27 Sarah Johnson – Bumble Bee Decline and Recovery

Speaker 1: From the Oregon State University Extension Service, this is Pollination, a podcast that tells the stories of researchers, land managers, and concerned citizens making bold strides to improve the health of pollinators.

I'm your host, Dr. Adoni Melopoulos, assistant professor in pollinator health in the Department of Horticulture. When most people think about endangered species, they think about something a lot bigger than a pollinator. You know, here in the Pacific Northwest, you might think about the spotted owl. But, even here in Oregon, we have several federally listed endangered pollinator species. Two butterflies, the Oregon Silver Spot and Fenders Blue.

And just this year, we had our first federally listed bumblebee species in the U.S., Bomba's Offensis, or the Rusty Patch Bumblebee. And I thought this was a great opportunity to catch up with Sarah Johnson. Now, Sarah is the lead biologist for Wildlife Preservation Canada's Native Pollinator Initiative. Wildlife Preservation Canada is a nationwide organization that focuses on hands-on recovery initiatives for critically endangered species. The Pollinator Initiative supports Canadian bumblebee recovery through a diverse set of programs that we're here about. As Wildlife Preservation Canada's lead pollinator biologist, Sarah has overseen a variety of citizen science training programs.

She runs multiple field-based research and monitoring projects. And she leads, as we're going to hear in this episode, the development of a captive breeding program for the at-risk yellow-banded bumblebee. A part of the interview I particularly love is when we move from the rearing of bumblebees to talking about bumblebee's natural history.

Sarah has a lot of experience working with bumblebees, and it really shows. We talk about bumblebee mating and bumblebee hibernation. So let's take this opportunity as our bumblebees are all hibernating here in Oregon. Let's leap across the border into Canada to learn about bumblebee conservation with Sarah Johnson. I'm really, really, really excited to be here today talking with Sarah Johnson from Wildlife Preservation Canada. Welcome, Sarah. Hi.

Thank you for having me. Now, I think all our listeners know there's been mounting concern about the health of bumblebee populations in North America. Can you just give us a little snapshot of what the situation is with bumblebee populations in Canada?

Speaker 2: Sure. So I think it's probably pretty similar to the United States. So a lot of the different bumblebee species have ranges that extend into both countries. So a lot of the species that are declining or species that we're worried about, we're worried about in both Canada and the States. So the same sort of story that we've been hearing lately where some species seem to be doing really well and some species are actually maintaining their population numbers or even increasing, but others, the story is not so happy. So they seem to be declining rapidly and some are even critically endangered, one of which I'm sure everyone has heard about as it was recently listed as endangered in the United States as the rusty patch bumblebee or bonvis affinus. And they've actually been listed as endangered in Canada for quite a bit longer. So since 2012, but we haven't seen any individuals of the species in Canada since 2009.

So there's a definite possibility that they may be extirpated from Canada. There are another two species that are closely related to the rusty patch. So in the same subgenus of bumblebee, the yellow-banded bumblebee or bonvis trichla and the western bumblebee or bonvis oxyventalis, and they've both been assessed nationally as species of special concern or species that are threatened, but they have been listed under our Species at Risk Act yet because that seems to move a little bit more slowly. But there's kind of contradictory information on those two species because like certain areas they seem to be doing okay. For instance, the further north that you go in Ontario, the more abundant they seem to be, whereas in different locations where their habitat might be more disturbed or potentially in areas closer to agriculture, they seem to be experiencing possibly steep declines, which I think is the same story that we hear about a lot of different bee species, not just bumblebees, where it's really difficult to assess how they're doing in terms of populations because the ranges are so broad and lack that baseline data to know how they were doing before all of this change happened.

Speaker 1: That rings true as well. I think in the western part of Oregon, on the west side of the Cascades, you can't find bumblebee oxyventalis, but you can on the eastern side. So there seems to be not as clear a case. And I think the point that you made about really having baseline data as a way of being able to know how steep those and how unusual those declines are seems really a missing piece.

Speaker 2: Right. And for oxyventalis and taricula as well, we've kind of seen weird contradicting information potentially. So some years you seem to find them quite a bit more easily, whereas some years maybe regionally the population seems to crash, or maybe there's some sort of cycle. So it's really hard to see long-term or be able to determine whether those declines are real declines or just natural population dynamics.

Speaker 1: This is really good as well, I suppose because people might walk out and they say, well, we have bumblebees. But as you pointed out, it's not a uniform. Not all species are affected equally. And some species may be doing well, whereas here a real common taxonomically related group across the continent seems to be having difficulty.

Speaker 2: Right. For instance, the one species that seems to be doing exceptionally well is the common eastern or on this impatient, maybe helped along by the fact they're bred for greenhouse pollination and shipped across the continent. And they just seem to be doing awesome. I'm still walking around in October and seeing bumblebees out because their life cycle is just so extended, they start early and end late and are just great generalists and can eat from pretty much any flower. So it seems like some bumblebee species might be winners versus others that seem to be losing out as things change in the landscape.

Speaker 1: Well, this really sets up well, trying to talk about initiatives that are dealing with this kind of subtlety. And so tell us a little bit about wildlife preservation in Canada. What is the bumblebee recovery initiative? And we've really got this initiative rolling. Was it these set of concerns of bumblebee declines and sort of tell us a little bit about the initiative that you're involved in? Sure.

Speaker 2: So Wildlife Preservation Canada is a national conservation organization and we specialize in saving at-risk animal species that are...

Speaker 1: Sarah, national in terms of Canada, right? It doesn't come across. Okay, great.

Speaker 2: Thank you, National. Since we do have Canada in the name, we have one species that exists within Canada. Okay. But the species that we're looking to save are critically imperiled. So they require some form of hands-on care or interventions to avoid extinction. And so we're a charity founded by Gerald Durrell in 1985. Really?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, I love my family and animals.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay, great. So he started the organization in 1985 and we've been running ever since with this focus on hands-on interventions. We received some government grants and some contract work, but we rely on donations for over half of our budget. Wow. And the pollinator initiative started back in 2011. That was when the Rusty Patch Bumble Bee kind of first came into public view after being listed as endangered in Canada.

And so initially it was just a small project to send researchers to kind of go out and find out how they were doing. And obviously, as the last observation of the Rusty Patch Bumble Bee in Canada was in 2009 by 2011, we went and couldn't find any of them. So they had already declined past the point of us being able to intervene. At the same time when we were doing those surveys, we saw several other Bumble Bee species seem to be experiencing similar declines. A number of native butterflies were also endangered or had been extirpated from Canada as well.

And so at that point, it was pretty clear that we needed to make pollinators a major priority for the organization. So from that evidence, it's clear that it's pretty clear that the only way that we'll ever have bombas aphanus or butterflies like the Carnar Blue butterfly back into Canada where they had native range but have now seemed to have been extirpated is through some sort of reintroduction project. So that's what Wildlife Preservation Canada specializes in and very few other organizations do. So we saw kind of an in to hone our focus on pollinators for these species. So one of the main priorities for the native pollinator initiative is we have been over the past several years developing a captive breeding project with the yellow-banded Bumble Bee, which is closely related to the Rusty Patch. And so every spring, staff head out across Ontario in search of emerging queens to bring into captivity to raise in the lab. And so our goal out of that program is to develop a captive population to eventually release individuals back in the wild to try and supplement declines. Through this program, we can also use it to hone our techniques for husbandry and captive rearing for potential use with Rusty Patch in the future, though that would be potentially further complicated since the only Rusty Patch left are out of the state. So we definitely have to work with other organizations and try to figure out how to potentially get that kind of project off the ground. But that is really what we focus on as an organization.

Speaker 1: Well, I can just imagine for, you know, when you're perhaps used to working with vertebrates, developing an invertebrate rearing and release program must be quite a challenge. If you can tell us a little bit about how that got rolling, like what were some of the first steps that took place, that it just seems like a really unique approach to conservation, especially where we've lost some species.

Speaker 2: Right. So we've definitely run into our fair share of challenges. It tends to happen with a lot of captive breeding programs. It can be tricky too, especially because the species are always species that are in decline. So we don't really know the causes of their decline.

And maybe some of those are genetic or something about the species that makes it difficult to rear in captivity. So we started, and this has kind of been our strategy for the past several years, is to go out and collect these newly emerged queens in the spring. And what we're looking for are queens that don't have pollen on their legs. So they haven't started collecting pollen. So the bumblebee has a life cycle. It's quite a bit different from the honey bee, for example, where bumblebee queens are the only individuals from the colony that survive for a whole year. And all the rest of the individuals, so the workers and the males only survive for the summer season or the bumblebee season.

And so the queens hibernate on their own over the winter. They emerge in the spring to start looking for a home to start their nest. Once they have found a place to nest, they start to collect pollen, which is used for feeding their babies.

So that's their protein source. And so when we're out looking for queens in the spring, and we see a queen with pollen, we know she's already found a place to live. So if we collected her, then she would not start another colony in our lab. So we have to make sure that we leave the queens that have already been found at colonies in the wild. Otherwise, it would just be taking a queen out of the population. So we collect the queens who don't have pollen, bring them to the lab, and make their home nice and cozy. So we've developed or we've used techniques for raising bumblebees that have been developed by researchers in the past who so lots of different people from different universities have raised bumblebees for different research projects.

But nobody's really tried to do it for conservation purposes. So using techniques, we try to encourage all the queens that we collect each spring to start a colony. So start laying eggs and raising workers. And then the ultimate goal, which we've been working on and getting better each year as we go, is to produce new queens at the end of the season so that we can start having a self-sustaining captive population by being able to overwinter our queens and then not have to go out in the spring and search so intensively to keep adding to the population. So with the colony life cycle, after the workers have been produced and the colony grows over the course of the summer, towards the end of the summer, there's some sort of switch where the queen decides it's time to stop laying eggs that produce workers and start laying eggs that produce queens and males. Those queens and males emerge out of the colony, go off, and mate with other queens and males from different colonies. And then everybody except those newly mated fertilized queens dies, including the old founding queen, and all the workers. And that new queen goes off on her own to burrow a little bit underneath the soil and hibernate for the winter.

Speaker 1: So that was going on right now or it's already happened in larger parts of the places our listeners are. These queens, I guess they're guines at that point. They haven't had a colony and so they've dug themselves into the ground. Do you have any idea? I'm so curious about this. I've only seen line drawings of this. Do you have any sense of where they're going?

Speaker 2: Well, obviously it's pretty tough to tell where they're going. But from the research that has been done, we think they're probably burrowing down just a little like a few inches into the loose soil.

They'll be built for digging so they can't quite dig themselves down very deep. So often, like I've seen a couple on social media lately, I've seen people sharing stories where they've accidentally raked up their leaves and found a slow sleepy queen in the leaves that they're raking up. So I think they can hide under loose leaf litter and that sort of thing too, which is a perfect excuse not to clean up your leaves and the fall, which I definitely utilize.

Speaker 1: All right, listeners, if you are raking, your leaves stop. If anybody comes across one of these, please post it on our Facebook page. I want to see one of these videos in Oregon. That'd be really cool. Okay, so this is really innovative. This is the way in which conservation is practiced for a lot of vertebrates and adapting it to bumblebees. I know how difficult it is to rear bumblebees. It's a big undertaking that you guys have taken on. This is a really remarkable initiative.

Speaker 2: Right. So besides just rearing the bumblebees to get those new queens, which we've actually been quite a bit more successful at over the past several years, this year we have a record number of new queens that have been produced out of our captive breeding program. But on top of that, we have to try and figure out how to mate the queens with males. So we have to put them together into a mating cage and hope that they mate. Different species of bumblebees can mate for different lengths of time.

So I've seen photos of the Moneezern bumblebee where the male attains to the queen at the back and they can stay attached for up to several hours. Really? Yeah. Crazy, which is why people are getting photos of them.

Right. We suspect that the length of time might be different for different species. We have actually never seen our bees attached together in the mating cages, though it's also difficult for us because we don't have someone who's regularly watching them. So we have a bee fin that checks up on them every other day.

And so this year we tried a new strategy to try and figure out whether the bees are mating or not by putting up trail cams. Oh, right. And so the cameras take photos every 10 seconds. And so we leave them running on the mating cages. And I actually have a student helping me at York University in Toronto right now going through these mass amounts of video looking for any evidence of mating, though I feel sorry for her because the trail cams are not meant for tracking bumblebees. So the bumblebees are more like little black blobs. Oh, no. And so I'm asking her to report back to me when she sees two little black blobs that seem to be attached for more than several minutes.

Speaker 1: Well, this is great. This is such an interesting initiative. Also for our listeners, in the process of telling us about what you're doing, you've given us a really great description of quirks of Bumblebee's life history. This has been wonderful. Let's take a break and then we'll come back.

We'll hear more about some of the initiatives that Wildlife Preservation Canada. Okay, well, welcome back. So, you know, in past episodes, we have talked about the need to generate data in order to determine the baseline population for B-Taxa. And this came up in the first part of the interview as well. Just, you know, we see bumblebees decline up and down.

We don't know what their baselines are. So, every time we talk to people, there always seems to be a shortage of qualified ecologists and taxonomists who can survey something on the scale of a region or even a country. So citizen science always gets brought up as a way to get around this dilemma. And I think the episode before you with Skyler Burroughs in Utah, same issue he raises as well. So can you tell us an approach to citizen science and bumblebees?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so I definitely agree with the value and kind of requirement for citizen science. So with our mandate focusing on hands-on recovery efforts, we obviously need data on the species we're trying to find before we can make any sort of interventions to help them recover. So Wildlife Preservation Canada is actually a founding partner on bumblebeewatch.org, which is the North American bumblebee citizen science database. And so it can be used in both the United States and Canada. And so we were involved in starting that along with the Xerxes Society, the University of Ottawa, and a variety of other partners.

Dr. Elaine Evans also played a crucial role in its founding. And I saw that you spoke with her already. So I think she's mentioned some of the really cool aspects of the website. But it's a really awesome website where anybody who is able to take photos of bumblebees, can use anything, any type of camera, from a super fancy camera to something as simple as your smartphone. Then you can submit them to the website or directly through the new mobile app on iPhone that was just released.

Speaker 1: Android users, it's coming.

Speaker 2: Yes, sit tight or get an iPhone. But yeah, so you can submit these photos of your bumblebee sightings with other information like sighting time and location and other information about your observation. And then you get to use an interactive ID key to try to figure out on your own what species of bumblebee you have observed and the options that you get to choose from are narrowed down based on where you're located. You also get to answer a suite of questions about the different characteristics of the bee from your photo. So for instance, what color is the face and what colors are the stripes on the abdomen, colors on the thorax, and that sort of thing? And so you submit your observations and then they can be verified by a team of regional experts. So that comprises a variety of people in both Canada and the United States.

And so we come in and verify the photos, but the key allows for anybody to develop their identification skills and learn what sorts of characters of the bumblebees to focus on so you can improve your photography skills by learning what sort of features are important for identification.

Speaker 1: How do people find out about it? How do you kind of get it into people's hands? I imagine that it gets more and more powerful the more people are doing it. How do you kind of confront that challenge?

Speaker 2: Right. So there are a huge number of people that are involved already. It's actually incredible. It blows my mind how many people are interested in taking photos of bumblebees, though they are adorable and awesome to be fair.

So I shouldn't. But yeah, the website has over, I think 21,000 observations submitted since 2014. So there are verified records of almost all the different species of bumblebee in North America.

There are verified records in every single state, province, and territory in North America. Over 600 records of species known to be in decline have been submitted and verified. So we have photos of aphanus, taricula, oxytentalis, and crotchii. So it's an incredible resource and successful at locating these declining species.

And it would be way too difficult for researchers to get to all of these different species. It's amazing. I'm pretty sure over 200 submissions of the rusty patch bumblebee have been verified in the United States. So there's still hope for us up here in Canada that we might have people besides us be able to find remnant populations. But yeah, it's just, it's been so successful. And like there has been all the partners involved have been sharing the website.

But I think even just by word of mouth that it seems to have spread across North America like there's just so much value and so much produced from it already. Another cool example thing that has come out of Bumblebee Watch is we have verified records of the common Eastern bumblebee living outside of its natural range. So from potential introductions from greenhouses in both Washington and and it's given us a better idea of native species ranges.

So we're seeing sightings submitted in areas where we didn't know species extended to and now we do because of submissions by citizen scientists. And it just kind of like continues on and on the value and applicability of this resource. And so many people are coming together to contribute. It's just awesome.

Speaker 1: Well, and it sounds like one of the things that was done really well in Canada is it was multi-agency. There was such a broad buy-in in getting it rolled out that all those networks can then be tied in towards letting people know about it. I like the way that you describe it too as soon as that happens and people start telling people and then it sort of has a motion of its own, which is what you want.

Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Actually, Wildlife Preservation Canada runs several hands-on citizen science training programs using Bumblebee watches at a variety of different locations across Canada. So we invite volunteers to come to our workshops and get direct hands-on training and surveying for Bumblebees so that throughout the summer, they're able to return to the location independently and survey consistently through the Bumblebee season to collect kind of long-term extended data at these different focal sites and submitted. One of our programs specifically is at Pinery Provincial Park, which is the last known location of the rusty patch Bumblebee in Canada. So we've had a team of volunteers out there every year since 2015 trying their best to locate the species since that was the last place that we found it. But actually, something exciting for our program this year is that several volunteers have been participants since 2015 at Pinery Provincial Park. And this year, one of our volunteers who has been dedicated since the first day, actually surveyed and located a species, an individual of a species that has never before been recorded in Pinery Provincial Park. So the American Bumblebee or Obamus Pennsylvania, which is also a species that is possibly in decline.

There's been concern about their population numbers lately, but she found an individual of this species and submitted it to Bumblebee Watch. And it was the first record we've ever had. Yeah, which is really great. So yeah, it's super cool.

And with these programs, we provide all the equipment required. So we have a big storage box full of nets and vials, and we teach the volunteers how to catch the Bumblebees and put them into these clear plastic vials. So they get a chance to get a little bit more of a close-up look at each of their observations. Because of trying to teach people to take photos of Bumblebees and submit them to Bumblebee Watch, often we end up getting just photos of Bumblebee's butt as it flies away. Or I know myself, I can spend a lot of time chasing a bee from flower to flower trying to get a good picture. And in the end, it just flies away.

And I just got a picture of the flower that was left behind. So with these hands-on training programs, we're able to teach people how to safely catch the bees and take a bit of a closer look at them later on. We also can have them use little freezer lunch cooler packs, you put the bees on ice for a little while, and they then cool down. And you're better able to look at the different features that are important for identifying Bumblebees. So yeah, it's just an opportunity for people to get directly involved with hands-on experience with catching Bumblebees and seeing what the different species look like.

Speaker 1: Well, we're really excited. We've been talking with Xerces about getting them to do training around Oregon, their home state, trying to coordinate them, and doing an atlas with other taxa in the state. And I'm just really curious, from your experience, what makes a good Bumblebee picture? Like if you have a little cool dail Bumblebee, do you take it from the front to the side? Do you take a couple of pictures?

Speaker 2: Right. So probably take as many pictures as you possibly can, because most of them are going to be terrible and you're going to delete them later. So you have the option on Bumblebee watch to submit up to three photos for each sighting. And so usually the best photos involve a shot of the bee so you can see the top of the thorax and the top of the abdomen. So often you have to play around so you can get a photo of the bee with its wings open, so the wings aren't covering the abdomen where there might be important features for identification. The color pattern is really the main feature for identifying Bumblebees. But for some of the species that are trickier to identify, a shot of the face can be really useful.

Because you can look at the lengths of the face and distances between certain features. Though there are some, there are going to be some species and there are going to be some specimens that you just can't identify from photos. For instance, one of the important characteristics for differentiating between different species can be that there are extra sets of eyes that are above the larger eyes. Kind of, I think they're called a Celly. And so the determining factor for the difference between the two species is that the distance between the edge of the eye and the celly is less than one-half of the diameter of the celly.

And obviously, anyone who is listening right now has probably never even seen like look to be in the face this closely. Because it has these features. So I think a good shot of the face, a good shot at the top of the bee, and sometimes a side shot can be helpful too. Because sometimes the fur on the side of the thorax can be important for identification. Or if the bee is really cold, they often sit with their wings closed on the back of them. So if you can take a peek underneath the wings from the side, you can see the fur underneath. But really just a varied set of three different angles with a face and a top shot and it will probably be your best bet for being able to identify the bee.

Speaker 1: And I think that's a really good point you've made is, you know, sometimes you can't discern the species, but a lot of times you can. So getting those pictures is really kind of key. Right.

Speaker 2: And it really depends on where you are to like certain areas have just a ton of different species that all have similar color patterns. Like Oregon. Exactly. Though it was convenient for me. I came from Alberta and Ontario when I started this position. I used to have trouble with all of the different bumblebees that had yellow stripes, then two red stripes, a yellow stripe, and a black stripe on their abdomen. And I moved to Ontario and there are only two bees that have read on them. So I was like score. All right.

Speaker 1: Well, this is great. I think this gives people a lot of ideas on how to move forward. And I'm really excited. We're really looking forward to working with Xerces on lots. There are lots of records of bumblebee watches in Oregon. Lots of Oregonians are using it, but we really would love to do a push to kind of get better coverage around the state. And this just talking to just reminds me and inspires me that we got to get this initiative off the ground.

But, you know, the other thing I want to talk about when it comes to citizen science, and we had a really good interview with Aaron Oodle about engagement versus data. And I guess, oftentimes, we still, you know, we were just out in Southern Oregon talking about bee-be decline. And people really, really do think about honeybee stocks. And obviously, honeybees do have problems. But you often find that people's awareness of problems in native bee communities is really not there.

They don't have a really good sense of it. Can you give us some tips? What are some effective approaches to raising public awareness, both the natural history and diversity of bees and sort of putting native bees on people's radars?

Speaker 2: Right. We definitely run into the same sort of story up here in Canada where lots of people think that all bees are just bees or maybe they know that bees are the big fuzzy ones, but not much of that fact. And I think Joseph Wilson mentioned, I think he was the lead author on a recent paper where he surveyed a wide variety of people. And the vast majority of them think these are important, but nobody really knows what a bee is versus what a fly is. And so, I think it's tough for us just because we're such a small organization. And so, our ability to get out there and talk to people and engage people in learning about bees is quite limited. But we've definitely seen what works for us, or at least I've seen what seems to really engage people is sharing this type of information.

It seems like it's just not really out there. And so, the idea that honey bees are really great and they're really cool, they make honey, which is awesome, but they're not at risk of extinction. And they're all managed kind of similar to raising chickens or cows where you would never think that if you had chickens in your backyard, you were contributing to bird conservation, where it's like there's this confusion. Some people just think that all these are the same and they don't know that honey bees aren't native or they're not typically wild. And so, I think just telling people that and engaging people in these types of hands-on workshops where they can have an active part in real-world conservation, showing them pinned specimens, which seems to be a theme that's come up on this podcast a couple of times as well, giving people the opportunity to look at and see in front of them the crazy diversity of bees just in North America, just even within certain provinces and certain states.

It's unbelievable. And I think even just giving them a little bit of a taste, a lot of people seem to take that and run with it. So, just a little bit of these are the different groups of bees. There's not just one or a handful of different bees, there are a lot of different bees that can be ultra-specialized.

So, they only have a relationship with one or two other plant species and without this relationship, neither the plant nor the bee would still exist. And so, yeah, we try to do our best to do some of this educational outreach to raise awareness and to just give people a little bit of an idea of the magic of bees. But it seems to me that once people get a hand in it, they really take it on for themselves. Another strategy that we have is because we're so small, we often try and engage the help of volunteers and students in our research projects and our captive breeding project directly.

So, we don't have a huge number of staff and so getting people to come help us with the projects helps us and it also gives people a sense of being able to take ownership and being able to see that they're actually contributing, I think works really well.

Speaker 1: Well, I have to say, I'm a total city person, but I do remember becoming interested in natural history by reading Gerald Dwell. You realize how accessible natural history was. It really was everywhere around you and you didn't require somebody to be able to ask even some very basic research questions anybody can do just to have to have the ideas and a pair of eyeballs and you're away. I love that part of it that people seeing this stuff, just showing them the bees and showing them the diversity and just giving them tipping your cards a little bit and telling them a little bit about the natural history goes a real long way.

Speaker 2: Well, and then you just start to look and you start to notice, well, even myself, like I didn't really start my career thinking that I would get into bees. I didn't really know anything about bees until after undergrad and I kind of fell into studying bees and fell in love with them now every time I'm on a hike with any of my friends, they look back as if I was talking to them.

I'm staring at flowers because there are bees there so it's really infectious and I think as soon as people get a sense of what they're missing by not looking, they can be really inspired on their own to contribute to conservation.

Speaker 1: Well, super. That's great and well said and let's take a short break and then we're going to come back and I got three questions for you. All right, welcome back everybody. We're with Sarah Johnson and we're going to ask her these three questions. The first question is a book. Is there a book that you just love that you want everybody to know about?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so my favorite book and the book that I carry with me during every set of fieldwork that I do all summer is Bumble Bees of North America, an identification guide by Paul Williams, Robin Thorpe, Leif Richardson, and Sheila Kola and especially for people who have listened to this and now are keen to start using Bumble Bee Watch in the spring. This is a really great resource for kind of extending your identification skills. So there is lots of great information on all of the North American Bumble Bee species. There is a really cool introduction section at the front with lots of really accessible information on Bumble Bees. Every species has range maps, notes about the types of habitats that they like and their behavior. Every species has identification steps including hand characters and then you can flip to the back if you're feeling really brave and dedicated, you can use the full ID key which takes you through the steps to decide which Bumble Bee you have if you happen to have specimens that you can look at under a microscope.

Speaker 1: And it has those really great segment coloration diagrams at the back of each species. You get the whole range because I guess maybe people don't know this but Bumble Bees, well we've got a Bommas Melanapigus in Oregon has two types. If you're in the north part of the valley, it looks one way.

In the southern part of the valley, it looks if you head to Ashland, you have another type. And so we've got these color variations which are really nicely captured in the book.

Speaker 2: Right, yeah same thing for Bommas Bifarias. There are two kind of regional color patterns that you see and my least favorite be Bommas Rufus Synctus.

Speaker 1: With a million color variations.

Speaker 2: Like every Bumble Bee species imaginable. So if you don't know what it is, it's probably Rufus Synctus.

Speaker 1: Well the other thing is as well for those advanced people you can do males because it has them, tell people about Bumble Bee genitalia. Like it's very disc, yeah I've not done it. I remember doing it a bit with Lincoln in a workshop but you can apparently the genitalia of males is like really diagnostic.

Speaker 2: Right, well males are particularly difficult because for almost every species they have this crazy amount of variation in their color patterns and I actually haven't done a lot of it either but the only way that you can definitively identify most male Bumble Bees is to inspect their genitalia on your microscope. So there are photos of an assortment of extracted Bumble Bee genitalia in the book if you feel so inclined. It definitely is quite the skill though to be able to open up the back of the abdomen and pull out that capsule and then take a look at it under a scope to be able to figure out what species it is which, to be honest I have not fully developed. I try, I leave that to Lincoln.

Speaker 1: Well I think it's as good, it's an inexpensive book. It has stuff for beginners but it'll last you all the way to like you know the person who's most advanced. It is a, I think it's under 30 bucks. It's a really great book.

Speaker 2: Yeah you can get it on Amazon. I'm pretty sure it's under 30 dollars. It's awesome. I would recommend it to any Bumble Bee lover or future Bumble Bee lover.

Speaker 1: Okay so here's another question for you. What tool? If you were stranded on a desert island or there's just one tool you just always carry with you for doing the kind of work you do, what is that tool? Or one that you're known for? It's like that's the Sarah Johnson tool. Can be any one of those answers.

Speaker 2: I'm not sure that I have quite developed the Sarah Johnson tool but get back to me in a decade maybe. Okay. But I would say the most useful tool or set of tools for either citizen scientists or for researchers trying to survey Bumble Bees is the net and vile because it is so difficult to identify them as they're flying away and gives you a chance to take a look at them a little bit more closely and potentially cool them down. And so I know that a lot of people have said net before or I need to want up them a little bit and at Wildlife Preservation Canada we use these special nets that are telescopic. Most of our survey work is done in the early spring looking for these queens to bring for our captive breeding program. What is the most common early spring flowering plant but the willow tree? So when we're out serving for Bumble Bee Queens quite often they are obviously visiting the flowers at the very top of the willow trees and so we have nets that extend out to I think between eight and 12 feet long.

So we often have sites actually that are on the road sides and we often have people coming up to us being like what the heck are you doing? Long nets waving them around like crazy but definitely useful to be able to get those bees at the tops of trees.

Speaker 1: I have a question for you since you do a lot of this that's great net that telescoping net is the first on the show it's a great one but the one thing I often what is the best kind of diameter for I guess when you're going to chill a bee down it doesn't matter but what kind of diameter of a clear tube is best for doing work with Bumble Bees. I know some people have really big ones like a pillbox and some people have little tiny ones.

Speaker 2: Yeah so I guess it probably some of it comes down to personal preference. The ones that we use are maybe three quarters of an inch to an inch in diameter I would guess so they're not like the big collection jars because I find when they're smaller the bee can't move around as much so it's easier to get a better look at them and you can cool them down faster too because they're right up against it yeah yeah but I think it's mostly personal preference it kind of depends on what you're trying to do with them but yeah we just use the kind of small vials to capture our Bumble Bees in.

Speaker 1: Now last question is a favorite bee and a little bit a bee that you see it really oh I love that bee um do you have one?

Speaker 2: I do so obviously Bumble Bees are by far the best kind of bee in my highest opinion though to be fair they are kind of like the the polar bears or panda bears of the insect world but my personally favorite Bumble Bee is the cryptic Bumble Bee or Bombus Cryptorum though they used to be called Bombus moderatus and and I think that sounds a lot better and a lot friendlier it depends I will call them that but they are very beautiful bee they have very smooth and even for a lovely stripe of lemon yellow on their abdomen and the tip of the abdomen is white and there's not a lot of variation in their color patterns so they're usually pretty easy to identify which I also like in a bee though they can be confused with the western Bumble Bee certain color patterns but yeah I I lived in western Canada for so long and there's so much more diverse colorful bees there and so moving to Ontario for the last little while though it was nice to have my identification made a little bit easier I I definitely was a little disappointed to learn that all of these here are just plain black and and so I've missed the white bottom bees and the orange straight bottom bees back in Alberta

Speaker 1: well for full disclosure Sarah and I were in both in Dr. Ralph Carter's lab at the University of Calgary and I really like to get Ralph on the show but I just don't know you know he also doesn't have great internet out at his place so I'm waiting till I can like put a microphone in front of his face

Speaker 2: well I will be back in Calgary shortly so I'll knock on his door and try and track him down

Speaker 1: but Ralph has been working with bumblebees for so long and has and there I guess you know one thing that yeah just to end on I think people think about southern Alberta and it's like but there's a rich history of bumblebee research in southern Alberta Dr. Richards and Dr. Hobbs and Dr. Carter like it's it's a place that I think people don't often think about when it comes to bumblebees but a great place to study bumblebees

Speaker 2: yeah well it's so great because there's such a diversity of habitats because you have the rocky mountains the foothills the prairie the parkland and so there's there's a lot of diversity in habitat to support a high diversity of bumblebees

Speaker 1: Well great talking to fellow Albertan and thanks for taking the time to be on the show thanks so much for having me thanks for listening to 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's 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 pollinationpodcast at organstate.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 it makes us more visible which helps others discover pollination see you next week