26 Skyler Burrows – Bringing Taxonomy to Citizen Scientists

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.

Here in Pollination, we've really cracked our heads on this problem of how to sample or monitor either a state or a region for pollinator diversity. It's a real challenging prospect. You've got a lot of land and clearly have to involve citizen scientists to be effective. I was so excited to hear about a project that really didn't fit the mold of some of the citizen science projects that we'd previously talked about, namely the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's Virginia Working Landscape Program, which connected citizen scientists, landowners, and researchers to study biodiversity in Northern Virginia.

I was just fortunate to make the acquaintance of Skyler Burroughs, who is currently working on a project with Utah State University, the USDA B-Lab, and USDA AFIS to build an easy-to-use interactive identification guide for commonly invasive general bees. We're definitely going to get them back on the show to tell us about that tool. But what we focused on in this episode is how in Virginia they tackled this problem of using passive trapping systems. We've often talked about using visual, photographic, or aerial netting. But here, they've got citizen scientists with a very rigid protocol using passive traps and connecting them with taxonomies. We're going to talk about the challenges of all that, and we're also going to bridge this issue of how you become a taxonomist. You're one of the listeners out there who really got the bug from listening to the show. How do you go about developing your taxonomic expertise?

What's involved with doing that? It's a really great show, and Skyler knows a lot about his bees. I'm sure you're going to enjoy listening to this as much as I enjoy talking with Skyler. I am so excited to have Skyler Burroughs here, he is in Logan, Utah, and he works with the Utah State University but collaborates with a whole lot of people. Welcome to Pollination Skyler.

Thanks for having me. We've had a few episodes on pollination now that have been devoted to citizen science programs, and we're really interested in going through all these episodes, listening to them carefully here at Pollinear Health as we're trying to figure out how to get something going in Oregon. One of the ways that we connected originally is that I know a couple of years ago you were involved in a pretty impressive citizen science project in Virginia. Tell us a little bit about that initiative and what was peculiar about it.

Speaker 2: The project out there is a joint effort. There's a part of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. They call it Virginia Working Landscapes. The idea is to connect landowners and farmers with citizen scientists with pollinator researchers. It's a pretty large operation where each year they get probably 50 citizen scientists working together and around 30 properties. It's a huge effort on a lot of people's parts. They look at herd communities and butterfly communities, and I was involved with the part of the project. Wow.

Speaker 1: This was a larger initiative for biodiversity. Did they have a kind of rural farm focus? It was the biodiversity on farms?

Speaker 2: Yeah. A lot of it, they talked to farmers and asked them to leave a part of their grassland for us to do studies. And so at the end of the year, we could tell them, you've got this grassland and just by leaving it, this is the diversity that you had living in that space.

Speaker 1: I see. It was a kind of standard, well, I imagine there's a lot of biogeoclimatic variation, but you kind of had the same habitat across a number of sites. Yeah.

Speaker 2: For the most part, it was warm-season grass and cool-season grass-type stuff. And we basically set up pan traps and blue-grain traps in those fields to collect for bees. All of the butterfly and bird stuff was observed. Okay.

Speaker 1: So for some of our guests, those traps may be a little abstract. Make it more concrete. Maybe start with like, what is a trap? Why do you trap bees and how do you trap bees? And then go on from there to explain the different traps.

Speaker 2: Okay. So a lot of research has gone into why pan traps work. Pan traps are basically just little cups that we color different colors. I think the standard people use is yellow, white, and blue. It seems like different colors have better effects in different areas. I know yellow works a lot really well in some desert areas and things like that.

Speaker 1: So we're talking like a plastic. It's really not that complicated. It's really a plastic cup.

Speaker 2: It's a really simple thing. And a lot of people will leave them out for a day and just put some soapy water in there. And for some reason, a large diversity of bees is attracted to bees.

Okay. And that's the part that's kind of confusing is why they're actually attracted to it. And I think there are different reasons for that. But they seem to work really well and get a good amount of diversity in the area get rid of some of the collector bias you might get and have varying levels of net collectors, which I think is something you run into with citizen scientists. Some people may have been collecting insects for years where some people, this may be their first project catching bees.

You can't compare the sites in that way if someone inexperienced is collecting on a different site than someone's experience. You can't say this bee is here or this bee isn't here.

Speaker 1: Because some person is really good with a net and they can really spot bees and get them in. Well, other people may not even see the bees and just walk by them and put them in the net. Whereas these traps, really, all that gets eliminated because the trap is a trap is a trap. Yeah.

Speaker 2: So you may end up with just large bees if someone isn't aware of the diversity of bees and the small bees that may be around where the trap doesn't care.

Speaker 1: Oh, and the other thing I will mention is we had Sejai Rao on an earlier episode talked about blue vein traps. So I don't think we need to talk that much about it. It's another kind of trap. And tell us how these traps are assembled. So you had this grassland area and you had volunteers. What did they do?

Speaker 2: So basically, we tried to figure out the best way to make things consistent among sites. So we did something a little different in this one. And we set up permanent trap stations. A lot of times you'll just send someone with a bunch of traps and they'll lay them in a line. And in order to be consistent, we did, we set up little stations for the cups and we set them in there with propylene glycol. And that allowed us to leave them out for two-week periods at a time without the cups drying up.

Speaker 1: Okay. So this is not soapy water. This is another material, propylene glycol. What is propylene glycol?

Speaker 2: This is antifreeze. And we use pet-safe antifreeze because you'll occasionally get deer that are curious about what's in the cup. And there's rodents and things like that.

Speaker 1: It's a kind of goopy fluid, isn't it? It's kind of... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2: Very unpleasant to process.

Speaker 1: So why use it as opposed to soapy water?

Speaker 2: Mainly for the long term. If you're just going to leave it out for a day, I would always go with soapy water. It keeps your bees much cleaner and easier to process them. But because we had a limited number of volunteers and we were doing collections across, I think it was 10 counties, we wanted to be able to leave these things out and just do sites at two-week increments. And the propylene glycol won't dry up in a day, which soapy water will. Okay.

Speaker 1: So they put out these traps in kind of a line around this kind of patches or in these patches?

Speaker 2: In these patches. So we did three different lines of three traps each. So nine traps in each site and then a blue vein trap in each site.

Speaker 1: Okay. So they put the traps out and then they went away and then would come back a week later or so? Yeah, two weeks. Two weeks.

Speaker 2: Okay. So one, that was one of the advantages of these is to leave them out and get the diversity for a longer part of the season by leaving them out for longer chunks.

Speaker 1: You know, some more advanced listeners will think, oh, well, don't you collect all the bees if you put a trap out for two weeks? Tell us a little bit about that issue. It strikes me that these traps with the glycol don't collect as many bees as say a pan trap. They kind of, tell us a little bit about that concern.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it does seem to level out at a point where you end up with about the amount that you would with a long series of maybe 30 pan traps in these nine pan traps over two weeks. You don't get a ton of bees, but you do get a good amount of the diversity that's out there.

Speaker 1: Okay. So it seems to be a really, I guess as well with two weeks rather than a snapshot, some bees may start to emerge if you're only there one day that you may miss some fauna.

Speaker 2: Exactly. And so it really helps to get a larger part of the season where I know a lot of projects will do once a month or something like that. The snapshot is a great word of what you're getting when you do collections like that.

Speaker 1: So this was every two weeks and then, yeah, what would happen when they came back two weeks? So they come back and they have these cups and this vein trap that have these bees and then what was their next step?

Speaker 2: Basically siphon them out through a tea strainer, put them in alcohol, and then they would send them to me and I did all the processing and identification work on the bees that they brought back.

Speaker 1: Okay. And then they reset the trap and it would just go continuously. Yeah. Okay. All right. That's great. Okay. So maybe the last step. So they give you a little sample, you would get a little sample with alcohol and it would identify where it came from and what happens then? What's the next step in this whole chain?

Speaker 2: It's sort of a bee beauty salon where you wash them off the best you can. Maybe I think something you mentioned earlier is that propylene glycol is very viscous and when you're looking at things like bumblebees, which were really common in this project, it's really difficult to identify them without using their hair characteristics.

Okay. And if they're all covered in goop, it makes life really tough. So there's a lot of washing that is involved in blow drying to fluff up their hair. There are a lot of interesting methods online. I know Sam Joby has done a lot of different outreach materials that explain the process. Everyone has their way of doing it, but we're all trying to make the bees look nice and pretty.

Speaker 1: Well, on the show notes, we'll link his YouTube channel, which is really great. And also the handy bee manual. I think that you had really great resources for the beginning. But before we take a break, I just want to come back to, so the volunteer now, the citizen scientist has finished their job. Are they done at this point? Or how did they get looped back into the project? Or is that kind, they're really just satisfied with contributing this data?

Speaker 2: So that's a good question. And it's something that I know Ty Ralston, the person who brought me in on the project, was really concerned about. And I think he did a neat thing of, they're getting these piles of bees. And when you've got a lump of propylene glycol-covered bees, it's not terribly interesting for the citizen scientist. And so Ty was trying to solve that problem and created a website so that as I identified the bees, it showed what bees were identified from which sites and pictures that he had of the bees. So they could see, okay, we've got this lump, but I collected in this site for the whole project.

And these are what I was getting each time. So there's at least some connection to that. We also had them in the lab to help process and teach them basic identification stuff. So it's a learning experience for them as well as us getting data.

Speaker 1: Oh, that's really terrific. So they would be able to visualize. So at the end of the day, in some ways, it kind of takes some of the ground workouts, they'd see these dots appear and it would be, oh, this time of year, this becomes the bees. And then they had this opportunity to work and help in the lab and kind of develop some of their capacity to identify bees. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And I think that sort of thing is really important because the passive trapping style, it's just basically going on a bee run and picking it up at the end of the day. If you're not doing these extra styles.

Speaker 1: All right, great. Well, let's take a break. And I want to come back and talk a little bit more about the other part of it. How to really kind of use it as a scientist to do this. And this seems like a really remarkable program, really kind of covering a lot of areas, 30 sites and really cross the season seems really detailed. So let's come back, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the other side of this.

We're back talking with Skyler. And you know, the thing that is really impressive about this initiative in Virginia is it does get around this problem of sampling effort. It's, you know, by getting a sampling system in place that's season-long and multiple sites and kind of getting volunteers to do that, that one piece of kind of getting to the samples. It kind of provides a solution to think a lot of people encounter of being able to evenly sample across space and time. But maybe just a little bit more on the space, like how if somebody, if some state was trying to sort of replicate this, how do you kind of take a very uneven landscape and multiple kinds of habitats and be able to do something representative?

Speaker 2: I think that's a really good question. A lot of it in this situation was the availability of farmers who were interested in having us work with them. So I think that was a huge limiting factor. If you worked out, you still, all the land is owned for the most part. So we really had to coordinate.

There's not the nice thing like you have out west of these large swaths of land that you can do studies on. And so really, there was a full-time person coordinating and trying to get places that we could work and work closely with a farmer.

Speaker 1: Okay. So that becomes, you really, kind of our hamstrung and really to find these sites also becomes another source of like you needed a coordinator to be able to get the access and find the places and all. It's a big undertaking. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And we had a couple of different coordinators when I was involved. There was Jennifer Davis and Celia Boakalov. But I just think they did a great job. It's a lot of work to put something together like that and find sites and places like this. That should never be underestimated at the beginning of a season, how much time may go into finding the right sites.

Speaker 1: All right. So you get around this, let's say you get around this problem of finding sites. And I do, and it was really great, the first part of the conversation, just talking about really eliminating the biases by moving to passive trapping. So you get to that point and you've got these Bs. As you described it, you know, they go through the beauty salon in your hands.

They get all fluffed up and you've got them. And it strikes me that there is this issue of now doing the determinations. If you're going to estimate diversity, you need to sort of take that box of Bs and translate it into, you know, species names. Tell us a little bit about that challenge. Like, is that, yeah, tell us a little bit about the challenges of doing that and the manpower and whether there is a role for citizen scientists in that piece or is that really kind of the domain of a taxonomist?

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a really tricky part of the project, especially here out west. There aren't a lot of people doing species-level identification. I think out east, there are nice resources, DiscoverLife works really well out east, and Mitchell's guides are great, which you can ID most of the species out east with a couple of books that aren't that large. Where out west, you have to search for a lot of the primary literature and find a key for a genus or even a subgenus.

Speaker 1: So just to begin with, so maybe that comes as a surprise to listeners, the Bs of the east are not, you can't just use that for a lot of the Bs out west. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true. And it's also true with DiscoverLife. There are some guides that have extended the west, but a vast majority of them are focused on the east because a lot of the people who are working on DiscoverLife are based out east.

Speaker 1: Well, I think you're the first person on the podcast to talk about DiscoverLife. So we will link it on the website, but just kind of briefly talk about what DiscoverLife is, just not in a lot of detail, but just...

Speaker 2: So DiscoverLife, from my understanding, it's got a pretty broad scope. I just use the B part of it. But as far as Bs goes, there are a lot of guides to a large number of genera, especially out east that are non-dichotomous. So there's a good number of pictures and it allows you, instead of what you have to deal with, a dichotomous key, which you choose this or this. And if you don't understand a character, you're stuck, essentially. That allows you to say, well, I don't know what this is. So I'm going to choose the things that I do know what they are. I'm going to see how close that can get me to the B I'm looking at.

Speaker 1: Which makes it a lot easier. You don't have to... You can narrow the scope down to a handful of species and then really look carefully at that point, but you can eliminate things that are obvious. Yeah. Okay. All right.

Okay. So out west, and this, I think really, I think it's good to sort of think about out west. So out west, we do not have a lot of people who can work through the Bs and we have not... The other thing I'm hearing is not a lot of resources, too. So somebody who's just doing this from scratch is going to have some problems. Yeah.

Speaker 2: It's a pretty steep entry curve, I think. Just knowing what literature is available to identify your Bs and knowing what people are using currently. There are various people who've revised and revised groups and some groups that haven't been revised in a long time. And I think when dealing with the problem of how to identify Bs myself, the best way is really getting in contact with someone who's doing that. There's a lab here in Logan that has a really large reference collection, which I find essential to doing B species identification. And we also do this all the time. So we've hunted down a lot of the keys for the genera that are out west. And so getting in contact with someone that at least has been working on it, they can really help you through some of that first part, I think.

Speaker 1: And we're talking about the National USDA collection. So this is really the center for native Bs in the USDA system is in Logan, in Logan, Utah.

Speaker 2: Yeah, we have at least 2 million bees here and counting. A million bees. They kept digitizing that stuff. So when you deal with that big enough of a number, it's like guessing jelly beans in a jar.

Speaker 1: Well, maybe picking up on guessing jelly beans in a jar, there is a kind of way in which I think at some level, and I'm really a beginner at this myself, and sometimes I feel, oh, I can identify these things. I can pick up a book, and this looks about right.

And I kind of make my first impulse is like, oh, yeah, I can probably figure this out. Tell us a little bit about the kind of challenges of building up. Let's say I think we have some listeners out there who do or really motivated and want to kind of build up their taxonomic expertise. Tell us a little bit about the learning steps. What goes into building somebody, a building an amateur taxonomist?

Speaker 2: A lot of it is learning your vocabulary and learning it with, I think, being around a reference collection is extremely helpful. So if you can travel, if you can find someone in your area that has a reference collection of bees or can make contact with someone that has that collection, it's, I think it's really essential. I still need it. There are a lot of times when I'll run through a key and think I've gotten there. Then I grab the bee out of the collection.

It looks nowhere near it. And I think being able to look at that and if you have material, at least getting a set of your own material that's compared to stuff that's identified by an authority is important. And then you can have that take it back to wherever you're at once you've compared it.

But I think having that initial collection that's been matched to something that you can verify is really important. Things like bees in your backyard are really helpful. But until you have the bee in your hand, it's really difficult to know what you've got.

Speaker 1: So like one of the first steps is like making a collection and then taking your, you know, your, the collection that you make and going to like a museum or something and saying, oh, okay, now I see this characteristic. And then you make your own kind of reference collection that you have.

You look at a reference collection is sort of like assembling your own set of bees that become your reference. Yeah. Okay. So that's, that's really helpful. And so it sounds like one of the first steps is people just have to go out and collect some bees and start to go through work through that process.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And that's, that's the fun part. They, I think a lot of us go out and collect a bunch of bees and have a great time and they get back and it's a lot of, a lot of work to get them to species level once you've got them. I feel you owe it to them after you've killed them to figure out what they are.

Speaker 1: Well, you must also have had some experience with people who do this. But what's the kind of expectation of somebody really, you know, listening to this is really inspired by what you're talking about and really wants to take this on? What's the kind of realistic expectation for, you know, being able to obviously not, there are some groups that we don't even have keys for, but really kind of a filling in a useful, a useful role in a kind of division of labor in a, you know, a regional monitoring program. How many years would, you know, somebody have to sort of put into kind of get to serve a role in this whole task?

Speaker 2: That's, that's pretty difficult to say. It's, it is a lot of work and I feel like I'm, I'm still constantly learning and I don't feel like that I haven't seen many people who do taxonomy-type work that don't still have to constantly check reference material and things like that.

Speaker 1: So you never, you can graduate at like I am now the taxonomist.

Speaker 2: Yeah, you learn, you learn your cheats and you, you learn, I mean, I can pretty confidently sort to genus almost instantly now, but species level, there's just so many bees, especially out West is so diverse out here.

Speaker 1: How long did it take you to get to a point where you felt you developed a search image for genus or are you kind of like, you can, how long did that take you?

Speaker 2: I would say a few years and I really had an amazing opportunity here in Logan in that they took on some really large projects when I first started. So my first couple of years were working on projects that caught 30,000 bees each year.

Okay. So going through 30,000 bees each year and sorting them, it's, it's a really good opportunity to get that search image. But I know that a lot of people aren't going to have 30,000 bees to look at and build, those bases. So it's just doing it as much as you can each season.

Speaker 1: Okay. So the answer I'm getting is, is going to take a while. This is a knot-like birding where it may really kind of require either you're going to really commit to it or you will kind of have a blind spot. That's sort of an inevitability.

Speaker 2: Yeah. And I would say you, you pick up on a lot of genera reasonably fast and you still will, for the first while, regularly be checking things like, I mean, Mitchner's, is the world, is an amazing resource.

And I do like these in your backyard. It gives a lot of great background material and things like that. And I think, I think you can, it's not like you won't know any genera by the end of your first season. I think it just gets faster and faster each year you do it. Okay. I don't want to scare people off. I think it's really fascinating work.

Speaker 1: And I think anyone can really do it. It's just putting the time in,

Speaker 2: but it's really satisfying when you go out and you look at what's in your garden and can recognize eight different genera in a few minutes, it changes the way you look at the landscape.

Speaker 1: That's awesome. That's great, I love that. I love that. I like, I love that sentiment. You know, one thing that we were talking about a little bit at the break was how it's possible developing some, you know, some more tools like the matrix-based discover life tool that you can use out East can kind of lower the entry barrier for people. Tell us a little bit about those, you know, those tools and prospects for developing for the Western region. Yeah.

Speaker 2: I think those tools are extremely helpful in that not only are they not dichotomous, but since they're digital, you can have a key for a picture for every feature. So some of those things that you would need a reference collection to be like, what does this look like when it says there's a jack rope hits on the basal part of the propodium?

All that could seem really complicated, but if there's a picture with an arrow pointing at it right there, it saves you from having to get a reference for at least that piece of it. And so that's, that's one of the things I've currently been working on is we're working on sort of adapting Mitchner's Bees of the World, generic key for mega Kyla Day into a digital key. So it should work for the entire world, including the Western US to get to the great genus of mega Kyla Day right now. The plan is to go to the species level and cover more groups as we progress through this project. So we've got a full-time, well, two full-time imaging techs and a lot of people working together on this project to make it happen.

Because it's a lot of work trying to get all the images for each bee and translate these keys. But I think it'll be an extremely useful tool since we don't have a lot out west that really covers this area.

Speaker 1: Well, I know there's a lot of interest out here. Obviously, we have amateur, you know, Mason people who are working with Mason bees, but I also know we have to do an episode on this. We've got people with varying channel sizes on their nesting blocks who are collecting some bees that they don't know what they are.

I mean, actually, I'm just in my office right now. I've got somebody handed me some resin bees and they're sitting there. I can see I can see their it's got a nice plexiglass top so I can see them kind of developing in there.

And I'm just like, huh, it would be really nice to emerge a little sample of those bees and be able to figure out who they are. And having a key like that would just be super.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's all about eliminating barriers and hopefully making the process easier, and having this collection that we talked about earlier in Logan is amazing. But if I can take pictures of a lot of this stuff, it makes that collection more available to more people. And I think that's a nice thing to do.

Speaker 1: You know, just to wind this part up, you know, on a previous episode, I think it was we had Elaine Evans on one of our first episodes from the University of Minnesota. And she pointed out, like, you know, there's a way in which ornithology is way ahead, something like the breeding bird survey has really kind of become more than just an engagement tool. It really has become a hard and reliable way to look at fluctuations in bird populations.

And that's the citizen science initiative. We've talked a little bit about some of the obstacles and some of the really great solutions to getting around those obstacles in this episode. But I want to just kind of ask you from your experience, what do you think is possible in 10 years? Could we achieve something like a breeding bird survey?

Or is it really because of the kind of the taxonomic and sampling and level of species diversity that, you know, it's a longer-term project than that? What do you sort of see as the prospects for the next decade?

Speaker 2: I do think the birders definitely have a head start. I mean, I did notice it when we did that project out in Virginia, people got to choose what project they were going to be a part of, the butterfly survey, the bird survey, or the bee survey. And the bee survey was definitely the last one to fill up.

OK. But the people that did the bee survey, the first year came back and did the bee survey again the next year. I think once you get involved with it, it's really interesting. And the awareness of native bees in general, I'm sure everyone listening has seen it rise exponentially over the last few years. And I think the combination of that and us creating some of these tools can get us there. I think the birders are also pretty far ahead in tools. You can get a number of books that have pictures of birds you're going to see where we're just sort of breaking into that with. I mean, I think Sam Droghi is making a great effort in what he puts on Flickr and things like that.

And there's more and more people that are getting access to the cameras that can get pictures like that out of bees. But we do have some catching up to do.

Speaker 1: OK, well, that's great. I'm hopeful too. And I think I am really excited to see these new tools come out of places like Logan in the West and also just really exciting.

You know, I always love it when a big collection of museums really turns outward in the way that Logan is really kind of putting the collection to work for different estate agencies, but also for farmers as well, who want to know what these species are. And I think it really does. It's such a great way to turn the collection outward, I guess.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I think figuring out a way to do that is what needs to happen. It only fits so many people in the museum. If we make that more accessible, it makes it easier for all of us.

Speaker 1: Well, let's take a break and we're going to come back. We have a couple of questions for you that we ask all our guests. So we'll be right back in a minute. OK, Skyler, we're back.

We got these three questions. The first question we ask all our guests is books. Is there a book that's really influential to you? Do you really think somebody's got to read? Tell us about your book selection.

Speaker 2: As far as really thinking someone's got to read, it's the book I've chosen doesn't quite fit that. It's a rough read, which is mentioned as Bees of the World. I think it's really essential for what I do. But if you want to read it front to back, you're going to have a rough week. It's a big book. Yeah, but I mean, also in sort of what we were talking about, about communicating the different ways to look at bees and bees, and what kinds of bees are actually out there. I think the Bees book that Sam Droghi and Lawrence Packer put out. Oh, yeah. Basically, all just pictures, really nice pictures of bees. I really enjoyed that because there were bees that they had there that I'd never seen and just some beautiful ones.

Speaker 1: And you've got sort of Lawrence's kind of globetrotting all these great stories that are kind of embedded with this stunning picture. It is such a great book.

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a really rare material that they photographed in there because of his globetrotting and then bees in your backyard. But I have to say, Mentioners Bees of the World is just it's an amazing accomplishment as far as categorizing these things and being able to get where they need to go with a whole lot of bees out there.

Speaker 1: Maybe this is an occasion for me to ask you this question. I never quite understood it. Again, I'm not a taxonomist. Often I hear people say things like, you know, Osmia, here's a bee. And I say, oh, why can't we have a regional key to Osmia? And the answer is something like, well, you would have to do a global assessment.

Like it's not a matter of just kind of, I don't understand that. And it seems like something like Bees of the World does fill that. There's a reason why you need to, even when you're concerned with bees regionally, you need to sort of understand their connection outside your region. Can you help me with that?

Speaker 2: I think it's a matter of you can't be sure that you've got the species if someone else has described it somewhere else. And so I do. And with the described species, I think regional keys are great.

And I do think you can do that. But when it comes to saying something is a new species or something like that, you do have to gather up all the material and really make sure that you're not calling something someone else another name.

Speaker 1: OK, so I get it. So when you're doing this, it's like, if you really want to kind of like distinguish these things, you really have to look at the global collection and then you can sort of then you can make the relationships and make a key that can. OK, I think I got it.

Speaker 2: But I do think you could go through and do Bees of Oregon and just look at what's been found there and do a key to it. It would still be time-consuming, but I don't think that would require you to take all the world into account.

Speaker 1: OK, our second question for you is a tool, something that you really are the go-to tool that you really find indispensable when you're doing your work.

Speaker 2: Once again, a nerdy answer. I would say a microscope. There's just really no way to do species-level B work without it. And really to get a good look at some of the crazy features that these can have. There's there's a lot of things that you get under the scope and just say, whoa, I did not expect that to be there, especially like in the Megacylids, they have all sorts of weird structures on their face and mandibles and all sorts of crazy things can happen on the microscopic level that from a distance you're not going to see.

Speaker 1: You know, maybe just expand on that a little bit, because I imagine for a lot of people and I've just been through this myself. I've been trying to assemble a teaching collection of microscopes for classes. And what sort of micro if somebody is kind of looking, you know, not a $3,000 microscope, but what are the kind of the essential features of a microscope that you need to do be identification?

Speaker 2: You can really do a decent job with with a pretty basic microscope as long as it's reasonably clear and the lighting, I think is hugely essential. I really have a difficult time without a ring light these days. I think I've been spoiled. And when I go back to those old snake lights, it just seems like you're creating extra work for yourself if you're not lighting the B right.

Speaker 1: Oh, you're constantly having to adjust it. And for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2: And I know I've worked with people that have been on on the old snake lights and switched over when I'm trying to show my feature and just think, oh, man, I'm making like this. I really enjoy the ring lights. And I know there's Pierce who will still never switch. But for me, that's essential.

Speaker 1: OK, great. And I guess the other feature is being able to move magnification up and down if you think I think what you were describing earlier is that you might need to get up close, but you also may have to look at something further back.

Speaker 2: Yeah, there's an amazing amount that you can glean just by the overall gestalt of a bee, which is why you can. Usually go to Genius after you've looked at it not just by looking at it from a distance. And so you so you will often get in really close, but then want to go back out and see the whole picture.

Speaker 1: OK, great. Our last question is, is there a bee specifically or a group of bees that when you see it kind of like your heart skips a bit? It's like, oh, I love that bee.

Speaker 2: I think that's always switching for me, but it's it's usually switching between the or within the family. They make a kind of day. I think there are so many really cool bees in there and lately, probably Sarah Pista, it's an African bee that's just got such neat, crisp lines of hair and really serrated edges of the abdomen. And just to really start looking beautiful bee. But I'm sure I'll come up with a new one soon enough as I keep looking through things and falling in love with different bees.

Speaker 1: You know, the after we're done recording, I'll get you to email that to me and I'll so the listeners can I'll try to dig up a picture somewhere and so people can take a look at it.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm pretty sure I've got some. I could send a picture.

Speaker 1: Oh, great. Listeners, look at that. We're going to have this great picture. OK, that'd be awesome. We'll put it on the website and then people can take a gander at it and tell us a little bit about its life. You tell us a little bit about its morphology, but what's anything peculiar about its life history?

Speaker 2: It's it's not a well-studied bee. A lot of the bees in Africa aren't. There's if you want to gap in be able to say a lot about bees, you could spend some time in Africa. We really learned a lot about bees there. It's an amphidion and it's a wild carder bee.

So it kind of has those cockney-looking nests. But as far as life history, there's not a whole lot known. There's something fascinating about that too. And it's something that drew me really into the bee world when I first started. It's just how much space there still is and how much there is to learn. If you get in, get into these, there's really a lot that you could tell all of us because there's a lot.

Speaker 1: I'll say the one thing I've really enjoyed in my kind of brief education on native bees is, you know, I have some amateurs, you know, master gardeners who really take careful observations. And I think some of the stuff that they do is unique because they are the only ones who've really, you know, it doesn't take a lot of effort to be the first person to find a bee in a county or to be able to make some kind of detailed observation on their life history. I think that's a really great point. There is a lot of room for discovery.

Speaker 2: Yeah, I recently published something with some people I identify bees for in Montana, and we added 30 or so bees that had never been collected in Montana before. And it's not like people wouldn't have expected them to be there, but people just aren't doing work in Montana. And then a lot of the places in the Midwest, there's a lot that if you just collected the bees in your state and identified them, you've learned something.

Speaker 1: That's great. Well, thanks so much. I know you've had a really busy field season. You're just coming off it. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us on Polynesian today. Thank you.

Yeah. 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 can be featured in a future episode. You can also email us at pollinationpodcastatorganstate.edu. 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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