary bee even though there's so many nests side by side they're not helping one another.
Speaker 3: We say that oh well they're not social this is primitive right. Bear in mind in the neighborhood where you live your families live independently in neighboring houses and in bees that would be considered primitive sociality that's not even primitive sociality and yet we consider ourselves a social species. So it's living in villages and cities each with its apartment each female with her own apartment and her own kids.
Speaker 2: Okay got you but they're just they're real close together.
Speaker 3: Right and they tolerate that a lot of bees don't tolerate that. So it's alfalfa leaf-cutting bee showed up in North America the suspicion is they came back in the crating for armaments from World War I when there was this huge return of all this stuff and this bee because it lines its nest cells in tunnels with a lining of cut pieces of leaf hence the name leaf-cutting bees. They can accommodate different kinds of cavities it doesn't have to be a nice clean cylindrical tunnel.
Speaker 2: Oh it could be a little bit of lining in a crate or something.
Speaker 3: Yep a gap between boards in the crate they'll nest in all sorts of places they will get into recessed screw holes including in your in and around your car. They'll T111 siding where it meets a molding they'll follow up the grooves of the T111 siding and put a couple of nest cells on each groove.
Speaker 2: You know it reminds me we had Skyler boroughs on a net earlier episode and at the time we talked about a new USDA website it's really great this exotic bee ID website and we'll link that this group of bees is very this whole family is very prolific in getting around the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah and alfalfa leafcutting bee it's not a specialist on alfalfa there's a lot of things it can use especially if it's caged it prefers small flowered legumes perhaps but it prospers with other things of flower in mid-summer and it was first perceived by alfalfa seed growers the story I'm told is in Utah who saw that this little bee was going into nail holes in their barns and they somehow maybe they saw it on the flowers on their alfalfa but they started drilling holes in barn timbers to get more of them and they'd fill those up and their alfalfa seed yields would go up a little bit.
Speaker 2: I could just imagine before these bees were there they probably had terrible seed yields.
Speaker 3: They didn't have great seed yields and in fact, seed production was back well originally seed production a long time ago was back in the east and the problem with that is that untimely rains can spoil your harvest because alfalfa seed will germinate in the pod that's given water so you can lose a whole crop to an untimely rainfall and so management's been coming west in Nebraska in the 1950s before we were managing these bees it yielded were around 500 pounds per acre of clean seed and it was thought that this is the physiological maximum of the plant because you're not going to go into alfalfa doing hand pollinations on a great scale on these tiny flowers to see what the true yield could be. Today a good year they're getting 1100 pounds of seed per acre.
Speaker 2: So much for that limit.
Speaker 3: Yeah the production is and so we still don't really know where the limit is we think that's the limit but it wasn't that many years ago we thought eight or 900 pounds was the limit.
Speaker 2: Well there's 700 pounds that were added by pollination like that's a big big okay yeah that's fantastic okay.
Speaker 3: So the nice thing about this alfalfa leaf cutter bee because it nests in tunnels in substrates that we drill or conform in the case of polystyrene plastics polystyrene foam is now you got a portable nest and so you can set them up where you want them you can bring piles of the cocoons of the incubated over after they've overwintered incubated cocoons where they finish their development they're about ready to emerge and you can take them out by the bucket full and then they'll go into the holes you provide and then you can take the drilled boards or the molded polystyrene foam with the holes and you can bring it back in you can clean it there's automatic punching machines a whole industry that traces back partly to Bill Stephen that involves how do you scale up with management of this bee and that's for for other bees that have potential as crop pollinators or good pollinators at home you can encourage them to nest for you but to scale up to large agricultural crop size sometimes you get into troubles but this bee there is a brisk one-way business of producing alfalfa leaf cutting bees in Canada in dryland alfalfa where they're after some seed but they're mostly their product is growing bees and they sell those from Canada to the US for growers like out in the dry areas of Oregon for pollinating alfalfa where the growers goal is piling the bees in to maximize pollination and their big crop is the seed and they then have to supplement their bees each year and they buy them from Canadians
Speaker 2: Okay let's take a break I want to move off of leaf-cutting bees and I want to come to this really phenomenal bee Pacific Northwest native bee unlike the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee the alkali bee let's take a quick break and I'm really looking forward to hearing all about this bee that
Speaker 3: will be the eighth wonder of the world for bee biologists
Speaker 2: so don't go away from your your phone too long or however you're listening to this come right back's eighth wonder of the world awaits you okay we're back eighth wonder of the world is what you promised the listeners what is this eighth wonder of the world
Speaker 3: it's the alkali bee this and it's fairly fanatic it's nomia melendary it's a bee of the western United States in nature it likes to nest at mid summer in alkali pans so places where you have white alkaline salt deposits on the surface and it's damp underneath
Speaker 2: it sounds like a hard place to make a living
Speaker 3: hard place to make a living and if you've driven across central Nevada across the basins at that time of year there's not a whole lot of forage and that's still somewhat of a mystery of what this bee uses in nature that's native where it nests naturally it's a bit of a question mark because those areas are so disturbed now for the most
Speaker 2: part oh we don't know what used to be there I suppose right okay so this bee
Speaker 3: is an interesting bee it's a gorgeous bee the abdomen has bands of pearly green or pearly yellow or golden uh iridescence there you really can't in the Pacific Northwest you can immediately recognize a species with one glance of what they look like we're certainly looking at a specimen under a scope it's a little well close to a honey bee size maybe a little bit smaller than a honey bee oh so a lot bigger than these leaf-cutting bees yes the leaf-cutting bees are quite a bit smaller okay little tikes even amongst leaf-cutting bees they're little tikes mm-hmm alkali bees are more modest size bee it's a ground nester it's the only intensively managed ground nesting bee in the world even though the majority maybe 70 percent of our bee species are ground nesters this is the only one we've successfully
Speaker 2: managed on a large scale it's you've got all these bees all around the world and probably a lot of them are doing pollination of crops yet this is the only one
Speaker 3: this is the only one we can manage in large numbers successfully oh so now for small orchards and things like that you can have free pollination from various ground-nesting species that fly when your crop blooms and are good pollinators or something huge like alfalfa seed fields what happens is that those ground nesters become diluted in numbers
Speaker 2: because you need a lot of bees you were telling us there are some more flowers per right in this crop than any other crop so they would just take a lot of bees you have a couple of bees nesting in the ditch they just they make you know the collective pollen nectar but they won't be chipping all these flowers at once
Speaker 3: yeah they would might do a nice pollination job and it would be far less than a drop in the bucket for the yield the estimate that I've made some others have is an alkali bee in her tire it's not very it's humbling in her entire lifetime all of her foraging all of her flower visitations she sets about 25 cents worth of seed oh wow okay so about a quarter pound or a third of a pound of alfalfa which is a lot of seeds
Speaker 2: so I'm imagining in these first of all I don't get so salt beds like you're growing alfalfa you're not gonna have salt beds
Speaker 3: no there it's what the Romans used to do to their enemies when they didn't want them to grow crops anymore they would salt oh really places where they grew and that was the end of it that's how you starved out your enemy
Speaker 2: so they take some of their cropland and they salt it so for this bee
Speaker 3: huh about one you need for about every hundred acres of alfalfa you need to have maybe an acre that you devote to these ground-nesting bees okay when you concentrate them in one place where you can manage for them and they need to be in soil this is this was bill stevens genius working with soil scientists he figured all this out the bee needs to be in a soil with a high silt content and that's because silt's more than sands or clays are good at wicking moisture oh so if you have a water table at six feet in the silt soil will wick
Speaker 2: moisture all the way to the surface because what this bee wants is damp soil the nest in but it doesn't want is be rained on okay and it's in the height of the summer in eastern Oregon or eastern Washington where it's very dry dusty okay the other thing which bill figured out is not everybody's got a place with that shallow water table at least where you want to put these bees now how do you provide that well what bill figured out is ways in which you could sub-urinate those soils and at the time was before we had pipe for it so he did it with gravel layers
Speaker 3: and then the water would wick up so he'd set those up at a depth of a couple two or three feet four feet and then you could make the damp soils that the bee want then on the surface right now our best estimate for it certainly when you're establishing these beds is you want about a quarter pound of salt per square foot every three years god it's a lot of salt it comes in walla near tushy between walla and the tri-cities out there is where most of the seed growing is done it's about a third I think of all alfalfa seed grown in us is grown in that county uh-huh they will buy lake salt from the evaporators at the great salt lake they'll be in one-ton bags on railroad cars and they'll be 30 to 41-ton bags that they'll distribute
Speaker 2: amongst the growers every couple of years and then salt these bed they're white with the salt and the idea is that you are before the bees emerge or ideally before the winter precipitation ends or even do it in the fall you want that to soak into the top of the soil uh-huh you don't want pellets of salt out there you want to be soaked in a nice crust on there and you get a crust it's actually a soft yeah if you don't if it doesn't soak in you get a crust and the bees can't get through that if it soaks in you get this very I guess you'd call it a slick or smooth surface that the bees can easily dig into okay if you don't salt the surface this was some of bill steven's insight calcium salts in those soils calcium carbonates and the like will make a very fluffy dusty surface that the bees digging through that powder that's hard on them they really can't dig in it well by putting
Speaker 3: these monovalent salts sodium salts on the surface flattens it down and make this nice damp surface that the bees can easily get through okay and if it's properly moistened although it's a fairly big bee they only go down about eight to ten inches to make their cells their underground cells and because they're not a cavity-nesting bee they make an interesting cluster of cells that about that depth with damp silt you can almost carve damp silt if you took out a cube of silt you could carve it in not perfectly into a beautiful sculpture but you can carve it with a knife and it keeps its shape what that allows growers to do is they have a custom built rig for that they can put onto the where a bucket would go on a backhoe that works like a cubic foot cookie cutter oh you can press that down into the damp silt soil back it out and the cube cubic foot cube of soil comes out with it with all the nest cells in there
Speaker 2: which would be the larva that has eaten their
Speaker 3: provisions right and it's got a hydraulic plunger in the back okay and they have cubic foot boxes made to receive the cubic foot cubes of soil you array those on pallets you stack the pallets on a flatbed trailer you've built a new nesting bed somewhere with sub-irrigation with trenches in it that are a foot apart or foot wide and a foot deep you unload all these you pack in a couple thousand of these cores into the new nesting bed burn off the cardboard pack the soil around it Make sure the water's right and you have a new nesting bed.
Isn't that something? And these nesting beds can last. The oldest one, there's a number of them out there that the growers' fathers put in.
And those are growers who are in their 50s and 60s now. The oldest nesting bed now, it's a medium-sized bed. It's about 65 years old and it's got half a million bees in it.
Speaker 2: You know, I was just talking to somebody, you know, at Almond's this year. It's been a tough year for pollination. A lot of beekeepers have lost colonies and growers are paying, I think, $200, $225 a colony every year having to spend them. Here you have growers that have put this one-time investment in and getting a 50-year return out of it. That's really remarkable.
Speaker 3: Right, but the cost of periodic cost of salt and a pump, if you don't have a shallow water table, then a pump to run water through your sub-irrigation tubes. Well, that sounds like a good deal. And yeah, and they come up every year. You don't also have to go through all the incubation stuff, the buying, storage, everything.
Speaker 2: They just emerge at the same time. That's a good coincidence. Yes, it's a really good coincidence.
Speaker 3: Although it may be that over the course of 50 bee generations there's been selection for perfect timing. Because when they're out there where they grow alfalfa, it's alfalfa seed almost to the horizon. Before alfalfa seed, after alfalfa seed, except for some stray vacant areas that have bindweed, there is nothing in flower. And so if you're an alkali bee who comes out two weeks late or three weeks late, you're not leaving any progeny.
Speaker 2: So this is in the natural history of the alkali bee. This is probably its golden era.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes. The biggest aggregation out there, I ceased censoring the aggregations, I think eight years ago, nine years ago. And the time in the valley, I estimated pretty accurate estimate of about 16 million nesting alkali bees.
Oh, wow. And they bring up, as I recollect, about 25 grams of soil, little volcano of soil as they excavate their nest. How many of these are there per meter squared?
The densest I've ever measured, and it took me a long time, was about a thousand or 1,200 nests per square yard. Whaa. Holes on top of holes. It's very hard to count when they're that close together.
Very tight, okay. And collectively, that 16 million bees are bringing 96 tons of soil to the surface across the Tushy Valley each year. They're astronomical numbers. It's the oldest nesting aggregations of any known for any bee in the world. They're the largest nesting aggregations known for any bee anywhere in the world. And it's some of the densest nesting known of any bee anywhere in the world.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I guess, you know, people outside the region, we do have listeners outside the region like, well, I'm gonna come up with my own version of this. There's gotta be some other bee in the helic today that I can just turn into this. This sounds like a great idea. Should they try?
Speaker 3: Well, there's always the possibility because before the alkali bee was managed, there was no managed ground nesting bee. There's been lots of attempts. Couple things just like with the alfalfa leaf cutting bee, there's some peculiar, additional peculiar traits with the alkali bee. One of them, say nesting these soils that you can excavate, you don't excavate, you can punch out cells. If you simply dug it up with a backhoe, you'd smash all the cells and jumble them. Oh, you can get a cube of them out.
Right, you could move it and it'd be a mess. So you can build new nesting aggregations for this bee. In addition, and it's a biological peculiarity for which we have no understanding, almost all other genera of bees have the equivalent associate of another species of bee or genus of bees who function like the cowbird does, their nest parasites. They don't collect pollen and nectar for themselves, but their larvae eat pollen and nectar like all bees do. The way evolutionarily that's solved or the way it works out is that they sneak their eggs in the other bees' nests. As you start clumping up nests, such that the holes are right side by side, you don't have to search for a nest. You can be very successful as a parasite and they have lots of eggs.
Speaker 2: People in Western Oregon sometimes see this when you have these Adrena colonies on people's lawns. You soon see a lot of these flies and
Speaker 3: other waspy looking things, the genus Nomada. And actually they get misclassified, missorted as wasps in collections before people look at them under a scope.
Speaker 2: So these are the cowbirds that are coming in. And so I guess that colony of those ground nesters will go through cycles. They won't be as dependable. Go through cycles.
Speaker 3: For whatever bizarre reason, the genus Alkalai bee and other members of its genus have no dedicated kleptoparasitic bee. I see. So you can build these huge aggregations and no parasitic bee will take it down.
Okay. There's some other things that will do harm to them like that. And over the years, Bill Stephen and as well as scientists at Washington State University and Utah State University have solved those other problems in very effective ways that have endured.
Speaker 2: We always ask about the health of honey bees and we talk about health of native bees. How is the health of these Alkalai bees? Seems fine.
Speaker 3: The challenge with Alkalai bees, part of the reason why their numbers over the years, their management's concentrated in Walla Walla County is that because they've been tried and new nesting aggregations established. The student of Bill Stephen's Phil Torshio established them in California for pollinating alfalfa.
They were at one time there were a fair number of nesting beds across southern Idaho. But this bee, like the alfalfa leaf cutting bee, is not a specialist. So it will go to various plant species for pollen.
It's just that it can make do with alfalfa. And it's a bigger bee. So I've measured it flying out a mile to forage from its nesting sites as it has to. I've measured that from wild aggregations in Utah and from managed aggregations. And within a mile's flight range in Walla Walla, there's still an alfalfa. And so the growers coordinate very well because they know they could kill their neighbors bees if they're not careful.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see. So in other places, there's other things. Mixes of crops.
Speaker 3: Crops may not need bees. They get sprayed during bloom. When Alkalai bees are flying, this is what happened in California. It's thought it was a switch between either tomato to cotton or cotton to tomato. Both of them, which especially cotton can take really harsh insecticides, especially back 30 years ago. And the irrigation suddenly one day was gone.
Oh, that's tragic. In southern Idaho, the kind of thing you'd like to promote, which is a lot of mixed agriculture, all kinds of small, relatively small farm fields with all sorts of things they're growing. Well, this be able to tangle with that. It's actually a big monoculture to coordinate when you do pest control is actually beneficial to this bee. Even though it's backward from what we think of for everything else about agriculture. Over this bee, it really does best when in all directions, the food sources are safe. Okay.
Speaker 2: Well, I have been to the Tushy Walla Walla area during their flight. And I also noticed that the grows are really protective. They've got these signs all over the roads telling people to slow down, which is a peculiar thing to see as you're driving a country road and coming across this big banner.
Speaker 3: It's probably, and I might be proven wrong, it may be the only place in which posted speed limits are for the benefit of a bee. Sorry. What they found is that if you go faster than about 25 miles an hour, instead of the bee following the slipstream of the car, if it's flying over the road, it splats against your windshield. And where they put up these signs is where some of these nesting aggregations are near the rural road, the county road, which is kind of neat, I agree. The other thing out there is that there are some beekeepers, a few who pile large apiaries in near these alfalfa fields off of the growers property in order to take advantage of all that bloom without having to plant it. And Walla Walla County may be one of the very few counties in the country in which there's a county ordinance for maximum size of an apiary.
Is that right? And on the Oregon side, the last I checked, there was no such ordinance and you would see apiaries of four or five hundred colonies dumped off. And it's because the alfalfa seed growers don't want the honeybees stealing the nectar that's needed for reproduction of their bee.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see, of course. And it is such a great, someone from the Canadian prairies, you know, with a, we would often have maybe two or three cuts. But after that, they let the plant grow up to establish its stand for the next year. You would get a great honey flow off those apiaries.
Speaker 3: And yet it tells you about the ability of bees in scale because for you or I to get nectar out of those flowers, it's a dab. It's such a tiny amount.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we were talking about this previously, as you know, when honeybees are on alfalfa, they get nectar, but they're obviously not getting any pollen from it. Not getting
Speaker 3: any pollen. That's, it's a great honey crop. Unlike, say, yellow sweet clover, where's a fabulous honey crop and they can get pollen off that. It's a nutritious pollen, but not off of alfalfa.
Speaker 2: We've had a previous guest, Ron Mishka, on the show, who remembers having these massive sweet clover blooms in southern Saskatchewan when he was growing up, made beekeeping very easy.
Speaker 3: Very easy and in some ways beekeepers more than ever need a place to summer their bees now that's safe from insecticides, especially some modern chemistries that we have suspicions about. And where there's plenty of bloom and it's reliable, the yellow sweet clover is a biennial. So the first establishment year, it's still pretty robust plant.
But that second year, when it comes back from a taproot, I don't believe it's stoppable. So it's a very reliable crop and it blooms for a long time. For alfalfa leaf cutting bee, it is the single best floral resource in terms of reproduction of any that have been tested.
Speaker 2: I remember back when I was in Lethbridge, Weldon Hobbs would have his shelters up on sweet clover bloom and get really great reproductive rates on...
Speaker 3: I mentioned the states, but actually Weldon Hobbs from Canada was another important scientist in developing the management practices and pest control practices in terms of parasites and predators and all for alfalfa leaf cutting bee. Besides being a very good bumblebee biologist, did some of the best work for wild bumblebees.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's like, that's his dad. That's his dad, Gordon Hobbs. Well, there is dispute among southern Albertans. Was it the fillpots or the Hobbs that brought the bees to dispute that I don't want to get in the middle of?
Anyways, brought the leaf cutters to southern Alberta. So let's take another break. We have this set of questions we ask all our guests. I'm deadly curious about what your answers are going to be. Very good. And we're back.
Very short break. So one of the questions we ask our guests is, do you have a book recommendation? Is there a book that you want our listeners to know about?
Speaker 3: A fun one and is a fair chance your public library might have it. There was a French rural school teacher in the mid 1800s, a contemporary of Darwin's who corresponded with Darwin. By the name of Jean Henry, and I'm told his pronounced Fabre.
It looks like a Fabre. F-A-B-R-E. Who was just had questions and was motivated and did all sorts of experiments with bees. And maybe some with wasps and wrote a series of books that were widely translated maybe the 1940s or 1950s and published a lot double day published cheap books of them.
Lots and lots. One of them is entitled The Mason Bees. And it is fascinating reading because you realize that this guy had very clever experiments. Very nice writing, very readable bed time reading and you'll be entertained. It's just fascinating. And you think it was that long ago that here was somebody interested in solitary bees and everything about their biology, how they figure out where their nest is, how an offspring knows which way to leave if it's in a tunnel nest.
How far can they orient from a nest and find their way home? Just fascinating. But Jean Henry Fabre or Fabre, look for the books in your public library. Look for used copies.
Speaker 2: A real giant in entomology too did a lot of behavior work across and always spurred by this curiosity and this great writing style.
Speaker 3: I think he was a pioneer in insect behavior at the time. Experimental research in insect behavior.
Speaker 2: Real genius. You know we had a, we just came from this summit and conference and one of the speakers there, Ron Spendle from Washington County, used the word, Uncredentialed Scientist as somebody who is not part of the institution but does really good work. And I guess Fabre was a father.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he would have been the equivalent of a high school teacher here. And, I don't know if Ron mentioned it also, but the flip side of that is here was Charles Darwin who quickly rose to fame and was a giant in his field. And he writing in long hand with quill pens, which is not fast, he would respond to all of Fabre's letters. They had a long correspondence among all the many, many correspondences that Darwin maintained. Because you never know when there's a Fabre or Ron out there who has really neat insights as a scientist to throw that away because, oh well, they're not credentialed, you're missing out. And you never know.
There's no predicting when someone puts in touch that way. And Fabre was interesting too because he was a staunch Catholic. So at the time with the Catholic Church, evolution was not an option. And so he was forever, both you'll see if you read the Mason Bees, making critiques of Darwin's thinking. He says, no, Darwin's a very smart man, but this evolution thing, he's way wrong.
Speaker 1: And here's why from what I've observed with bees. And sometimes in their correspondence, he would needle them a little bit and then Darwin would politely offer an alternative explanation. But each one careful not to cause too much offense. I don't know if they ever met. I think it was just the correspondence over the decades.
Speaker 2: You know, Darwin had a number of religious figures around him, including himself. And it was interesting how he could correspond and be kind of respectful. I remember hearing there was another person in that milieu who was very aggressive with it. Who Darwin was, how do I pick it up? Huxley. Yes. Huxley was very aggressive. Huxley was Darwin's bulldog.
Speaker 3: It's been quoted by somebody. And Huxley would be, Darwin was reticent. He did not like debate. He did not like discord. And also was afraid for his wife. His wife was quite religious and he thought, boy, I bring out this. I am inexorably led to my theory of evolution based on what's before me in terms of evidence.
And yet I really don't want to go there because my wife is going to be upset by this if I go public. Because it counters the Christian doctrine of the time. So Huxley was the one who would hold these huge public lectures.
Loved it. I mean, it's an interesting thought compared to today. But these huge public lectures, working men would come to them and he was engaging and lots of demonstrations. And if there was critiques from scholars who tried to debunk Darwin, he would take them on. In open debate or in writing.
Speaker 2: And yet we have all these people who are quietly working away and getting all this data and sort of building this case that just became insurmountable. I guess Fabre is a great example of maybe somebody who was collecting all these observations and stitching this together and really enhancing our ability to understand how the world works. Yeah, exactly. Fascinating guy.
Speaking of works, we have a question we asked our guests about, do you have a go-to tool, a tool that you'd find indispensable or maybe it's the Dr. Jim Cain tool you're known for? I don't know.
Speaker 3: And it occurs to me there's two of them. I've not no tool that I'm known for particularly that I can think of. The one for anybody interested in insects is insects are small relative to our visual acuity. And so some means of magnification. A hand lens, some of those little magnifier clear boxes you can put a B in. Ultimately an inexpensive microscope or borrowed microscope, at least a hand lens.
Something like that will greatly appreciate, enhance your appreciation of any insect. What makes a good hand lens? Probably 10x magnification. And if you read online, there's several different ways of arranging lenses. I don't remember their names to achieve those magnifications. You want something where it's not a center, only at the very center of the lens are things in focus, but you want a broader focus.
And that will mean frankly a hand lens. I always have one in my pocket whenever I'm hiking because flowers the same way. The other thing which for pollination work is critical.
And there's various ways of solving this, but you need some kind of a mesh bag with a drawstring or something like that. They keep bees away from the flower that you want to manually pollinate without subsequent visitation. With pollen where you know where it came from, they come from the same plant. Is the plant self fertile? Or do I only get seed set or fruit set if I bring pollen from another different individual in which case the plant's an obligate outcrosser?
Those are very key questions. Almonds or rabbit eye blueberry. But almonds for instance are vegetatively propagated and they're self infertile. So pollen has to move between cultivars. And if they're rose, that's a much bigger demand for a pollinator than alfalfa where the pollinators just got to be moved around.
Speaker 2: I've always thought this would be a great tool for a school teacher trying to introduce students to the idea of pollination and the sort of differences. Tell us a little bit about these bags. What do they look like?
Speaker 3: Mine, although I've got some other ones now. Mine are about, just because I've worked with a variety of, I've worked with different crops over the years. Cranberries, rabbit eye blueberries, squashes. So mine are, well maybe the size of an unfolded wallet.
Okay. And they've got a drawstring at one end and it's a fine mesh and very flexible or limber material. It's not like window screening.
More flexible than that. There's various places you might find it in a fabric store, something that works this way. If you use something as too coarse a mesh, you get an interesting alternative experiment. I did that with rabbit eye blueberries in Alabama and I encountered bumble bees with, this is what I think it's, organ-D mesh. Okay.
Maybe a eighth inch mesh and they were creasing the bags, pulling them and tugging at them to crease them, the fold to crease the inside and then running their proboscis through the mesh to drink out of the flowers. Okay. And compromising my exclusion. So you need something finer than that. The ones I have, I contracted with our secretary in Alabama at the time to sew them for me. I provided the fabric and she charged me a buck a piece for the labor. You don't have her email, do you? Not anymore, but you might find someone else who could do that. Okay.
Speaker 2: And they endure forever. Yeah, yeah, you build them and then you've, yeah, they're not complicated.
Speaker 3: And then you figure out a quick closure and the drawstring is much faster than twist ties that you have to tie on and then you have to untie. But you could do that for tiny flowers, the mesh stuff they make tea bags out of. Oh, of course.
And you can get blank tea bags from, I think even some of the craft stores. Oh yeah. So that's another option. Oh, that's a great. Something like that. Just some kind of a fine mesh fabric bag doesn't overheat if you're working in places with intense sun.
Speaker 2: Those are two great tools. They really allow anybody to go out and really explore things.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then many of our plants, especially our wild plants, we don't know if they're self-incompatible or not. Oh, so we can. Or self-pollinating. That happens too. Where the flower, our common bean in the garden is self-pollinating. It pollinates in the bud. So if you put these bags over your bean flowers, you'll get full-sized green beans with all the seeds inside. Oh, we darned.
Speaker 2: Well, we could get out there and start getting some of this information. Okay, our last question. This is a tough question, especially for someone like yourself who has really studied the broad range of different pollinators. Do you have a favorite? Poof.
Speaker 3: Most bees. It's sort of like having a favorite bird if you're an ornithologist.
Speaker 2: Can you narrow it down? But alkali bees got to be amongst them. And the joy of the alkali bees, besides the fact that it's a gorgeous bee, but the joy of it is you can, you would have to ask the growers permission.
And they'll be reticent to allow it. But with a shovel, you can dig out one of the, a core like I described. Slide it carefully into a box, bring it back to the lab, set the block of soil up on a counter. And then very carefully dissect into it to reveal the nest cells. For all other ground nesting bees, you have your head down in a hole in the ground. Trying to follow, say for alkali, be a tunnel the diameter of a pencil as it goes weaving down through tree roots and rocks without losing track of it.
And for smaller bees, it can be tiny diameter. And then you're on your hands and knees bending into a tunnel, bending your back, trying to see down in the dark what's going on. Clippers in hand to clot up roots or a hatchet.
Speaker 3: Or something to pry out rocks. And you don't know initially how deep they go. If it's a new species has never been dug up before. So you're digging with a spoon at the surface. Either you're digging with a spoon at the surface and come to find out this bee, nested three feet down. And you spend all afternoon digging a hole with a spoon. Or you go after it with a shovel and you wonder, gosh, where'd the nests go? And it turns out it was in that first shovel full.
So it's a labor of love. And if you ever come across descriptions of the morphology of ground nests, of ground nesting bees, realize that someone really had to work at that.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, and I, you know, one of the great, it's still in the OSU catalog is Bill Stephen, Phil Torshios and Ned Boheart's book for the Bees of the Pacific Northwest. It has some beautiful diagrams of nests.
Speaker 3: And that's been all scanned as PDF on the website.
Speaker 2: It's there available free. It's a great resource.
Speaker 3: It has comparative illustrations for things like egg placement on provision masses, because it varies with the species. All sorts of things like that that I don't think you'll yet find anything like it in the world. It's a fabulous book and it's specifically relevant to the Northwest. So if you can quote everything out of it and learn all it's between those pages, you will be an expert in bees, I guarantee. I can't, I still have to go back to it all the time for new questions I have and find out what they already knew.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share the story of the Alkalabies. We would love to get you back again. You've got some great pollination stories in the Pacific Northwest with raspberry. We've got stories of sagebrush theft restoration. I'm looking forward to having you as a guest again.
That will be another visit. Thank you.
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. When you think about crop pollination in the Pacific Northwest, what kind of crops come to mind? I bet it's something like cranberries, blueberries, cherries, probably not alfalfa seed, but in fact, alfalfa seed pollination is the biggest crop pollination event in the entire region. And it doesn't involve honey bees, but rather two managed species that are a little bit peculiar, the first one, the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee, and the other, the only managed ground nesting bee in the world, the alkali bee. I have long wanted to talk about these two bees with my next guest, Dr. Jim Kane, who's a research entomologist at the USDA, Pollinating Insect Biology Management Systematics Research Lab in Logan, Utah. And just to mark the occasion of this conversation just a few days before at the Pacific Northwest, Summit and Pollinator Conference here in Corvallis, Oregon, Dr. Kane was awarded the WP Stevens Award for excellence in research around pollinators here in the Pacific Northwest region. This is a great episode with lots of tidbits about solitary bee management. I hope you enjoy the episode. All right. I'm so excited to have across from me Dr. Jim Kane from the Logan Bee Lab. Welcome to pollination.
Speaker 3: Good afternoon to you. This is a nice place to be and novel for me.
Speaker 2: We've had a great week. You've been here. There was this summit and conference of the Pacific Northwest bees and you also got a WP Steven Award for lifetime excellence.
Speaker 3: Which is lovely and very gratifying. I'm humbled by it because Bill Stephen here at OSU did some pioneering work with alkali bees and alfalfa leaf-cutting bees that allows us the management we do today for pollination of especially alfalfa seed crops.
Speaker 2: And that's the thing we have not covered much on this episode. We're an Oregon-based podcast and we think a lot about bees and pollination and other pollinators but we really haven't touched this big pollination event that takes place all across the Pacific Northwest in alfalfa pollination. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. When I came from the east I thought alfalfa seeds pollinate eastern United States alfalfa seed pollination I thought well how much alfalfa sprouts can one nation eat? Not knowing that all through the upper Midwest and the West United States all the dairy herds or many of them are eating alfalfa hay. It's an incredibly large crop and it all has to be grown from seed and every single seed of alfalfa that's planted is the result of a bee's visit to an alfalfa flower.
Speaker 2: And what's so big why is alfalfa such a prominent feedstock? Why does it seem to be clover and other things?
Speaker 3: Why alfalfa? It has a broad tolerance for conditions in the West and for arid growth in arid areas. It handles salinated soils a little better in summer. Certainly alkaline soils I should say not salinated. It doesn't do well in acid soils but in alkaline soils where typically the drier parts of the West it prospers and hay the volume of hay the weight of hay you can get off of alfalfa from multiple cuttings is huge compared to other crops and it doesn't eat all the water that something like corn needs for silage where corn silage is a big one for feeding cattle or not cattle dairy cows back in the northeastern U.S. The corn out here is a water hog.
Speaker 2: Okay so you can get a lot of protein and volume with relatively few resources throughout alfalfa. It's so you need a lot of seed to plant all this is a lot of plant material that you're trying to grow each year.
Speaker 3: Yeah I mean it does have the advantage it's a perennial but eventually you're you start getting patchy blank spots in your hay field or you have a bad year for voles in which they clover it or you have a which may have happened this year in the upper Midwest with the bitter cold they've had if there's not a blanket of snow over that it'll kill the crowns and then you need to replace it. Alfalfa is a common name for the queen of forages. It's very versatile that way so for dry places and dry summers it's a great plant.
Speaker 2: So here in the Pacific Northwest and I guess other areas like Canada into California to produce all that hay you need seed production and so there's specialized seed production fields and I guess to set that seed you require a pollination visit tell us a little bit about that
Speaker 3: yeah from many perspectives it's a peculiar crop amongst the crops we have that require bees for pollination. I don't think there's a crop that has unless you count the individual florets on a sunflower head as separate flowers which they technically are but otherwise no crop has more flowers per acre than I know of than alfalfa. Is that right? It's a huge number I won't be able to quote number it's way into the millions per acre.
Wow. And I don't know of any flowering crop I've ever worked with and certainly not the major ones that provide less pollen and nectar per flower so it's distributed amongst a lot of flowers a paltry amount of pollen and nectar per each cumulatively over the field that adds up to a lot. It flowers at mid-summer so day length is maximal and it turns out from my calculations for alfalfa that if it bloomed in the spring there's not enough hours in a day for a female bee to complete a nestle these are solitary bees to complete a nest cell for one offspring they can't cook there are not enough hours in the day to collect the pollen so it's it's a challenge for those bees and before I get too far ahead of myself another one of its peculiarities is the honey bee is the jack of all trades for pollinating crops and that's why they're so popular for crop pollination because you can go from almond to blueberry to apple to cucumber and honey bees will be a pretty good pollinator for all those and they can be provided fairly cheaply on a perforage or basis. Okay. The alfalfa flower is arrayed like your pea flower in your garden or a bean flower with the anthers down inside what's called a keel petal but it's under like a mousetrap it's under a spring-loaded mechanism with some trigger hairs at the bottom so when the bee lands on that keel petal and probes in for what little nectar is in there the whole column the anthers and or the stamens and the pistols snap up from underneath and hit if it was you or I would hit us in the chin. Okay. Ouch. Honey bees don't like that and they very quickly learn that they can work from the side of the flower and not trip that and that's the pollination effect.
Speaker 2: Oh so they get the that's how you get this beautiful alfalfa honey that's so revered as they go through the side of the flower suck the nectar out but they don't set a seed. They don't trip the flower and it's the
Speaker 3: tripping that was so that whole little column snaps up and smacks against the banner petal the top one and in the case of alfalfa it just sits there that was the pollination event that one tripping and then within a half hour the banner petal coils or curls around that reproductive column and the resources of the flower are no longer available to any more visitors.
Speaker 2: So the just a point I should know this but I don't so the the plant itself is not self sterile. Thank goodness. No. And so the bee is actually just tripping just facilitating this transfer within the flower. Right.
Speaker 3: Oh right. It can be within the flower. There are some gains for our crossing but if we had to depend on out crossing we wouldn't be using alfalfa as our source it would be a very costly production.
Speaker 2: Okay. All right so not honeybees then.
Speaker 3: Honeybees are not going to do the job because a naive honeybee trips about five percent of the flowers she visits of educated honeybees. An experienced honeybee just doesn't trip any except in California settings and by manipulating irrigation such that you bring the planals to the wilting point that tripping action weakens and then they're willing to work them legitimately.
Speaker 2: I was hoping you were going to say an OSU apiculture program educated bee would not be okay so the California bee under certain irrigation conditions.
Speaker 3: Right. Okay all right. And then you quickly restore irrigation before you kill the plant. So it's a well one more time. So under normal turgor pressure, this tripping mechanism is a pretty vigorous snap. I got you.
Okay. And that's how you normally maintain the plant because it's a nice vigorous plant it's got all the water it needs. If you have to pollinate it in a hot climate whereas we'll get to in a little bit the alkali bee and the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee don't perform so well.
So a hot climate the Imperial Valley something like that at the height of summer. You can use honeybees but what you have to do is get your plants up and lush get them flowering get a good stand of untripped flowers and then withhold water irrigation water because it's so dry and the evaporate transpiration is so intense. The plants start to wilt they lose turgor pressure this tripping mechanism also loses turgor pressure so now the snapping becomes much less vigorous it's more flaccid. And then honeybees don't mind it. Oh they'll visit all the flowers and you'll get your seed set going but then you can't just stay that way because now you're going to kill the alfalfa plant. So now you have to restore water establish a whole new flush of bloom then withhold water then let honeybees pollinate again and the meantime your pest problems are accumulating on your alfalfa. So it's a much more management-intensive method for gaining pollination from honeybees on alfalfa.
Speaker 2: Okay so in the outside of that very hot climate you can use other bees. There are other bees.
Speaker 3: Okay tell us about them. One the one who's used most widely and it's portable is the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee. It's a small species in the genus Megakiley that carries its pollen dry and a brush of hairs under the abdomen. It came to North America inadvertently from Europe. It was first detected in the late 1940s on both coasts. Where in Europe does it come from? Probably around the Mediterranean or the Near East.
Okay got you okay? Back there in the places where there have been large intense sampling projects for bee fawn it's always uncommon. Where people have tried to manage it for alfalfa pollination it doesn't manage very well. Isn't that something? Here in North America, it becomes a bee that tolerates nesting in close dense arrays of holes. It's a cavity-nesting bee like a hollow hole.
Speaker 2: But it's still a solitary bee even though there's so many nests side by side they're not helping one another.
Speaker 3: We say that oh well they're not social this is primitive right. Bear in mind in the neighborhood where you live your families live independently in neighboring houses and in bees that would be considered primitive sociality that's not even primitive sociality and yet we consider ourselves a social species. So it's living in villages and cities each with its apartment each female with her own apartment and her own kids.
Speaker 2: Okay got you but they're just they're real close together.
Speaker 3: Right and they tolerate that a lot of bees don't tolerate that. So it's alfalfa leaf-cutting bee showed up in North America the suspicion is they came back in the crating for armaments from World War I when there was this huge return of all this stuff and this bee because it lines its nest cells in tunnels with a lining of cut pieces of leaf hence the name leaf-cutting bees. They can accommodate different kinds of cavities it doesn't have to be a nice clean cylindrical tunnel.
Speaker 2: Oh it could be a little bit of lining in a crate or something.
Speaker 3: Yep a gap between boards in the crate they'll nest in all sorts of places they will get into recessed screw holes including in your in and around your car. They'll T111 siding where it meets a molding they'll follow up the grooves of the T111 siding and put a couple of nest cells on each groove.
Speaker 2: You know it reminds me we had Skyler boroughs on a net earlier episode and at the time we talked about a new USDA website it's really great this exotic bee ID website and we'll link that this group of bees is very this whole family is very prolific in getting around the world.
Speaker 3: Yeah and alfalfa leafcutting bee it's not a specialist on alfalfa there's a lot of things it can use especially if it's caged with it prefers small flowered legumes perhaps but it prospers with other things of flower in mid-summer and it was first perceived by alfalfa seed growers the story I'm told is in Utah who saw that this little bee was going into nail holes in their barns and they somehow maybe they saw it on the flowers on their alfalfa but they started drilling holes in barn timbers to get more of them and they'd fill those up and their alfalfa seed yields would go up a little bit.
Speaker 2: I could just imagine before these bees were there they probably had terrible seed yields.
Speaker 3: They didn't have great seed yields and in fact, seed production was back well originally seed production a long time ago was back in the east and the problem with that is that untimely rains can spoil your harvest because alfalfa seed will germinate in the pod that's given water so you can lose a whole crop to an untimely rainfall and so management's been coming west in Nebraska in the 1950s before we were managing these bees it was yields were around 500 pounds per acre of clean seed and it was thought that this is the physiological maximum of the plant because you're not going to go into alfalfa doing hand pollinations on a great scale on these tiny flowers to see what the true yield could be. Today a good year they're getting 1100 pounds of seed per acre.
Speaker 2: So much for that limit.
Speaker 3: Yeah the production is and so we still don't really know where the limit is we think that's the limit but it wasn't that many years ago we thought eight or 900 pounds was the limit.
Speaker 2: Well there's 700 pounds that were added by pollination like that's a big big okay yeah that's fantastic okay.
Speaker 3: So the nice thing about this alfalfa leaf cutter bee because it nests in tunnels in substrates that we drill or conform in the case of polystyrene plastics polystyrene foam is now you got a portable nest and so you can set them up where you want them you can bring piles of the cocoons of the incubated over after they've overwintered incubated cocoons where they finish their development they're about ready to emerge and you can take them out by the bucket full and then they'll go into the holes you provide and then you can take the drilled boards or the molded polystyrene foam with the holes and you can bring it back in you can clean it there's automatic punching machines a whole industry that traces back partly to Bill Stephen that involves how do you scale up with management of this bee and that's for for other bees that have potential as crop pollinators or good pollinators at home you can encourage them to nest for you but to scale up to large agricultural crop size sometimes you get into troubles but this bee there is a brisk one-way business of producing alfalfa leaf cutting bees in Canada in dryland alfalfa where they're after some seed but they're mostly their product is growing bees and they sell those from Canada to the US for growers like out in the dry areas of Oregon for pollinating alfalfa where the growers goal is piling the bees in to maximize pollination and their big crop is the seed and they then have to supplement their bees each year and they buy them from Canadians
Speaker 2: Okay let's take a break I want to move off of leaf-cutting bees and I want to come to this really phenomenal bee Pacific Northwest native bee unlike the alfalfa leaf-cutting bee the alkali bee let's take a quick break and I'm really looking forward to hearing all about this bee that
Speaker 3: will be the eighth wonder of the world for bee biologists
Speaker 2: so don't go away from your your phone too long or however you're listening to this come right back's eighth wonder of the world awaits you okay we're back eighth wonder of the world is what you promised the listeners what is this eighth wonder of the world
Speaker 3: it's the alkali bee this and it's fairly fanatic it's nomia melendary it's a bee of the western United States in nature it likes to nest at mid summer in alkali pans so places where you have white alkaline salt deposits on the surface and it's damp underneath
Speaker 2: it sounds like a hard place to make a living
Speaker 3: hard place to make a living and if you've driven across central Nevada across the basins at that time of year there's not a whole lot of forage and that's still somewhat of a mystery of what this bee uses in nature that's native where it nests naturally it's a bit of a question mark because those areas are so disturbed now for the most
Speaker 2: part oh we don't know what used to be there I suppose right okay so this bee
Speaker 3: is an interesting bee it's a gorgeous bee the abdomen has bands of pearly green or pearly yellow or golden uh iridescence there you really can't in the Pacific Northwest you can immediately recognize a species with one glance of what they look like we're certainly looking at a specimen under a scope it's a little well close to a honey bee size maybe a little bit smaller than a honey bee oh so a lot bigger than these leaf-cutting bees yes the leaf-cutting bees are quite a bit smaller okay little tikes even amongst leaf-cutting bees they're little tikes mm-hmm alkali bees are more modest size bee it's a ground nester it's the only intensively managed ground nesting bee in the world even though the majority maybe 70 percent of our bee species are ground nesters this is the only one we've successfully
Speaker 2: managed on a large scale it's you've got all these bees all around the world and probably a lot of them are doing pollination of agricultural crops yet this is the only one
Speaker 3: this is the only one we can manage in large numbers successfully oh so now for small orchards and things like that you can have free pollination from various ground-nesting species that fly when your crop blooms and are good pollinators or something huge like alfalfa seed fields what happens is that those ground nesters become diluted in numbers
Speaker 2: because you need a lot of bees you were telling us there are some more flowers per right in this crop than any other crop so they would just take a lot of bees you have a couple of bees nesting in the ditch they just they make you know the collective pollen nectar but they won't be chipping all these flowers at once
Speaker 3: yeah they would might do a nice pollination job and it would be far less than a drop in the bucket for the yield the estimate that I've made some others have is an alkali bee in her tire it's not very it's humbling in her entire lifetime all of her foraging all of her flower visitations she sets about 25 cents worth of seed oh wow okay so about a quarter pound or a third of a pound of alfalfa which is a lot of seeds
Speaker 2: so I'm imagining in these first of all I don't get so salt beds like you're growing alfalfa you're not gonna have salt beds
Speaker 3: no there it's it's what the Romans used to do to their enemies when they didn't want them to grow crops anymore they would salt oh really places where they grew and that was the end of it that's how you starved out your enemy
Speaker 2: so they take some of their cropland and they salt it so for this bee
Speaker 3: huh about one you need to for about every hundred acres of alfalfa you need to have maybe an acre that you devote to these ground-nesting bees okay when you concentrate them in one place where you can manage for them and they need to be in soil this is this was bill stevens genius working with soil scientists he figured all this out the bee needs to be in a soil with a high silt content and that's because silt's more than sands or clays are good at wicking moisture oh so if you have a water table at six feet in the silt soil will wick
Speaker 2: moisture all the way to the surface because what this bee wants is damp soil the nest in but it doesn't want is be rained on okay and it's in the height of the summer in eastern Oregon or eastern Washington where it's very dry dusty okay the other thing which bill figured out is not everybody's got a place with that shallow water table at least where you want to put these bees now how do you provide that well what bill figured out is ways in which you could sub-urinate those soils and at the time was before we had pipe for it so he did it with gravel layers
Speaker 3: and then the water would wick up so he'd set those up at a depth of a couple two or three feet four feet and then you could make the damp soils that the bee want then on the surface right now our best estimate for it certainly when you're establishing these beds is you want about a quarter pound of salt per square foot every three years god it's a lot of salt it comes in walla near tushy between walla and the tri-cities out there is where most of the seed growing is done it's about a third I think of all alfalfa seed grown in us is grown in that county uh-huh they will buy lake salt from the evaporators at the great salt lake they'll be in one-ton bags on railroad cars and they'll be 30 to 41-ton bags that they'll distribute
Speaker 2: amongst the growers every couple of years and then salt these bed they're white with the salt and the idea is that you are before the bees emerge or ideally before the winter precipitation ends or even do it in the fall you want that to soak into the top of the soil uh-huh you don't want pellets of salt out there you want to be soaked in a nice crust on there and you get a crust it's actually a soft yeah if you don't if it doesn't soak in you get a crust and the bees can't get through that if it soaks in you get this very I guess you'd call it a slick or smooth surface that the bees can easily dig into okay if you don't salt the surface this was some of bill steven's insight calcium salts in those soils calcium carbonates and the like will make a very fluffy dusty surface that the bees digging through that powder that's hard on them they really can't dig in it well by putting
Speaker 3: these monovalent salts sodium salts on the surface flatten it down and make this nice damp surface that the bees can easily get through okay and if it's properly moistened although it's a fairly big bee they only go down about eight to ten inches to make their cells their underground cells and because they're not a cavity-nesting bee they make an interesting cluster of cells that about that depth with damp silt you can almost carve damp silt if you took out a cube of silt you could carve it in not perfectly into a beautiful sculpture but you can carve it with a knife and it keeps its shape what that allows growers to do is they have a custom built rig for that they can put onto the where a bucket would go on a backhoe that works like a cubic foot cookie cutter oh you can press that down into the damp silt soil back it out and the cube cubic foot cube of soil comes out with it with all the nest cells in there
Speaker 2: which would be the larva that has eaten their
Speaker 3: provisions right and it's got a hydraulic plunger in the back okay and they have cubic foot boxes made to receive the cubic foot cubes of soil you array those on pallets you stack the pallets on a flatbed trailer you've built a new nesting bed somewhere with sub-irrigation with trenches in it that are a foot apart or foot wide and a foot deep you unload all these you pack in a couple thousand of these cores into the new nesting bed burn off the cardboard pack the soil around it Make sure the water's right and you have a new nesting bed.
Isn't that something? And these nesting beds can last. The oldest one, there's a number of them out there that the growers' fathers put in.
And those are growers who are in their 50s and 60s now. The oldest nesting bed now, it's a medium-sized bed. It's about 65 years old and it's got half a million bees in it.
Speaker 2: You know, I was just talking to somebody, you know, at Almond's this year. It's been a tough year for pollination. A lot of beekeepers have lost colonies and growers are paying, I think, $200, $225 a colony every year having to spend them. Here you have growers that have put this one-time investment in and getting a 50-year return out of it. That's really remarkable.
Speaker 3: Right, but the cost of periodic cost of salt and a pump, if you don't have a shallow water table, then a pump to run water through your sub-irrigation tubes. Well, that sounds like a good deal. And yeah, and they come up every year. You don't also have to go through all the incubation stuff, the buying, storage, everything.
Speaker 2: They just emerge at the same time. That's a good coincidence. Yes, it's a really good coincidence.
Speaker 3: Although it may be that over the course of 50 bee generations there's been selection for perfect timing. Because when they're out there where they grow alfalfa, it's alfalfa seed almost to the horizon. Before alfalfa seed, after alfalfa seed, except for some stray vacant areas that have bindweed, there is nothing in flower. And so if you're an alkali bee who comes out two weeks late or three weeks late, you're not leaving any progeny.
Speaker 2: So this is in the natural history of the alkali bee. This is probably its golden era.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yes. The biggest aggregation out there, I ceased censoring the aggregations, I think eight years ago, nine years ago. And the time in the valley, I estimated pretty accurate estimate of about 16 million nesting alkali bees.
Oh, wow. And they bring up, as I recollect, about 25 grams of soil, little volcano of soil as they excavate their nest. How many of these are there per meter squared?
The densest I've ever measured, and it took me a long time, was about a thousand or 1,200 nests per square yard. Whaa. Holes on top of holes. It's very hard to count when they're that close together.
Very tight, okay. And collectively, that 16 million bees are bringing 96 tons of soil to the surface across the Tushy Valley each year. They're astronomical numbers. It's the oldest nesting aggregations of any known for any bee in the world. They're the largest nesting aggregations known for any bee anywhere in the world. And it's some of the densest nesting known of any bee anywhere in the world.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I guess, you know, people outside the region, we do have listeners outside the region like, well, I'm gonna come up with my own version of this. There's gotta be some other bee in the helic today that I can just turn into this. This sounds like a great idea. Should they try?
Speaker 3: Well, there's always the possibility because before the alkali bee was managed, there was no managed ground nesting bee. There's been lots of attempts. Couple things just like with the alfalfa leaf cutting bee, there's some peculiar, additional peculiar traits with the alkali bee. One of them, say nesting these soils that you can excavate, you don't excavate, you can punch out cells. If you simply dug it up with a backhoe, you'd smash all the cells and jumble them. Oh, you can get a cube of them out.
Right, you could move it and it'd be a mess. So you can build new nesting aggregations for this bee. In addition, and it's a biological peculiarity for which we have no understanding, almost all other genera of bees have the equivalent associate of another species of bee or genus of bees who function like the cowbird does, their nest parasites. They don't collect pollen and nectar for themselves, but their larvae eat pollen and nectar like all bees do. The way evolutionarily that's solved or the way it works out is that they sneak their eggs in the other bees' nests. As you start clumping up nests, such that the holes are right side by side, you don't have to search for a nest. You can be very successful as a parasite and they have lots of eggs.
Speaker 2: People in Western Oregon sometimes see this when you have these Adrena colonies on people's lawns. You soon see a lot of these flies and
Speaker 3: other waspy looking things, the genus Nomada. And actually they get misclassified, missorted as wasps in collections before people look at them under a scope.
Speaker 2: So these are the cowbirds that are coming in. And so I guess that colony of those ground nesters will go through cycles. They won't be as dependable. Go through cycles.
Speaker 3: For whatever bizarre reason, the genus Alkalai bee and other members of its genus have no dedicated kleptoparasitic bee. I see. So you can build these huge aggregations and no parasitic bee will take it down.
Okay. There's some other things that will do harm to them like that. And over the years, Bill Stephen and as well as scientists at Washington State University and Utah State University have solved those other problems in very effective ways that have endured.
Speaker 2: We always ask about the health of honey bees and we talk about health of native bees. How is the health of these Alkalai bees? Seems fine.
Speaker 3: The challenge with Alkalai bees, part of the reason why their numbers over the years, their management's concentrated in Walla Walla County is that because they've been tried and new nesting aggregations established. The student of Bill Stephen's Phil Torshio established them in California for pollinating alfalfa.
They were at one time there were a fair number of nesting beds across southern Idaho. But this bee, like the alfalfa leaf cutting bee, is not a specialist. So it will go to various plant species for pollen.
It's just that it can make do with alfalfa. And it's a bigger bee. So I've measured it flying out a mile to forage from its nesting sites as it has to. I've measured that from wild aggregations in Utah and from managed aggregations. And within a mile's flight range in Walla Walla, there's still an alfalfa. And so the growers coordinate very well because they know they could kill their neighbors bees if they're not careful.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see. So in other places, there's other things. Mixes of crops.
Speaker 3: Crops may not need bees. They get sprayed during bloom. When Alkalai bees are flying, this is what happened in California. It's thought it was a switch between either tomato to cotton or cotton to tomato. Both of them, which especially cotton can take really harsh insecticides, especially back 30 years ago. And the irrigation suddenly one day was gone.
Oh, that's tragic. In southern Idaho, the kind of thing you'd like to promote, which is a lot of mixed agriculture, all kinds of small, relatively small farm fields with all sorts of things they're growing. Well, this be able to tangle with that. It's actually a big monoculture to coordinate when you do pest control is actually beneficial to this bee. Even though it's backward from what we think of for everything else about agriculture. Over this bee, it really does best when in all directions, the food sources are safe. Okay.
Speaker 2: Well, I have been to the Tushy Walla Walla area during their flight. And I also noticed that the grows are really protective. They've got these signs all over the roads telling people to slow down, which is a peculiar thing to see as you're driving a country road and coming across this big banner.
Speaker 3: It's probably, and I might be proven wrong, it may be the only place in which posted speed limits are for the benefit of a bee. Sorry. What they found is that if you go faster than about 25 miles an hour, instead of the bee following the slipstream of the car, if it's flying over the road, it splats against your windshield. And where they put up these signs is where some of these nesting aggregations are near the rural road, the county road, which is kind of neat, I agree. The other thing out there is that there are some beekeepers, a few who pile large apiaries in near these alfalfa fields off of the growers property in order to take advantage of all that bloom without having to plant it. And Walla Walla County may be one of the very few counties in the country in which there's a county ordinance for maximum size of an apiary.
Is that right? And on the Oregon side, the last I checked, there was no such ordinance and you would see apiaries of four or five hundred colonies dumped off. And it's because the alfalfa seed growers don't want the honeybees stealing the nectar that's needed for reproduction of their bee.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see, of course. And it is such a great, someone from the Canadian prairies, you know, with a, we would often have maybe two or three cuts. But after that, they let the plant grow up to establish its stand for the next year. You would get a great honey flow off those apiaries.
Speaker 3: And yet it tells you about the ability of bees in scale because for you or I to get nectar out of those flowers, it's a dab. It's such a tiny amount.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, we were talking about this previously, as you know, when honeybees are on alfalfa, they get nectar, but they're obviously not getting any pollen from it. Not getting
Speaker 3: any pollen. That's, it's a great honey crop. Unlike, say, yellow sweet clover, where's a fabulous honey crop and they can get pollen off that. It's a nutritious pollen, but not off of alfalfa.
Speaker 2: We've had a previous guest, Ron Mishka, on the show, who remembers having these massive sweet clover blooms in southern Saskatchewan when he was growing up, made beekeeping very easy.
Speaker 3: Very easy and in some ways beekeepers more than ever need a place to summer their bees now that's safe from insecticides, especially some modern chemistries that we have suspicions about. And where there's plenty of bloom and it's reliable, the yellow sweet clover is a biennial. So the first establishment year, it's still pretty robust plant.
But that second year, when it comes back from a taproot, I don't believe it's stoppable. So it's a very reliable crop and it blooms for a long time. For alfalfa leaf cutting bee, it is the single best floral resource in terms of reproduction of any that have been tested.
Speaker 2: I remember back when I was in Lethbridge, Weldon Hobbs would have his shelters up on sweet clover bloom and get really great reproductive rates on...
Speaker 3: I mentioned the states, but actually Weldon Hobbs from Canada was another important scientist in developing the management practices and pest control practices in terms of parasites and predators and all for alfalfa leaf cutting bee. Besides being a very good bumblebee biologist, did some of the best work for wild bumblebees.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's like, that's his dad. That's his dad, Gordon Hobbs. Well, there is dispute among southern Albertans. Was it the fillpots or the Hobbs that brought the bees to dispute that I don't want to get in the middle of?
Anyways, brought the leaf cutters to southern Alberta. So let's take another break. We have this set of questions we ask all our guests. I'm deadly curious about what your answers are going to be. Very good. And we're back.
Very short break. So one of the questions we ask our guests is, do you have a book recommendation? Is there a book that you want our listeners to know about?
Speaker 3: A fun one and is a fair chance your public library might have it. There was a French rural school teacher in the mid 1800s, a contemporary of Darwin's who corresponded with Darwin. By the name of Jean Henry, and I'm told his pronounced Fabre.
It looks like a Fabre. F-A-B-R-E. Who was just had questions and was motivated and did all sorts of experiments with bees. And maybe some with wasps and wrote a series of books that were widely translated maybe the 1940s or 1950s and published a lot double day published cheap books of them.
Lots and lots. One of them is entitled The Mason Bees. And it is fascinating reading because you realize that this guy had very clever experiments. Very nice writing, very readable bed time reading and you'll be entertained. It's just fascinating. And you think it was that long ago that here was somebody interested in solitary bees and everything about their biology, how they figure out where their nest is, how an offspring knows which way to leave if it's in a tunnel nest.
How far can they orient from a nest and find their way home? Just fascinating. But Jean Henry Fabre or Fabre, look for the books in your public library. Look for used copies.
Speaker 2: A real giant in entomology too did a lot of behavior work across and always spurred by this curiosity and this great writing style.
Speaker 3: I think he was a pioneer in insect behavior at the time. Experimental research in insect behavior.
Speaker 2: Real genius. You know we had a, we just came from this summit and conference and one of the speakers there, Ron Spendle from Washington County, used the word, Uncredentialed Scientist as somebody who is not part of the institution but does really good work. And I guess Fabre was a father.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he would have been the equivalent of a high school teacher here. And, I don't know if Ron mentioned it also, but the flip side of that is here was Charles Darwin who quickly rose to fame and was a giant in his field. And he writing in long hand with quill pens, which is not fast, he would respond to all of Fabre's letters. They had a long correspondence among all the many, many correspondences that Darwin maintained. Because you never know when there's a Fabre or Ron out there who has really neat insights as a scientist to throw that away because, oh well, they're not credentialed, you're missing out. And you never know.
There's no predicting when someone puts in touch that way. And Fabre was interesting too because he was a staunch Catholic. So at the time with the Catholic Church, evolution was not an option. And so he was forever, both you'll see if you read the Mason Bees, making critiques of Darwin's thinking. He says, no, Darwin's a very smart man, but this evolution thing, he's way wrong.
Speaker 1: And here's why from what I've observed with bees. And sometimes in their correspondence, he would needle them a little bit and then Darwin would politely offer an alternative explanation. But each one careful not to cause too much offense. I don't know if they ever met. I think it was just the correspondence over the decades.
Speaker 2: You know, Darwin had a number of religious figures around him, including himself. And it was interesting how he could correspond and be kind of respectful. I remember hearing there was another person in that milieu who was very aggressive with it. Who Darwin was, how do I pick it up? Huxley. Yes. Huxley was very aggressive. Huxley was Darwin's bulldog.
Speaker 3: It's been quoted by somebody. And Huxley would be, Darwin was reticent. He did not like debate. He did not like discord. And also was afraid for his wife. His wife was quite religious and he thought, boy, I bring out this. I am inexorably led to my theory of evolution based on what's before me in terms of evidence.
And yet I really don't want to go there because my wife is going to be upset by this if I go public. Because it counters the Christian doctrine of the time. So Huxley was the one who would hold these huge public lectures.
Loved it. I mean, it's an interesting thought compared to today. But these huge public lectures, working men would come to them and he was engaging and lots of demonstrations. And if there was critiques from scholars who tried to debunk Darwin, he would take them on. In open debate or in writing.
Speaker 2: And yet we have all these people who are quietly working away and getting all this data and sort of building this case that just became insurmountable. I guess Fabre is a great example of maybe somebody who was collecting all these observations and stitching this together and really enhancing our ability to understand how the world works. Yeah, exactly. Fascinating guy.
Speaking of works, we have a question we asked our guests about, do you have a go-to tool, a tool that you'd find indispensable or maybe it's the Dr. Jim Cain tool you're known for? I don't know.
Speaker 3: And it occurs to me there's two of them. I've not no tool that I'm known for particularly that I can think of. The one for anybody interested in insects is insects are small relative to our visual acuity. And so some means of magnification. A hand lens, some of those little magnifier clear boxes you can put a B in. Ultimately an inexpensive microscope or borrowed microscope, at least a hand lens.
Something like that will greatly appreciate, enhance your appreciation of any insect. What makes a good hand lens? Probably 10x magnification. And if you read online, there's several different ways of arranging lenses. I don't remember their names to achieve those magnifications. You want something where it's not a center, only at the very center of the lens are things in focus, but you want a broader focus.
And that will mean frankly a hand lens. I always have one in my pocket whenever I'm hiking because flowers the same way. The other thing which for pollination work is critical.
And there's various ways of solving this, but you need some kind of a mesh bag with a drawstring or something like that. They keep bees away from the flower that you want to manually pollinate without subsequent visitation. With pollen where you know where it came from, they come from the same plant. Is the plant self fertile? Or do I only get seed set or fruit set if I bring pollen from another different individual in which case the plant's an obligate outcrosser?
Those are very key questions. Almonds or rabbit eye blueberry. But almonds for instance are vegetatively propagated and they're self infertile. So pollen has to move between cultivars. And if they're rose, that's a much bigger demand for a pollinator than alfalfa where the pollinators just got to be moved around.
Speaker 2: I've always thought this would be a great tool for a school teacher trying to introduce students to the idea of pollination and the sort of differences. Tell us a little bit about these bags. What do they look like?
Speaker 3: Mine, although I've got some other ones now. Mine are about, just because I've worked with a variety of, I've worked with different crops over the years. Cranberries, rabbit eye blueberries, squashes. So mine are, well maybe the size of an unfolded wallet.
Okay. And they've got a drawstring at one end and it's a fine mesh and very flexible or limber material. It's not like window screening.
More flexible than that. There's various places you might find it in a fabric store, something that works this way. If you use something as too coarse a mesh, you get an interesting alternative experiment. I did that with rabbit eye blueberries in Alabama and I encountered bumble bees with, this is what I think it's, organ-D mesh. Okay.
Maybe a eighth inch mesh and they were creasing the bags, pulling them and tugging at them to crease them, the fold to crease the inside and then running their proboscis through the mesh to drink out of the flowers. Okay. And compromising my exclusion. So you need something finer than that. The ones I have, I contracted with our secretary in Alabama at the time to sew them for me. I provided the fabric and she charged me a buck a piece for the labor. You don't have her email, do you? Not anymore, but you might find someone else who could do that. Okay.
Speaker 2: And they endure forever. Yeah, yeah, you build them and then you've, yeah, they're not complicated.
Speaker 3: And then you figure out a quick closure and the drawstring is much faster than twist ties that you have to tie on and then you have to untie. But you could do that for tiny flowers, the mesh stuff they make tea bags out of. Oh, of course.
And you can get blank tea bags from, I think even some of the craft stores. Oh yeah. So that's another option. Oh, that's a great. Something like that. Just some kind of a fine mesh fabric bag doesn't overheat if you're working in places with intense sun.
Speaker 2: Those are two great tools. They really allow anybody to go out and really explore things.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And then many of our plants, especially our wild plants, we don't know if they're self-incompatible or not. Oh, so we can. Or self-pollinating. That happens too. Where the flower, our common bean in the garden is self-pollinating. It pollinates in the bud. So if you put these bags over your bean flowers, you'll get full-sized green beans with all the seeds inside. Oh, we darned.
Speaker 2: Well, we could get out there and start getting some of this information. Okay, our last question. This is a tough question, especially for someone like yourself who has really studied the broad range of different pollinators. Do you have a favorite? Poof.
Speaker 3: Most bees. It's sort of like having a favorite bird if you're an ornithologist.
Speaker 2: Can you narrow it down? But alkali bees got to be amongst them. And the joy of the alkali bees, besides the fact that it's a gorgeous bee, but the joy of it is you can, you would have to ask the growers permission.
And they'll be reticent to allow it. But with a shovel, you can dig out one of the, a core like I described. Slide it carefully into a box, bring it back to the lab, set the block of soil up on a counter. And then very carefully dissect into it to reveal the nest cells. For all other ground nesting bees, you have your head down in a hole in the ground. Trying to follow, say for alkali, be a tunnel the diameter of a pencil as it goes weaving down through tree roots and rocks without losing track of it.
And for smaller bees, it can be tiny diameter. And then you're on your hands and knees bending into a tunnel, bending your back, trying to see down in the dark what's going on. Clippers in hand to clot up roots or a hatchet.
Speaker 3: Or something to pry out rocks. And you don't know initially how deep they go. If it's a new species has never been dug up before. So you're digging with a spoon at the surface. Either you're digging with a spoon at the surface and come to find out this bee, nested three feet down. And you spend all afternoon digging a hole with a spoon. Or you go after it with a shovel and you wonder, gosh, where'd the nests go? And it turns out it was in that first shovel full.
So it's a labor of love. And if you ever come across descriptions of the morphology of ground nests, of ground nesting bees, realize that someone really had to work at that.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, and I, you know, one of the great, it's still in the OSU catalog is Bill Stephen, Phil Torshios and Ned Boheart's book for the Bees of the Pacific Northwest. It has some beautiful diagrams of nests.
Speaker 3: And that's been all scanned as PDF on the website.
Speaker 2: It's there available free. It's a great resource.
Speaker 3: It has comparative illustrations for things like egg placement on provision masses, because it varies with the species. All sorts of things like that that I don't think you'll yet find anything like it in the world. It's a fabulous book and it's specifically relevant to the Northwest. So if you can quote everything out of it and learn all it's between those pages, you will be an expert in bees, I guarantee. I can't, I still have to go back to it all the time for new questions I have and find out what they already knew.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share the story of the Alkalabies. We would love to get you back again. You've got some great pollination stories in the Pacific Northwest with raspberry. We've got stories of sagebrush theft restoration. I'm looking forward to having you as a guest again.
That will be another visit. Thank you. 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.
It makes us more visible, which helps others discover pollination. See you next week. you
Dr. Cane is a Research Entomologist with the USDA’s Pollinating Insect-Biology, Management, Systematics Research in Logan, UT. Dr. Cane has been interested in comparative studies of solitary bees for 30 years, beginning with the evolutionary origins and use of lipid exocrine secretions to attract mates, repel predators, supplement larval diets, waterproof, and disinfect their nests. Work with these bees naturally led to study of their pollination services in both wildland and agricultural settings. A bee species’ pollination value reflects its sustainable abundance, wherein habitat carrying capacity is capped by nesting opportunities and foraging success. Dr. Cane has applied his long-term interest in conservation to help measure, understand, and mitigate human factors that can shift nesting and foraging opportunities for bee communities such as climate change, urban sprawl, habitat fragmentation, and rangeland rehabilitation.
Listen in to learn about the two key pollinators of alfalfa seed: the alfalfa leafcutter bee and alkali bee.
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“There is no crop has more flowers per acre than alfalfa – way into the millions per acre – and less pollen and nectar per flower.” – Jim Cane
Show Notes:
- Why alfalfa is such a prominent feed stock
- What makes alfalfa a specialized crop for pollinators
- Why honey bees are not ideal pollinators for alfalfa
- How farmers learned to make use of alfalfa leaf-cutting bees
- Why alkali bees are the eighth wonder of the world
- Whether or not other species of bees can be managed like the alkali bee
- The challenges of managing alkali bees
- Qualities to look for in a hand lens for bee observation
“An alkali bee, in her entire lifetime– all of her foraging, all of her flower visitation, she sets about 25 cents worth of seed, about a quarter pound or a third of a pound of alfalfa seed.” – Jim Cane
Links Mentioned:
- Learn more about Pollinating Insect-Biology, Management, Systematics Research (USDA Lab)
- The Alfalfa Leafcutting Bee, Megachile rotundata: The World’s Most Intensively Managed Solitary Bee (2011, Pitts-Singer and Cane)
- Gardening for Native Bees in Utah and Beyond (2013, Cane)
- Check out Exotic Bee ID (USDA)
- A native ground-nesting bee (Nomia melanderi) sustainably managed to pollinate alfalfa across an intensively agricultural landscape (2008, Cane)
- Making the Bed Just Right for Alkali Bees (2017, Suszkiw)
- The Biology and External Morphology of Bees (1969)
- The Mason-Bees (1914) PDF
- The Mason-Bees (1914) Audiobook
