08 Dr. Sujaya Rao – Contrary Perspective to Native Bee Declines in Agricultural Landscapes: The Willamette Valley Experience

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. Today's episode is about bumblebees in agriculture, and it's my great pleasure to have Dr. Sujaya Rao, who's a professor in entomology here at Oregon State University.

I'm really excited about this episode for two reasons. The first is, just talking about Dr. Rao's really interesting discoveries about how agriculture might actually help bumblebee populations, something we don't often hear about. But the second is that I got to talk to her before she accepted a position heading up the University of Minnesota's Entomology Department, a very prestigious position. We're very sorry to see Dr. Rao leave, and I'm really excited though to have this chance to talk with her about some of her discoveries here in Oregon. I hope you enjoy the episode. Hi, I'm really excited to be sitting with Sujaya Rao, professor here at Oregon State University, and we're going to be talking about bumblebees today.

I just want to begin. You came to Oregon State University to do grass seed pest management, but you've established this really remarkable program, bumblebee research. How did you go from grass seeds to bumblebees?

Speaker 2: Good morning, Anthony. Indeed, it is really exciting to be talking to you about my bumblebee experiences. So I was hired at Oregon State University to look at IPM, develop IPM programs for grass seed and rotational crops. And this came about because grass seed is a really important crop in this region. And in the past, growers used to burn the straw after harvest. And that resulted in a lot of smoke and respiratory problems for people, especially in urban environments. And so because of that, the legislature said, no, you've got to phase out burning. And they were concerned that there would be all these new pests that would be emerging.

So that's why this new position came about. But when I was working on one of the pests, it's called the Seer Relief Beetle, and I was looking at over-interpreting populations, trying to monitor them using an aggregation pheromone. So I had put out these pheromone lures in a barley field.

So it's in spring and no flowers around, just seedlings. And it was successful, but I was using sticky traps, yellow sticky traps to actually catch the beetles. Ferrotech is a pheromone company that was interested in marketing the pheromone, and they thought this is a good product to go after. But they didn't like the yellow sticky traps. And so they had some traps around that I guess they had developed for some other product, and they asked me to try it.

So they gave me this trap. It's got a plastic bottom and veins on the top, cross veins. And the veins differed in color. So they wanted to see if yellow would work best, or white, black, green, blue. And as an anemologist, I thought only the yellow one's going to work.

But they gave it to me, so I put them out. And the other colors really didn't catch the beetle. But this blue one was just full of bees. And at that time, I just knew there's honeybees and there's other bees. But the number was so remarkable that I just put in a container and brought it back to campus.

Because this was done in LeGrand out in the eastern Oregon. And imagine this, it's seedling barley, no flowers, spring. Why would there be all these bees? So I brought it back to my colleague and he didn't believe me. He said, there's got to have been a bee pheromone. But there was no bee pheromone.

There's a beetle pheromone. And so we tested it at a number of different places. And we only tested the blue and the yellow. Because we expected yellow to be attractive. And every time, without any lure inside, the blue one was very attractive to bees. And so we compared it with other traps and found that the blue vein traps, what we call it, is always the most attractive. All this happened right at the time when they was concerned about bumblebee deaths in addition to the honeybee deaths.

And especially in the US, there's not a whole lot of baseline data or what are the bee populations in different areas. So this was very timely because in a sense, we just contributed through that one cylinder to this observation. And you'd be monitoring too. And so that's how I got into the bee business.

Speaker 1: Well, that is a real Eureka moment. Absolutely. That's like iconic Eureka.

Speaker 2: Yes. And it really helped me expand my program. So now I was doing the pest management, also doing the bees. And I think that's what's given me, I would say, a slightly different perspective than maybe other people who've just worked in bees. Because you sort of see the issues in pest management with pesticides and realize the impacts on the bees. And so I feel sometimes that my perspective may be slightly different.

Speaker 1: I really want to get into that perspective as we go on to the interview, but just want to come back to this trap and monitoring it. You raise this issue of when people are concerned about pollinators without knowing what the populations are doing, they're really kind of assumptions. Can you tell us a little bit about this trap? What does it look like? And how does one kind of start doing something like monitoring a bee population?

Speaker 2: Yeah, we feel that this trap is actually very easy to use and easy to set up. So it's got a big bottom plastic container, which is pretty much the container that, you know, if you buy, I don't remember the size, you know, like nuts.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Or a little coffee can.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I forget which product. Lot of, I don't know if it's peanut butter or, you know, but anyway, you know, I buy, I like tassels. I buy these containers. And instead of the lid, what you have is this crew cap, but it's like a funnel.

And into that funnel, you have these cross veins. So to that, we just use like a twist tie, attach it to, you know, these insulators that people put on fence posts so that we can just hang it. Because the critical aspect is that we believe, we don't know for sure, is that the trap should sort of dangle. It shouldn't be like stationary.

Really? Because it's a visual cue. And so bees are coming from all different directions.

And so maybe this sort of moving blue is what draws them to it. And so from a distance, and we really don't know how far a distance, but the bees come to these cross veins, they hit them and then they fall down. And for some reason, even though if they look up, there is this opening and they can escape. I don't know what it is. They remain in the trap.

And so I think it's nice. I mean, you can use it without any water to, you know, sort of, because people are concerned you'll be losing bees. So some people like to put in traps, they put like water or you put like a pesticide in there, little strip that people do when they work with things like moths. You could do that. But you know, depending on how precise you need your information, you could just leave it as is. And then you don't want to kill too many bees. You determine that you can use to determine how frequently you come and check it. So you could check it once a week, once in two weeks if you have very few bees. But if you get a lot, then you know, just keep it for a day or a couple days. And then what you do when you come back is you sort of, again, you know, the bees are flying, some of them will be dead.

So you kind of, with the experience, you can do this. You could come in the early morning or late evening when the bees are not flying. And then all I do is, you know, I separate the bottom from the vein part and then use that, you know, lid, the spin and put a jar lid to close it, put it in a cooler. And then when the bees are cool, you just can just transfer them to either like a plastic bag, Ziploc bag, or you put into some sort of a container and put the bottom back if that's what you need to do. Now, when you compare with other trapping studies, we find in particularly a lot of people are using these pen traps.

Speaker 1: Which is kind of like a little bowl with some water, soapy water in it of different colors. Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 2: And some studies have said you need like 10 of each. You need a blue, a yellow and a white. And and those work. But what happens is that the bees are pretty much wet when you collect them and you have to use a, you know, hairdryer to dry them. Because if you preserve these wet bees, they're going to get mold. Also, you know, they sort of look kind of what's the word you would use, you know, like when your hair is all wet.

Speaker 1: Yeah, matted. They don't they're very. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So, you know, you're familiar with that. And for many bee species, you know, it's just the external colors that are used to identify them. And so when you get these sort of fresh bees, it's easy to identify.

But when you get to this matted appearance, it's a lot more difficult. So, you know, so it's it may be less expensive, but you also have to put 10 of them at each to me. It's, you know, if this blue vein traps work, I would say it is a little expensive. But you can use it over and over and over again.

Speaker 1: Because I'm a big fan of the trap. And I have to say, I've always thought that with bigger bees, they can crawl out of those pan trap, pan traps. It just strikes me that you get a much different the sample seems.

Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. So when we did the comparison with the paint traps, the bumblebees, you know, you know, you've got this water to a particular, there is a top and then they just walk right off.

Also in our area in the Vlamid Valley, because it's high numbers, those pains are really too small to capture that number. Yeah. Now, for the for the trap to work, you know, think about it, it's based on vision. So it depends on where the bees are coming from. So if you have a bank of trees and you have the trap in front of it, but the nests are on the other side of the trees, and obviously they're not going to find it, because they have to be able to see it. Yeah. But, you know, when you see some of my pictures with the trap, I mean, they're just really attractive.

Speaker 1: Can you tell us a little bit more about vision? You had some really interesting discoveries, another serpentinipidus discovery. Tell us a little bit about that. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: So, you know, the traps are working very well at most locations, but it's one feel it just seemed that this one trap was not catching any bees. And so, you know, the scientists, what do we do? We think maybe it's something to do the location like I just described it, it's front of, you know, a bank of trees. So, you know, we switched around with another one that was working, but no matter what this one trap wouldn't catch any bees. So, we started looking into it and we called the distributor and said, you know, you know, what are we doing with product doesn't work. And like you call up and say, hey, what's going on? And the distributor said, hey, you know what?

The manufacturer, he said that in one batch of these veins when he was making them, he forgot to put the fluorescent dye. Yeah. And you know, we didn't even know that. We just thought it was blue.

And what is this? Because it's really, really blue. Just to our eyes, it looks blue.

Yeah. And they both look blue. But apparently there's a blue dye in the fluorescent dye. And the reason is this was being used for trapping Asian lady beetles, which are lady bugs, which are invasive. And they were being sold as Asian lady beetle traps. So, they had in addition a fluorescent bulb and some food bait. So, maybe he tried to get by without that fluorescence by putting, I don't know what it is.

But he thought, okay, I made a mistake. Nobody's going to notice. And truly, nobody noticed.

The bees did. So, we started putting them under light. And when you put it under just regular halogen light, yes, the peaks are the same. But when you put it under, and you can do this in a dark room, that the good, what we call the one that works, glows.

And the other one is just black. From that, I work with the physics professor just to share a little bit experience, her expertise in optics and stuff. And so, what she did is we looked at our data from field study, because we put a number of, what we did then is we took clear veins, painted them with different paints. So, that for us, they would look clear. But under UV, they would look blue or green. And the reason we picked those colors is because, you know, we know that in, you know, bees, they have what we call trichromatic vation.

So, they have blue receptors, green receptors, and UV receptors. And that's why we tried. But the green ones didn't work.

And so, we concluded, based on the bee vision models out there, that it's very highly selective sort of stimulation of the blue for receptors as a result of sunlight in these fluorescence, which makes these traps very a crack, just phenomenal. That's amazing. Yeah. So, it's like the supernormal stimulus, you know.

Speaker 1: It's kind of like the McDonald's at the side of the highway. It's just lit up and your Jess can't help herself.

Speaker 2: It's true. And, you know, there were these bird researchers, Tim Bergen and Conrad Lorenz, who actually, you know, just, I guess they came up with this sort of phenomenon that they described in birds that oyster catchers, if you give them a football, they would incubate it because it's a super normal sort of visual image of the egg. So, in the case of bees, you know, it is no like one egg kind of stimulus that we could correlate is probably a lot of flowers in the landscape. And so, now, I guess psychologists working on this idea of supernormal stimulus, it's interesting that you mentioned McDonald's because they believe things like french fries are a supernormal stimulus for humans. Wow.

Speaker 1: Well, I've got one last question on this trap and then we'll take a break. Somebody who's done a little bit of sampling, you always have this problem of when the traps are out and you get different types of catches, whether there's competing bloom or not. Like there seems to be this way in which when you put hand traps out, there's nothing around. You get these very high catches, whereas hand traps next to bloom, it sort of moderates the catch. Does this, do you think the kind of stimulus of the collar may help kind of buffer against that effect, which is kind of a downside of using hand traps?

Speaker 2: You know, I mean, you know, as you know, bee vision is pretty complex, but also bee behavior. Sorry, what I meant is bee behavior is really complex. And so, you know, we have, and we make a lot of assumptions too in terms of what's a preferred plant and people expect that native bees would, sorry, native plants would be more attractive to native bees because they've evolved, but turns out that, you know, there's different things that seem to influence what draws a bee. And so bee may come to a particular flower today and tomorrow go to something else. So in terms of whether something like a trap is competing, it's going to depend on, I don't know, where the bee was before perhaps, so many different factors. And if you just have one trap, but a lot of flowers, you know, it's hard to say if, you know, that trap is drawing them away from the flowers, we should be a concern, especially in cropping systems, but it could be also drawing them. And you know, maybe they come to the field, they don't land up in the trap and then, you know, end up on the flowers around. So we looked into that a little bit too, trying to see if, you know, if you put like a closed line of these where we would get a lot more bees.

And it was really hard, you know, it needs a lot more studies to determine that. So it works particularly well for determining what's in an area and people make this mistake with traps. It only tells you what's in the area. It doesn't tell you that they are pollinators of every plant or every crop that's in the area, because for that you really have to go and see what exactly, and even that assumption is made that just because you see a bee on a flower doesn't even mean that it's pollinating it, because, understandably, it really picks up pollen from one flower and, you know, deposits on another. And sometimes there are flowers, if you have a really open flower, and the bee may be just at the bottom and getting to the nectar, or you can, you know, you have some, you know, as you know, some flowers, the bees will just rob. So bees are there.

And that's the other sort of conception that people have. Bees are not pollinating crops for humans, right? Bees go to flowers for their own needs. They go to get nectar and they go to get pollen. And sometimes they only go to get nectar, sometimes they're pollen. And so that's going to also drive whether they're going to see, you know, whether what kind of trip they're on, whether they're going to see this blue-gain trap, because there's going to be different things that maybe odors they can perceive. I think some honeybees, people say they're able to assess the nectar in the flower. Who knows? There's so many things about bees that we really don't know. We can't just ask them and tell us, you know, what is it?

But yes, so in terms of the, you know, what's in the landscape, I think really we need a lot of observation studies to really be able to say when you have these competing things, what's driving whether a bee would go to a particular flower or not.

Speaker 1: Welcome back. Well, I want to ask you a little bit more. You've done so much work on bumblebee communities around the state. Where are some of the hotspots for bee diversity in Oregon?

Speaker 2: So a lot of my research has focused in this western part of Oregon, which is called the Vlamant Valley, and it is an agriculture-dominated area. And what's really unique about the place is, first of all, there's two, three hundred crops that are raised here, but also so many of them are raised for seed.

Why? Because of our, you know, just because of where we are placed close to the Pacific Ocean, what happens is we have really mild winters and a lot of rain. So you get plant growth is very extensive. But then in the summer, it's dry, which is, you know, not the same as in other parts of the country where the summers are actually rather humid. So this western climate makes it great for harvest because you need, you know, the crops to dry.

This needs to be dry so that you can separate the seed from the rest of the plant. And so that's particularly to me unique because not just the grass seed crops, but you've got so many crops like clover that are raised for seed. And so when you think about a clover, if it is just out there, you know, as forage, then you don't even, it doesn't even reach the flower stage.

The animals, you know, from who we added. But when it's for seed, then it's going to be there, you know, flowering. And then imagine this field of clover. I mean, it is just for a feast in terms of bees are concerned. And so with my research, what I find is that this area to me is like just a hot spot for bees. So if you think, and you need to connect it with the life cycle of bees. So if you take the bumblebees as an example, you know, they their life cycle extends over several months because you have the Ovent Ring Queens coming out in spring, they initiate a nest, and then you have once, the exhalate, you get the workers that take care of the nest, but also they go in forage for the brood and for everybody else in the nest. And so over time, the number of workers, the number of brood increases, so the need for food increases, and then towards the end of summer, then you have sort of this change, the new queens are produced, males are produced, they're made, and this is something that a lot of people don't realize in temperate regions, except for the mated queen, all other bees die, so they die anyway.

So the workers will die, the males will die, and the queen who initiated the nest will also die. So if you think about a lot of the perennial plants, they bloom, or cropping systems, they bloom for like maybe three, four weeks, maybe six weeks, max, maybe eight, in the case of red clover, but this life cycle can continue for several months. So then one crop is not going to be enough, what they really need then is sequential bloom. So you need something in spring, when the queen's emerging, and then when you have the early set of workers, you need some bloom, and then towards the end of summer, you need a lot. And what's nice about the Willamette Valley is we have sequential bloom. So you've got blueberries, blooming initially, crimson clover, then you have metafoam, you've got even the blackberries are beneficial.

We've got seed crops, chicory, veg, buckwheat, I mean, so many, and then towards the end of summer, which to me is really a critical period, we've got red clover and things like sunflower. So that's why I feel that our cropping systems are really facilitating to sustainability and the growth in populations, especially bumblebees and not a native bees.

Speaker 1: That's a really unique perspective, because in most places, I feel that there is a kind of way in which we think about habitat as being something aside from the crop. And here, what your observations are, at least in Oregon, the crop is part of, it is in some ways the set aside, it is the kind of diversity of these crops working together.

Speaker 2: Right. And so that's why I feel I have set up a contrary perspective also in terms of the impact of agriculture on bees. And I see a lot of reports that say agriculture is negative, that doesn't foster bee populations. And it bothers me because there's no such thing as agriculture. You've got to define what agriculture is. And agriculture, which just feels and feels a monoculture of maybe something like corn or soybeans is not the same as agriculture in the Vellamut Valley when you've got 300 different crops, so many of them, drawing bees because they've got these flowers because they're raised to seed. And so I think people really need to, there needs to be some more thought in terms of when we say agriculture has negative impacts on bees, what are we really talking about?

Speaker 1: So I guess the issue then is this issue with the pesticides, it's not so much that it's agricultural land, whether it's good or bad for pollinators, but it's how that land is actually managed.

Speaker 2: That's a really good point. And I wish more people would think about it in those terms because, so given my background in pest management, and when I teach, I keep reminding people agriculture is a business, first thing to remember. And so as a business, it's about profit, otherwise why would anybody produce the land, the crop? But the second thing, what drives pest management is really consumer preference. So if humans were not averse to insects in their food, then the pesticide pressure on the crops would be refused. But as consumers, we want not just food that doesn't have it, but good looking food. And so that is then going to impact what's done because while we have this whole tool, in terms of different options, IPM would be called IPM and you could do biological control, you could use predators, you could use all these other things, unless and until they are going to result in that perfect, beautiful fruit at low cost, which because that's the third thing, we want good looking food, but we also want low cost.

So we need to think about it from that perspective. And so then what happens is insects, sorry, growers are going to use pesticide. And a lot of the insects, a lot of the pests they're trying to manage are insects, and bees are insects. And so if you spray and kill pests, insects, yeah, it's high probability you're going to kill the bee, unless and until they're not both in the crop at the same time. And so two large extent growers are careful and the pesticide labels also don't permit use of pesticides during bloom.

But here's what people forget. And the same thing actually is important when you think about habitat that's next to a field. So let's say you have a blueberry field and then you have a clover field next door. And then what I want people to think about is instead of clover, also think about, let's say that's that habitat that's being enhanced there to help promote the bees. So a blueberry grower is not going to spray a pesticide during bloom, but he's going to spray during harvest.

We have this pest called the spotted winged esophila, which is, I mean, I myself, I'm fine with eating insects in my food, but maggots in the food. And then the other aspect of agriculture is marketing. And so one of our big markets for Oregon, which helps the economy of the state is, say the Japanese market. Now, if Japan says we will not take your blueberries unless you spray, they're not going to say that it needs to be pest free. They say you need to spray and spray and spray.

Well, if a farmer, you're a farmer, what are you going to do? You want to sell that, you want to make that money, you're going to spray and spray and spray. And well, what time is that you're going to spray?

That's going to be July, August. And if there's this clover field next door, that's in bloom. Nothing on the label says that you cannot spray the blueberries because it's not in bloom. But then, you know, the bees are all on the clover, the bees move across the land, and bees may be flying over the blueberries to get to their clover.

And so that's where the issue arises. Now, like I said, switch clover for your habitat. And in that, if you're doing a good job and paying attention to all the instructions, you're going to have flowers in there that are, I mean, plants that bloom. Well, the same impact that is going to have on the clover is going to have. And so people have questioned, is that, should you really have the habitat next door to this crop? Because a crop is going to be sprayed. And so really, we have to think about be conservation, be protected at a landscape level. And some bees will die. And so I think the lesson is really that we need to minimize to the extent possible. But always keeping in mind that agriculture is a business. It's about making money. And agriculture is also driven by what consumers demand, which people forget.

Speaker 1: Right. It becomes an external problem, not something that somebody contributes to somehow.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. So.

Speaker 1: Well, tell us a little, I guess one of the issues is that when it comes to growers, they also must have some interest in their businesses and having pollination services. Can you tell us a little bit about non-honeybee pollination that you've observed in some of the crops in Oregon?

Speaker 2: Right. So, honeybees are great for pollination of many crops for a number of reasons. One is, you know, very high numbers. So availability and predicted availability, because, you know, these are managed colonies and they can be moved from crop to crop. Native bees, on the other hand, it depends on what's out there. And also, you know, I was describing the life cycle of the native bee, the nest is fixed. And once that fixed, the queen is not going to move it. So unless and until the bees, the workers can fly long distances, only what's within their, you know, flying range can they pollinate.

So that's something that people need to keep in mind. But in terms of the actual pollination, what is pollination, you know, transfer the pollen from one flower to another? Well, that comes down to things like behavior of the bees.

And some flowers have some unique attributes. So if you think about blueberries, just the way, you know, the statements are present inside the flower, the flower has to be shaken, you know, we call it buzz pollination. And they have to release that pollen so that, you know, it's what we call picked up by the bee. Well, honeybees cannot buzz pollinate. And so we believe because of that, that honeybees are not good pollinators of some crops like blueberries.

Bumblebees, on the other hand, you know, they've got muscular for axes, and so they can do that. And so people have believed that blueberries are largely pollinated by bumblebees. The other reason the other cropping systems, or other factors, I would say that differentiate the two is, you know, honeybees like to fly in warmer temperatures, they like to fly, you know, when it's drier, bumblebees, especially those that have evolved the native ones in Oregon, you know, they used to our weather in a sense, they've evolved with it.

So they can fly when it's, you know, more rainy and colder. And so if you think about cropping systems that bloom when we have our rainy cold days, then one would expect then that it's the blueberry, sorry, it's the bumblebees that could be doing the pollination rather than the honeybees. And so in our research, we focused on three cropping systems based on this behavior. So one was blueberries based on the buzz pollination climatic condition, red clover. And the ratio of red clover is that, you know, the what we call the corolla tube is really long.

It's this flower with sort of like a trumpet like thing. And so the nectar, to be able to get to the nectar, it's the tongue length of the bee is important. And again, it was thought that the honeybee tongue length is not as long as the tongue length of some bumblebees. And so again, based on that, people think that the bumblebees are better pollinators of the honeybee, red clover than the honeybee. And then the third crop we focused on was cranberry, which is grown in the southern Oregon coast.

You know, if you've been on the coast here, it's really cold and windy. And so that was the third reason that we felt that, you know, bumblebees would be better. But then for all these cropping systems, the growers rent honeybees just because they cannot, you know, the numbers are unpredictable.

And, you know, so they cannot rent bumblebees, we cannot buy bumblebee colonies in Oregon, because of, you know, historic reason. And so, you know, here's something that you can actually buy and put in your field. And what they do in situations like the blueberries is they rent high numbers. It's sort of like an insurance so that if you have few warm days, the expectation is the bees would take care of the pollination in those days. And so even though, you know, bumblebees may do a better job in these, it is really honeybees that are driving the pollinators, the honeybees are being rented. We did cage studies comparing honeybees and bumblebees for all of these crops and there was no difference. And that came as a big surprise for us, especially with the blueberries. You thought the honeybees wouldn't do very well.

We thought, you know, based on everything. And also we did a study where we put what we call these pollen sieves, you know, in the pollen trap. Yeah. We put a pollen trap in the honeybee hives. And you know, it's just basically a sieve. And so when the workers come back, they squeeze their way and then that pollen load gets dislodged until you can identify. Well, imagine you have these hives next to the blueberry fields. And when we analyze that, there's next to no blueberry pollen in this.

Speaker 1: The honeybees that are coming back to the hive had no blueberry pollen on their back blades.

Speaker 2: And so it's like, yeah, this says, you know, the honeybees are not actually pollinating. But as part of a grant, we were looking at their numbers and oh, 95% are honeybees.

So it's like, what's going on? Well, it's a timing to one extent, especially the early varieties, you know, the bumblebees have not yet emerged. They just, queens are just emerging and queens can pollinate a lot of flora.

They're very, very efficient. But their numbers are not perhaps high enough. We don't see a whole lot of them. Or maybe they're coming to the field when we're not there. And we have stumbled upon a rather unique way in which we feel, I mean, this is at this point, the speculation, how it is that the honeybees, even though they cannot pass pollinate are actually pollinating the blueberries. How's that? So it's, we haven't published this yet.

Speaker 1: Okay, well, then we're gonna have to keep it a secret. So but we're anticipating a exciting new discovery on the pollination of blueberry.

Speaker 2: That's very cool.

Speaker 1: All right, welcome back. Well, so Jaya, we asked our guests the same three questions. So everybody's been asked these three questions, we want to get your take on these. And the first question that we asked our guests is, is there a book that's been really influential to you, or you want other people to know about it? It's just a really, really great book.

Speaker 2: So for me, you know, Missioners, the Bees of the World is like this fiber above for, you know, bees. So I think every researcher should, you know, at least look at it. But for our region, the one of the, there's a couple books, the biology and external morphology of bees and the bumblebees of Western America, both of these were written by my colleague, Bill Stephen.

He worked on native bees for over 50 years in this region. And, you know, especially for students and all, I mean, what to me is really phenomenal. All the drawings in those days were hand drawn. And I've heard people comment to me and initially they just look at the book and say, oh, well, you know, it's just a book. But I think when you start looking at, and you know, when you think about bees, it's, you know, all these characters, every single thing was hand drawn in those days. And so the bumblebees of the Western America, for each species, you know, it has a map that gives you this.

Speaker 1: We're actually looking, Listeners, we're actually looking at these books, we're flipping through them right now. They're amazing.

Speaker 2: They're, it gives the, I mean, it's only Western, but and it, you know, gives all the records of all the bees that were collected. It gives a little bit about the biology.

And so for me, anybody, at least in this region, and, you know, the same information, it pertains to if there's a species, same species found in other parts of the country, or, you know, parts of Canada. So to me, these are, you know, the sort of unique books that, you know, I like competitive questions, lots of other books that we all look at.

Speaker 1: Well, I'm going to, the listeners will know what we'll do is we'll link. I know more the biology and external morphology of bees is still, there's a PDF version, still available. So we'll make sure to put those links for the listeners. That'd be great. That'd be great. Okay. Well, the next question we ask people is, you know, is there a indispensable tool that you use for studying bees?

Speaker 2: Well, you know, my blue-bean trap is my contribution as a bee monitoring tool is, you know, I would say, was my favorite tool. But I feel that, you know, we sort of don't pay this attention, but just visual observation is really the best tools. And I have used it to sort of stumble upon sort of solitary bees nesting in the ground. And, you know, I mean, even the trap, it was visual observation, right? Part that both those surrender bit is observations, the one which had all the bees in and also the difference between the two with and without new bee.

And to me, yeah, I'm sort of really pushing this observation. And so just my own experience, on the one hand, I'm working with this engineer, we got a big grant, half a million to put a sensor on the back of a bee and track it. And you can imagine all the challenges because the sensor has to be wireless, like computers nowadays, they're trying to make them lighter and lighter by taking out batteries. And then, you know, the bee has to be able to fly with it.

And so we're still working on it. Meanwhile, I had a high school student last year come and visit me wanting to study the foraging behavior. And, you know, all we had her do is put these number tags on the back of bees and we released them, took them in the dark, released them at different distances. And then just came back and watched the sort of the hedge from which we collected them to see how many of them would come back. And, you know, because we've got a unique numbered colored tag on the back, we can tell, did they come back from one kilometer or five kilometers? And we had one come back from 16 kilometers. 16 kilometers?

Yes. And, you know, it was only one, but I don't think, I mean, there's any doubt that it flew that distance. I don't think I don't think could have hitched a ride on anything. I don't think anybody else is putting numbers in the back of bees. And to us, just that one visual observation, you know, raises so many questions that they can fly so far. Can they fly even further than that? How did they find their way back? I mean, that is sort of, perhaps the most intriguing. So, I'm a bit promoter now, you know, just keep your eyes open.

Speaker 1: That's great. We've had another guest make the same point. And I said, listeners, I think that if there's anything you get from this podcast, keep your eyes open. The last thing we ask our guests, is there a bee or some that just takes your fancy? First time you saw it, it was just like, huh, or tell us, do you have a favorite bee? Maybe you don't have one?

Speaker 2: I have several. So, amongst the bumblebees, for me, it's Bombus nevydensis, just because it's so big. It's called it like this little helicopter as I watched it. I think maybe big, it attracts me. I love carpenter bees for the same things because they're, you know, and I was in Ecuador. Oh my gosh, all of us every bee there is so gorgeous in the colors. I love their red descent, yeah, greens and the blues and I don't know, Anthony, it looks like I love every bee. That's a great answer.

Speaker 1: Keep your eyes open and love every bee. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Anthony. This was great. This was fun. I love to talk about bees and so hopefully some of what I've said has been useful to the people who listen to your podcast.

Speaker 1: Oh, and we don't worry, I'll be back in your office for another episode in the future. Looking forward to it. 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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