Listening to bees: What might we be missing out on?
Just some quick thoughts and assorted readings to share with everyone this week...
I have become fascinated with sound and, in particular, bee acoustics over the past couple years. It started back in 2018 when I read a paper by Candice Galen and her team showing how they used acoustic monitoring to reveal that bumble bees, honey bees, and some solitary bees ceased flying at total darkness during a solar eclipse. I then discovered previous work from the Galen Lab indicating that "acoustic signatures of flight can be deciphered to monitor bee activity and pollination services to bumble bee pollinated plants". And this is where I got completely hooked: the idea that we could observe and understand wild bee populations by listening to them (as opposed to only looking at them like we predominantly do) just blew my mind.
Of course, this idea is probably not surprising to anyone who has spent time in the field actively collecting bees. When netting bees, we often hear them before we see them, and that sound is often a tip-off to who we're looking for. But this use of bee sounds is far different than using acoustics as a primary medium for sampling a particular community of bees and measuring change.
Once I got interested in this potential use for bee acoustics, it was a quick jump to being interesting in soundscape ecology generally. And now that I'm podcasting, paying attention to sound has become a much more active pursuit; I'm now using actual tools to regularly pay attention to the acoustic world around us.
And it's frustrating most the time, because there's always a regular hum or bursts of human activities in the background. I'd like to say that this human noise isn't disruptive to the bees and places I'm trying to listen to and record – but I guess I wouldn't know if it's disruptive or not. I've never yet been able to listen to the bees and these places without that human background noise. What more might I hear and potentially be able to understand without it?
A recent article by Jenny Morber in Yale Environment 360 was a frustrating reminder of this. Two main points from her piece:
• A 2017 study by scientists at Colorado State University and the National Park Service found that human noise doubled background sounds in 63 percent of U.S. protected areas. In 21 percent of parks, human noise increased background sounds 10-fold, “surpassing levels known to interfere with human visitor experience and disrupt wildlife behavior, fitness, and community composition.”
• Studies show that the auditory landscape is a key component of habitat, and human noise masks critical sounds. Animals listen for prey, predators, and territorial alarm calls, to locate group members, and find sexual partners.
One of the things we often worry about with bees in today's world is losing species before we fully understand their individual stories and appreciate their unique connections to an ecosystem. What I'm also starting to worry about is losing the opportunity to understand and describe bees through the sounds they make in the natural world.
The varying sounds of a healthy bee community must have their own unique place in the soundscape of their particular location, fitting in nicely with the sounds of all the other life in that place. What more could that tell us about both bees and the world around us? What unique lens might that give us into individual species or pollination networks, both natural and disturbed?
How tragic would it be if the possibility of understanding the world of bees in that way disappears just as we’re starting to listen?
The podcast will be back soon with a brand new episode! In the meantime, why not catch up on some previous episodes? Available on Apple, Stitcher and all major podcasting platforms.
Do you have tips, comments, questions or ideas for collaboration? Please send them to tbr@bymattkelly.com.
Conservation
Community scientists identify bumble bees correctly 50% of the time
(York University) Think you can identify that bumble bee you just took a photo of in your backyard? York University researchers have found that a little more than 50% of community science participants, who submitted photos to the North American Bumble Bee Watch program, were able to properly identify the bee species. “Accurate species level identification is an important first step for effective conservation management decisions. Those community science programs that have experts review submitted photos to determine if the identification is correct have a higher scientific value.”
University Park restores meadow for wildlife and bees
The town of University Park has restored a meadow to provide food and shelter for local wildlife and flowers for bees. Working with the Honey Bee Lab at the University of Maryland, the town planted native grasses and flowers, including butterfly milkweed, purple coneflowers and wild senna as well as black-eyed Susans.
Wild bees depend on the landscape structure
(EurekAlert/University of Göttingen) New research was out by agroecologists from the University of Göttingen indicate that sowing strips of wildflowers along conventional cereal fields and the increased density of flowers in organic farming encourage bumblebees as well as solitary wild bees and hoverflies. Bumblebee colonies benefit from flower strips along small fields, but in organic farming, they benefit from large fields.
Economics
Horned-face bees sublet in a honey bee colony
(Olney Daily Mail) A state apiary inspector was stumped by the identity of insect cocoons that she had found inside the hexagonal cells of a beekeeper’s honey bee colony. After studying the cocoons, researchers definitively identify the intruders as a type of solitary mason bee: the horned-face bee (Osmia cornifrons). Horned-face bees have never previously been reported cocooning in honey bee colonies.
Cancelled flights means many bees are not arriving in Quebec and crop shortage could result
(CTV) Every spring, millions of bees are brought to Quebec on commercial flights. With so many flights cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many bees are not arriving causing a major shortage in the province. The shortage could affect crop output and honey production.
Science
Checklist of Pennsylvania bees documents 49 new species and some that may be endangered
(Penn State) A study documenting bees that are reported to occur in Pennsylvania has found the presence of 437 species, including 49 never before recorded in the state. Researchers said the resulting checklist of bees in the commonwealth also identifies species not native to North America and several native species that may be of conservation concern.
How honey bees avoid bumping into Nature’s obstacle course
(New York Times) A breeze-ruffled garden can be a minefield for honey bees: airborne seeds, shifting leaves and lurching flowers are basically projectiles, trap doors and Godzilla-tipped skyscrapers. In a new study, researchers found that when the going is tough, honey bees appear to high-tail it and hope for the best.
Fancy Aussie bees flew in from Asia
(EurekAlert/Flinders University) Ancestors of a distinctive pollinating bee found across Australia probably originated in tropical Asian countries, islands in the south-west Pacific or greater Oceania region. Describing the likely dispersal corridor for the ancestral lineage of the bee genus Homalictus will help understand the social evolution of the vibrant halictine bees say researchers. Ecologists are hopeful that the diverse origins of native bees are giving them an edge in withstanding and adapting further to climate change.
Open Entomology: tips and tools for better reproducibility in your research
(Entomology Today) "Reproducibility is a hot topic in today’s scientific world. Chances are, you’ve come across mentions in news outlets or social media sites of the “reproducibility crisis” in the medical and social sciences. These reproducibility issues have led to a movement to make science more open, especially with respect to how we handle our data, carry out our analyses, produce our results, and report our findings. By being more transparent about how we have carried out our work, the hope is that we will make our work more reproducible. Many tools are available to make our work more reproducible..."
Technology
Exotic Bee ID website expanded
(USDA ARS) Exotic Bee ID, a website created to help identify non-native bees in the United States, has been expanded to include more information and species.
One More Thing…
A field guide to the field guides you will never see. From Rosemary Mosco (Bird And Moon) @RosemaryMosco via Twitter.