Entomologist Judith Maxwell can’t seem to stay away from insects. Although technically retired, she still collects and studies them. More specifically, she collects bees. Her season begins in March, at which point she gathers her things and heads for eastern Oregon’s Siskiyou Mountains, near the California border.
“Bumblebees are the earliest bees to emerge. They’re really hairy, it’s like they’ve got on a fur coat,” Maxwell said.
As a volunteer for the Oregon Bee Project, Maxwell is part of a group dedicated to studying Oregon’s busiest pollinators. She devotes her time to them because, in spite of the vastness of human knowledge, we know little about wild bees—and the ways humans may be driving them to extinction.
Armed with insect nets and jars, Maxwell and a few others spend around four hours a day searching for the busy critters. Maxwell’s favorites are leafcutter bees. Males have long, hairy legs. When they catch a female to mate with, they cover her eyes with their busy limbs. Maxwell finds the process hilarious to watch.
At first glance, it is easy to think all bees are either bumblebees or honeybees. The reality is far more complex. Entomologists estimate there are anywhere from 500 to 1,000 species of bees living in Oregon alone, with about 25 of those species being bumblebees.
Global indicators show pollinators are declining. The United States Department of Agriculture cites habitat fragmentation, pollution, climate change and invasive species introduced by humans as some of the trouble. Bees are perhaps the most well-known pollinators, yet our knowledge is limited mainly to honeybees; wild bees remain largely unstudied. We don’t know the answer to basic questions like: How many species are there? What are they doing all day? What crops are they visiting?
Farmers rely on bees to fertilize about 35% of the world’s crops, according to the Natural Resource Conservation Service. California’s almond crop relies entirely on pollination from honeybee hives hauled in from across the United States each year. A 2008 study from the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres estimated the global value of insect pollination to be around $217 billion annually or $260 billion adjusted for inflation. Someone will have to pick up the bill if pollinators, such as bees, continue to disappear. Yet, there is still time to respond. Understanding the issues affecting bees and other pollinators helps turn around the situation for insects in peril.
Oregon State University professor Louisa Hooven studies global issues affecting pollinators.
“The human population is growing and we just take up so much space for agriculture and resource extraction,” Hooven said. “It’s like a big Jenga game. There’s probably some you could pull out of the pile and the thing would still stand. There would be a hole, but we don’t really know how many blocks we can pull out before the whole thing collapses.”
United States Geological Survey scientist Sam Droege has pioneered native bee research in the United States.
“We don’t have details. There is no data. We know simple things like, ‘These bees were found here in the past,’” Droege said. Without a stronger knowledge base, determining threats to wild bees “is like saying, ‘you know, not seeing a lot of bison around’ and deciding they all got shot,” he said.
Building up that data starts with learning what bees are around.
“It is the kind of thing that, for many of these small reasons, nobody can waltz in, catch the bees, and get the identifications right,” Droege said.
Identifying a bee requires a few tools. The first critical step: find a bee. A microscope provides the necessary magnification. Once it is magnified, whoever looks at it will need to determine what they are looking at, but as an unexplored field, quality guides to bee identification are still scarce.
University of Oregon alumnus, self-taught entomologist and educator for the Oregon Bee Project Bee August Jackson wrote “Bees of the Willamette Valley: a comprehensive guide to the genera” after becoming frustrated by limited and outdated information. Jackson’s book, released in 2019, is a free-to-access, detailed key. Anyone can use it to identify the bees they find down to their genus, one step above species. Although the book is focused on the Willamette Valley in Oregon, it can be used outside that region as well.
The project’s first year of collection in 2018 yielded around 12,000 specimens, representing over 400 species, said Lincoln Best, the lead taxonomist for the Oregon Bee Project. Best only has a couple months each spring for OBP specimen identification. He balances it with working in his lab at the University of Calgary in Canada, conducting independent research and supporting Bee City Canada, another group working to protect pollinators. As of November 2019, Best still had bees from 2018 to identify. He hasn’t started on last year’s specimens yet.
Best is an expert at identifying bees from western North America down to the species. Yet, some specimens still stump him.
“I’m shoulders deep in this stuff, and I know that it’s such a rich subject that I could spend 100 lifetimes on it,” Best said. “There is just so much, and the diversity is so extreme.”
The bees collected so far represent a myriad species, from common to exceedingly rare. Best said some may even be new species. With all that diversity and limited knowledge, opportunities abound for people like Jackson and Maxwell to make important discoveries.
Over the summer, Jackson found Morrison bumblebees, Bombus morrisoni, while collecting in Eastern Oregon. “They hadn’t been recorded in this part of Oregon for about a century,” Jackson said.
The International Union for Conservation of Nature maintains a comprehensive list of how the world’s fauna is faring. The Morrison bumblebee currently ranks as “vulnerable” overall and “possibly extinct” in Oregon. Thanks to the work of Jackson and other OBP volunteers, we know that the second part is not true.
Understanding the bees of Oregon is important for the protection of native habitats, so they can continue to pollinate plants. “In order to restore land effectively, we need to know how to maximize the biodiversity it can support,” Best said.
It will take time to understand Oregon’s wild bees. “I think it will be a long term project. If you look at a bee community, this year and next year it will change,” said Andony Melathopoulos, one of OBP’s leaders. “They are wild animals — they go through boom and bust cycles.”
The Oregon Bee Project aims to engage citizen-scientists in an effort to build knowledge as threats to pollinators continue to emerge. Droege’s advice for anyone interested in helping wild bees?
“Remove some grass and add a few plants,” he said. “Plant native plants because they bring with them animals and bacteria and all kinds of other great things.”
Oregon’s wild bees are part of the world’s pollinator community and coordinating an effort to study and understand them is complex, but Melathopoulous says it can be done through engaging citizen-scientists.
“The only way that will happen is not through a bunch of money,” Melathopoulos said. “It is by having people who are dedicated to a kind of lifelong learning. People who know they can have an impact if they just scratch at it. Those are the people who can carry something like this.”
Illustration by Billy Lawson