95 Lincoln Best – The Oregon Bee Atlas (Year 1 Update). (in English)

Speaker 1: From the Oregon State University Extension Service, this is Pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and concerned citizens making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators. I'm your host, Dr. Adoni Melopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health in the Department of Horticulture.

Frequent listeners of Pollination have heard of this thing called the Oregon Bee Atlas. We're always hinting at it out the show. We're saying, oh, this episode will help volunteers in the Oregon Bee Atlas, but we've never really talked about it. And I thought this would be a great opportunity to welcome back Lincoln Best, who is the lead taxonomist of the Oregon Bee Atlas. And for the last few months, he's been going through collections of native bees that are volunteers spread across Oregon, have collected meticulously curated. He's going through and giving final identifications on these bees.

This is a great chance for us to see and get a first glimpse of what was found in that first year. And let me tell you, there's some remarkable bees. I also want to mention that Lincoln is going to be leading our Oregon Bee School, our five-day native bee taxonomy course. Here in July, there's going to be two courses run on the 8th to 12th of July and 15th of the 19th. Registration is going to be on the Oregon Bee Project website, probably starting next week.

If you're interested in native bee taxonomy, you really need to sign up for this course. And finally, we're coming up on a hundred episodes, and I think there's no better way to celebrate than with all of you. We're going to have an episode where your questions are going to be central. We're going to invite an expert panel of people to answer your questions. You can leave your questions, preferably on my voicemail machine, and the number is 541-737-3139. 541-737-3139.

And we'll leave that on the show notes. Or if you're shy, email us at info at OregonBeeProject.org. Really looking forward to hearing from you. And I'm going to hand it over to Lincoln Best to talk about the Oregon Bee Atlas. I am delighted to have back with us Lincoln Best, who's the taxonomous with the Oregon Bee Atlas. Welcome to pollination.

Thanks, Adoni. We've always hinted about the Oregon Bee Atlas on the show. It's like Snuffleupagus, and nobody's ever seen the Oregon Bee Atlas on pollination, which is a shame because we're all really deeply involved. Can you kind of tell us what it is? Like, what is the Oregon Bee Atlas? What is it trying to do? Why is it needed?

Speaker 2: So the Oregon Bee Atlas is a citizen science initiative whose goal is to document the Bee Fauna of Oregon State. It's a lofty goal. And the way the Atlas is set up is that we have been going around, and I should say, Rich Little and Joe Angler and others have been going around the state and training hundreds of Oregonians on insect collection methods for native bees, data collection, teaching people how to prepare museum specimens of native bees, and to collect all the appropriate and necessary data. And the value in this is that we're educating probably thousands of people. We're producing new data for hundreds and hundreds of species of native bees found throughout the state.

And the great challenge is that there's no institution with the capacity to do statewide intensive surveying. And so by engaging the public and by recruiting hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers, we have this enormous capacity to generate data and knowledge related to the state bee fauna that might be impossible otherwise.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a big state. There's a lot of different eco zones in the state, like being able to cover it and find these bees at least come up with an inventory.

We had the episode a couple episodes back with Casey Delphia and Montana, and she sort of talked about like a 15 year time horizon. Like it's not, it's a very hard task to go through and find everybody.

Speaker 2: And it's easy to document common species. It's really difficult to really assess the extreme biodiversity that exists here. We're not sure exactly how many different kinds of bees live in the state of Oregon, but we suspect that there's several hundred. And to try and conceptualize that is very difficult. And so what I tell people is if we're to just put the names on paper, you know, a sheet of paper has about 25 lines on it. And so you're looking at 20 or 30 pages, just of names. And that's not including where in the state they are or when they fly or what plants they visit. That's just the basics of just listing all the species is it's just an enormous amount of volume and biodiversity. And it's really quite incredible.

Speaker 1: OK, that's OK. So you do need these well trained people. And I guess this was the first year. And when you arrived here just after the summit, there was a mountain of Schmidt boxes that were the product of the first year of collection.

Speaker 2: Right. And so when I got to Oregon in February, there was something like 100 Schmidt boxes of native bee specimens, beautifully prepared specimens with all of their data on little data tags. And so it's my responsibility to identify all this material and add the taxonomic data or the names of these critters to the biodiversity database that's been populated by our volunteers.

And during their collections, they also were using often I naturalist to record all the plants or flowers that the bees were collected off. So we really do have quite a robust robust data set. So OK, 100 Schmidt boxes.

Speaker 1: 100 Schmidt boxes. And then what do you do from there? Like what's the next thing you got this big? It's like it must. They're about the size of a candy box, a chocolate box. We must open it up and you see all these little chocolates. What do you do?

Speaker 2: So you have to just bite into that chocolate box one bite at a time. And also, you know, it's like a bowl of Skittles. Like obviously you're going to eat the red ones first. And so what I do as part of the curatorial process and what I did here was the first thing I did was I went through all the boxes and I pulled out all of the bumblebees and put them into one kind of pile. OK. And then I would work through the bumblebees. I would sex them all and then identify them all to species and curate them and then hand them off to one of our lab techs to do the data entry, which is to update our database with all of the names. And we found that our volunteers had collected 22 species of bumblebees from the state.

Speaker 1: Twenty two. Oh, wow, that's remarkable. They're that's getting close to probably the total number of species. It is. OK. All right. And so was there anything? Were they all did you all expect to find all of these or were any of them unexpected finds?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so we did find some pretty cool bumblebees. And I know that for a lot of our Atlas volunteers, bumblebees weren't a focus. And so a lot of our volunteers were looking for more solitary species, but they did produce about 1400 bumblebee specimens.

And four of those, I think, are noteworthy here. The volunteers turned in a bunch of bombus morsoni, morson's bumblebee, which is kind of a. In Oregon, it's a high desert species, primarily. They turned in bombus oxidant, talus, the western bumblebee from three counties.

Speaker 1: And that and that's a bumblebee that we've seen their range kind of contract.

Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of conservation concern related to the western bumblebee throughout its range in the US and Canada. All right. Our volunteers also turned in specimens of bombus wagons and bombus silvicula. And these are two species which are likely new state records, meaning that as far as I know, there's no data for these bumblebees having ever been found in Oregon before. We don't, which is pretty cool. So very cool. You know, just by curing the bumblebees, we find that we may have added some species to the state fauna, which is remarkable.

Speaker 1: OK, so you did this first pass through the boxes. You pulled out all the red skittles, which were the bumblebees. Right. And now you what did you do next? Where did your attention turn to?

Speaker 2: So I've been here working on curating this material for about eight weeks. And I have been through many genera at this point.

Speaker 1: OK, so let's just skip to some of the highlights. So you were going you were going almost like family by family. Yeah. And then tell us about some of the cool things that you found in those families.

Speaker 2: So we found Agapostamen mellaventress, which is a green sweat bee that's not often recorded in the state. That was found by Tom Robertson and Harnie County.

Speaker 1: So with those, those are the those are the green metallic sweat bees, which are we have a bunch of like viracents. We have a bunch of common ones, but this is not a common one.

Speaker 2: That's right. So mellaventress is one that's a lot more rare than the remaining species that we commonly find in the state. And just as an example, we had maybe eight hundred specimens of Agapostamen or green sweat bees turned in and four specimens out of eight hundred were this particular species.

Speaker 1: Oh, it's a good lesson. You have to catch eight hundred to find these four.

Speaker 2: That's often the case. And so what we find in any general sampling or in trapping is that you have this kind of standard species abundance curve. And what that is, is you'll have two, three, four species that are really abundant and represent 80 percent of the individuals. And then you have this tail of the curve where you have many species that are very uncommon. And so in any sampling, the bulk of your material is going to be these really abundant, common things. And then for me, all the interesting things are in the tails.

Speaker 1: And so this unusual Agapostamen was found in Harnie. It was found in Harnie County. Fantastic day. So it's nice to see people venturing. You know, there's a lot of these citizen science projects are really centered in urban areas, but it's nice to see people like going right out to the eastern corner of the state. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So another interesting critter that we found, Judy Maxwell found a really nice series of Seratina Sequoia and Josephine County. And Seratina are small carpenter bees. They're little emerald green bees that often have cream colored markings on their face.

Speaker 1: It kind of like for someone has never seen them before, it looked like a little flying ant about the size of it.

Speaker 2: They really are the size of an ant. They're not really shiny and metallic, but they are this emerald green color. And so that species of bee in particular is thought to be a floral specialist on Clarkia.

Speaker 1: Oh, farewell to spring and its relatives. That's right. Okay. So that because this is another example Agapostamen is a very common bee and seratina, the genus Seratina that found in every yard. But there we were finding our, the volunteers are finding some very rare species in that group.

Speaker 2: That's right. And so our volunteers turned in maybe a thousand specimens of Seratina. Probably 900 of those are Seratina acanthus, which love to nest in the Himalayan blackberry canes. And so you might imagine that these things are everywhere and there's tons of them.

Speaker 1: Right. But if you find a thousand Seratina from all over the state, you're going to find 15 of this really interesting species. Great. Okay. But what do we got next? That's a really on a roll here. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So I worked through almost all of the genera in the family Megakilidae. And so that's the leaf cutter bee family. And we found just within the tribe, Ozmiini, we found a whole bunch of interesting genera of cousins of the mason bees. Okay.

Speaker 1: This was just one sec. Hold a sec. So Ozmi and Ozmiini. What's the difference?

Speaker 2: So the mason bees are considered to be the genus Ozmiia. Got it. In a strict sense. The tribe Ozmiini is a higher level of classification that includes multiple genera of closely related groups.

Speaker 1: So it'd be like hominids and were the, the only primates.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. You got it. Okay. All right. So in, in the Ozmiani, we found several. Really cool genera. We found Ashmediella, hoplitis, chelostoma. We found about 35 species of Ozmiia and we found atop Ozmiia and we found protosmia. So it's a real incredible diversity within that tribe.

Speaker 1: So let's start. So there's for people listeners who have mason bees, they're not the only species of Ozmiia. There's tell us a little bit about some of the Ozmias that people.

Speaker 2: Sure. So I spent a few weeks working through the Ozmiia and I was able to identify about 35 species. There's at least 15 more that I couldn't put names on. And so our volunteers turned in probably more than 50 species of mason bees. And we suspect there's more than 75 species in the state.

Speaker 1: I'm always poking my head in the lab and the one that I really loved, because we are also getting, we'll talk about that maybe a little bit later, we're emerging bees from these trap nests we put around the state, but those little tiny green, do you think they were kinkady? Yeah.

Speaker 2: So there's, there's about six or seven species of Ozmiia that are kind of small and really brilliantly metallic. And the one that's really common in the kind of Northwest in more arid habitats is Ozmiia kinkady. And it is four to six millimeters to the tiny little bee brilliant kind of light green, really brilliantly metallic.

Speaker 1: Beautiful bee. Okay. So tell us about some of these other Ozmiia. And so the Kila, Kila, Stoma, you said

Speaker 2: Kila Stoma are Rocky and Tony out in Redmond, your band. They produced all of our specimens of the genus Kila Stoma and they found two species, minutum and facility. Kila Stoma are really long and skinny bees. Kila Stoma minutum in particular is like smaller than a grain of rice. Oh, and just like a leaf cutter bee, it carries its pollen under its abdomen. And both of these species are really faithful to facility. Cecilia.

Speaker 1: Okay. It reminds me of, we had that episode with Aaron Anderson and he surveyed all the gardeners. He showed them mugshots of different plants and people when they saw facility, they were thumbs down, but you're telling us for biodiversity.

Speaker 2: Cecilia is two thumbs up. I would guess that in Oregon, well over a hundred species of native bees will visit the genus.

Speaker 1: Wow. Cecilia. Holy moly. And so you're right. They're not showy. They're not big, but they support just a remarkable amount of biodiversity or species of native bees, including these two Kila Stomas that Rocky and Tony found.

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. And so if I, if I had to pick just a single plant in order to support, you know, the biodiversity of native bees, I would probably select Cecilia because it supports tons of generalist foragers and it also supports tons of specialist foragers. And so let's say, let's say you had two plants. If I had two plants, the second one might be a stragglass. Like I'm going to stragglass aficionado.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's right. We, in his episode, he was talking, he was talking up a stragglass. Yeah, it's great stuff. Okay. Cool. All right. So Kila Stoma and over in Redmond, they found the only specimens of it to be species. The other one you talked about was Ash Mediella. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Ash Mediella is another genus of osmium, so closely related to mason bees, mostly their little black bees with white hair bands, and they carry their pollen under their abdomen, like a leaf cutter bee.

Okay. And our volunteers turned in at least eight species. Um, there's still maybe a dozen specimens that I haven't been able to put names on, but there are undescribed species of Ash Mediella.

So that might be where the problem lies. And Ash Mediella, much like Kila Stoma, are often specialized to some degree on different flowers, including as you might guess, a facelia, a stragglass, and other things. Last August in Eastern Oregon, I was finding a lot of Ash Mediella on a plant called Stefanomeria, which is commonly called wire lettuce. Wire lettuce? Wire lettuce.

Speaker 1: That ain't going to sell. I'll just tell you now.

Speaker 2: That's another, yeah, it's not big and showy, but, you know, it's one of those things that you could maybe intercrop with more showy plants.

Speaker 1: Why do they call it wire lettuce?

Speaker 2: Wire lettuce, um, it's... Where do you find it? It's stems and branches are like wires. Its leaves are really small and it's an aster and the flowers are small and usually white, pink, or purplish or some tone in that spectrum. And you can find it in disturbed, dry sites. In the east of the Cascades? East of the Cascades. I don't know what kind of distribution it has west of the Cascades.

Speaker 1: Okay. So in the Ash Mediella, we found some specialists that were going, that, you know, they were found on these kind of super plants out in the... That's right. Okay. All right.

Speaker 2: And volunteers also turned in three species of atop osmia, which is another one of these obscure osmiani genera bees again carry their pollen under their abdomens. They're often quite specialized on, can you guess? Facilia and astragalus. Definitely Facilia, but in Oregon also, penstemons. Oh, we actually have a species which is really quite rare in the state that visits the penstemon only.

Speaker 1: Okay. Okay. So are we done with the, there's lots of, imagine it was just like the Agapostamen and just like the seratina, there were, you know, lots and lots of bees in this group, but these are some of the highlights. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. All right. Everybody, let's, we'll take a quick break and get something cool to drink. Come on back and we're going to tell you a little bit more about some of the cool findings in the first year of the Oregon Beialis. Okay. We are back. So where are we now with what the volunteers found?

Speaker 2: I'm just going to talk about some genera and species within the family apidae.

Speaker 1: Oh, so this is the group, the bull bees and the honey bees belong to.

Speaker 2: That's right. Okay. So let's see. Our volunteers turned in some specimens of xylocopa. Xylocopa are large carpenter bees. So they're in the same subfamily as the small carpenter bees. I see. But they're way bigger, darkly colored, fast flying, and they excavate holes into solid wood often to make their nests. And so down in Southern Oregon, we had volunteers turn in two species, Tabaniformis and California. Okay. So that was, that was great.

Speaker 1: Okay. So these are like, these are bigger bees. If I remember one thing I hadn't seen them because I think south of Eugene, if north of Eugene, you can't find them. Well, we'll see, I guess volunteers will tell us where that limit is.

They'll tell us where the distribution limit was they sample. But I remember seeing them for the first time in May down in Grant's Pass. And I saw the males and they were whipping around my head. Like they were just like, and they weren't aggressive or nothing. They were just like, they were like hyperly kind of doing circuits around this field.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Patrolling for females more than likely.

Speaker 1: But the other thing I remember, we always get a call. We got one just the other day. I actually got, it was from Medford. I got a picture and the guy sent these pictures and said, there are these two bumblebees. They're beating each other up. And no, let's take a look. And it was just like as a male because the males look different than the females. They got that yellow band on them.

Speaker 2: The one for the carpenter bees, the males typically have white markings on their face.

Speaker 1: The guy said, he thought they were beating and I said, no, I'm sorry, they're not bumblebees. There are carpenter bees and they're mating. And he said, oh, great. I meant to tell all my friends.

Speaker 2: Anyway, so no shortage of entertainment watching bees fight. So what else did we find? Oh, one I neglected to mention within the family mega Achille day is the genus tracusa. Tracusa. So tracusa are fairly large bees related to a wool Carter bees. And up until now, they've only been documented in the state from I think two or three specimens.

The whole genus was only known from two or three specimens historically. Yeah. Okay. However, Judith Maxwell down in Grant's Pass found a male and a female in Lake County. Oh, good job, Judy.

Speaker 1: So that is great. So these and just just to clear we jumped over a family. This is the family we're talking about before with the leaf cutter bees and the mason bees.

So tracusa is in that group. And they and I think you were describing them. They're like a bigger bee, but they look like if you've ever seen on lambs here, these will Carter bees, they kind of look waspy.

Speaker 2: Yeah, they're black and white striped and see the other white or yellow. So the females of tracusa timber Lakey are black and yellow striped. Yeah. The males are cream and black striped.

Speaker 1: So cool.

Speaker 2: So getting back into the aphids. Okay, let's see what we found are the volunteers turned in really nice series of summer digger bees. And in particular summer digger bees in the subgenera heliophila, which means sun loving.

Oh, I love that. And micrantephora, which are micra. They're small. They're small.

Okay, that's right. And so these summer digger bees are often specialized on particular flowers, including sunflowers. And I was able to document a bunch on Stefan Amaria last summer, which is wire lettuce again. Oh, there it is. One of these non-descript little scraggly desert plants that just has all sorts of really interesting critters visiting it.

Speaker 1: Okay, so these are different from the digger bees that people see. I think people often call like Adrina digger bees. These are like the ones you see at this time. You know, these are in a completely different family and they are fuzzy. They're fuzzy little cute.

Speaker 2: So that's a real challenge with trying to give these things common names is that well, 70% of our bees nest in the ground.

Speaker 1: So technically, they all dig. Yeah, they all dig. And so traditionally we call bees in the genus Andrina mining bees. All mining. Yeah. And then they got a pickaxe. And then any of the anthophorini or anthophore and haberpota bees we call digger bees. And there's spring digger bees and there's summer digger bees.

And there's really interesting diversity within that group. Okay, so we had the little tiny ones and we had these other ones. And these were mostly, were they in Western Oregon or were they in the East or South? Where were these found?

Speaker 2: So the really interesting summer digger bees that we found were all, I believe, east of the Cascades or down in the Klamasiskew.

Speaker 1: Okay, all right. Which would be the teams we have in Grand Pass, Klamas Falls.

Speaker 2: Okay, so they're the ones that turned in these specimens, which are really nice. However, though, you know, these things are much more broadly distributed in the state. You'll find them in the Gorge, like in the in Northeastern Oregon, we just have to get out there and look. Okay, cool. So the last be I'll mention is it's a species group. And so historically, the species group was considered to be in the genus Eucera, which are spring longhorn bees.

Okay. But recently, a paper was published with which puts this group of species in its own genus called proto-Helonia. And so in this new paper, for this new genus proto-Helonia, they had, I think, a single record for this genus in the state of Oregon.

Speaker 1: Okay, so let me get this straight. Some researcher went through, looked at everything and said, okay, I think that these are actually more closely related. But when they described it, there was only one of these in Oregon.

Speaker 2: That's right, there's one single specimen known for the genus proto-Helonia. Okay. So I do believe Tom Robertson turned in two more specimens. Oh, wow. The proto-Helonia venusda species group.

Speaker 1: And he's with the group in Aurora, the North Willamette Research and Extension Center team. That's fantastic.

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. So in one season, our volunteers have produced absolutely amazing material with lots of new state records. They found lots of really rare bees that haven't often been seen in over 80 years. Really? Yeah. And so, and I haven't been through all the material yet. Like, every day it's like, oh, this is amazing. And so, as we go forward, the potential for our volunteers to make really exciting discoveries is just huge.

Speaker 1: This is the first year too. This is like, I remember that year painfully. It was like trying to pull things together. We really expanded far greater than we ever thought.

It's like, really, I don't think we can manage many more volunteers. And in spite of all that, all these things popped up. That is remarkable.

Yeah, it's awesome. Okay, so looking ahead, just I know we're in an inventory phase. We're trying to get a number of species down before we do anything more. What are the bees that you're hoping to find?

Speaker 2: Well, really, our volunteers have done such a remarkable job that ideally what we would like to do is give them the guidance to be able to produce more data on the things that are more rare. Because like I said before, it's easy to produce data on things that are really abundant and common, but it takes a trained eye and some direction in order to focus on the things that are maybe more difficult to find or more specialized on different plant hosts. And so one thing that I've put together that we're giving our volunteers is a plant hit list. Okay, because if you're just surveying bees in your backyard, it's not diverse. A lot of the plants aren't really native plants and they may not be, if they are native plants, they might not be native to that where you're growing them in a cultivated setting.

Speaker 1: So you'll end up, probably if you just did your garden, you odds are you'd end up with a lot of common bees that we already know are here. We've got a good idea of their distribution.

Speaker 2: That's right. Okay, gotcha. So what I've done is I've put together a hit list of 20 floral targets because really the best way to find these bees is to search out populations of plants that they prefer.

Speaker 1: And I know two that are on, three that are on there. What are those? The wire brush. No, not wire brush. What is it again?

Speaker 2: Wire lettuce. Wire lettuce.

Speaker 1: That's right. Is wire lettuce on there?

Speaker 2: Yeah, wire lettuce is number six. Okay, let's number one. Number one.

Speaker 3: And these aren't ordered from the level of importance. It's just a list.

Speaker 1: Should I just run through them all? Yeah, I want you to go on 20. Here's the 20 top plants. Tell us a little bit about them before you like, you move on to the next one. Those just give us names.

Speaker 2: Okay, so first one is cercium. And so those are the thistles. We have a nice suite of species that are specialized on thistles. And many other species that are very happy to forage on thistles. Okay. The second one is Erychomeria. And that is the rabbit brushes. Right. So two common ones are the green rabbit brush is really abundant in the Cascades, especially nauseosis is more kind of sagebrush country is a lower elevation.

Speaker 1: And these are blooming later in the summer. It's like a mid summer to late summer. So that must be the only thing that's flowering.

Speaker 2: That's right. And so when a lot of things are drying up in Eastern Oregon, that's when some of some of these late season plants will be blooming. And so Erychomeria hosts tons of floral specialists, little fairy bees, different specialized mining bees, andrina and all sorts of things. Okay, cool. All right. Including some Calides and Melisodes and on and on.

So number three is Grendelia gumweed. Again, there's these specialized on it. And it also hosts a lot of really interesting native species. Four is the sunflowers, Helianthus, and their relatives, I should say.

So things like balsam root or mules ear, white, white, things like that. Number five is solid dago. So the golden rods.

Okay. Of course, six was the wire lettuce, the phantom area. Number seven is my personal favorite, facility. Number eight are the genera cryptantha and hakelea.

So these are little bristly small flowered plants in the family brachnaceae. They prefer dry, hot areas, disturbed sites. And they're not much to look at. They're probably less charismatic than facility even if that's possible. But they attract really cool and rare native bee species.

Okay. Number nine includes our cactus that occur in the state of Oregon. Cactus aren't really abundant and widespread in the high desert here, but there are areas that have good populations of cactus. And there are cactus bees in Oregon.

Speaker 1: Okay. All right. Which are diadasia? Diadasia.

Speaker 2: Okay. And possibly some others. Okay. Haven't been documented here yet. Okay. Yeah. Number 10 is Cleomy. That's in the family, the new family Cleo Macy used to be in Kappa Racy. And it has a common name, a spider plant or Rocky Mountain Bee Bomb, Rocky Mountain Bee Bomb, Rocky Mountain Bee Plant. And it attracts a whole bunch of floral specialists as well.

Like most of these plants attract a bunch of specialist bees as well as are really attractive to generalist foragers as well. And that's why they're on the list. Okay. Number 11 is Cucurbita. And so these are cultivated summer and winter squash pumpkins and marrows. And so these aren't native here. But we would like people to look on Cucurbita in their gardens to help us document the squash bees.

Let's see. Number 12 is Inothera. So these are the evening primroses. And we have a handful of species here. 13 are the pensitamons. We have many species of pensitamons here. 14 is Lysomachia. That's the yellow loose strife.

Okay. And so it's possible that the specialist floral oil collecting the macropus may occur in the state. We know that Lysomachia does occur in the lower Columbia in riparian habitats. And that's kind of a real special mission. But I've included it.

Speaker 1: And you've found this bee. You've found the only one of them in Canada, I believe. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Well, it appears as though I have rediscovered the genus after more than 100 years for Western Canada. Bravo. Okay. Number 15 is Potentilla. And so these are the sink foils.

Of course, some of the sink foils are introduced and really abundant, but we do have a bunch of native sink foils that attract specialist native bees. Okay. 16 is Calichordus. And these are the desert tulips. Or what else are they called? Mariposa lilies. Okay. Right. So Calichordus or the Mariposa lilies attract a few different specialist bees.

And we'll attract a generalist as well. 17 is Astragalus, Lotus, Adalia, and Visia. And so these are all small, flowered plants in the pea family, Fabaceae. And especially Astragalus and Adalia attract all sorts of really cool things.

Speaker 1: And all of those require a long tongue to get into, I imagine. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 2: They really do. And so they'll attract all sorts of different mega keelids. And Adalia will attract some other interesting things, including some short tongue bees. Okay. Right. There's only three left. So we have Selex or the Willows, which are, I guess you could chase them uphill at this time of year, go up an elevation to find Willows still blooming.

19 is the Mallows. And so the family Malvasae, including the Genera Spheralaceae and Iliamna. And then finally, we have Visinium. And so we have quite a few different species of blueberries and huckleberries in the state.

Speaker 1: Would the menzanitas be included in that as well?

Speaker 2: Yeah, really, I should have included a few more of the Aracaceae. So things like Arctostaphlos, especially, I should probably add that to number 20.

Speaker 1: It's common. It's a real easy to find early spring. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And we do have an Arctostaphlos specialist. It's a spring longhorn bee.

Speaker 1: Oh, you know, manzanita is in that group too, right? That's right. I remember getting over at Yamhill with the group there finding somebody had some manzanitas and we had some use on it.

Speaker 2: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So we have the common ground cover, canikinik or bareberry, but also in Oregon you have woody shrubs, some which get really large.

Speaker 1: Okay, great. So we've got a list of plants there. Are there some spots in the state that, you know, really you would expect to find some of these plant communities?

Speaker 2: You can find some of these plants everywhere. Okay. And so really, it's not totally necessary to travel far afield, but to try and seek out areas that are less impacted.

Yeah. To seek out native examples of these genera. And so maybe if you're surveying on Cersei, you want to survey on some native Cersei rather than say the introduced Canadian thistle or something like that. Okay.

Speaker 1: When people join the Atlas, we have a whole, well, now we have a YouTube channel. So we're going to, I think next week or sometime soon, you're going to do a video showing people how to use Oregon flora.

And we had a, remember, we had a podcast with Linda Hardison last year, where she talked about Oregon flora and sort of the maps and the plant communities and discover life. So just, oh, I guess for those who are in the Atlas or not, just check the YouTube channel. What are they going to see in this video?

Speaker 2: So yeah, we're going to do a little instructional. And so you'll be able to take this hit list of really interesting native plants. You'll be able to find on the Oregon flora website, what species occur in these genera. You can project that onto a map to see where the different species, for example, of facility occur. And you can also looking in the plant data, you can see approximately when they bloom, because that's important.

Yeah. And then using discover life, you can look those plant species up on discover life and they have published data on the floral associates. And so different insects that have been documented on those plants are listed there, including lots of B associations. And from that page, you'll be able to go to the B page and see, oh, is this B found in Oregon? If it is, where? And so on.

Speaker 1: That's fantastic. Okay. So watch for that video. The YouTube channel is Oregon B Atlas. And you also can go to the Oregon B Atlas website. And I guess one thing I just want to, I guess as a project lead for it, two things I just wanted to sort of say is right now, especially in the valley, we have a lot of volunteers and we actually don't need for now. I think we've got as many volunteers as necessary for here. But if there are listeners in Eastern Oregon, we have teams in Hermiston, in LeGrand, I think we were trying to get a group going just in Ontario and in Mal here. If you're in any, and there's a great group in Climath.

So if you're in any of those areas, that we're really looking for some new volunteers in Eastern Oregon, you can come to the website and contact us and we'll be happy to do a training. Where do you see us being in five years, Link?

Speaker 2: Well, just by looking at what's been accomplished in the first cycle, it's amazing. And so I think in five years, we'll be able to start producing a list of state fauna, the really strong understanding of what's here, where they are, and at least what these bees are visiting for forage. And it's really important information and we can use that information to help inform management.

Speaker 1: So getting a nice inventory of plants so that if you're trying to do restoration, it really will help people say, oh, I'm in this part of the state, we know this bee comes out at this time and it's pretty, it's in its range and we need to put some astragalus in when we do restoration. Absolutely, we do. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay, well, thanks so much for taking time out of your, I will send you back into the lab to look at thousands of bees. Thanks so much for catching people up on where the Oregon Bealus is at.

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

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