The Bee Report is back!
The Bee Report is Back!
As you may have noticed, the Bee Report newsletter has been on an unannounced and unintended hiatus for the past three months. That's because another project has required my fullest attention: a documentary film and research project about the bees of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument! Here's the trailer:
This project has grown out of the research I've been working on over the past year and published this past December with Olivia Carril and Joe Wilson. And this is more than just a film – it's legitimate, necessary fieldwork. We've assembled a small team to go back this spring to continue surveying and studying the bees for a week. We're going to look at how the bees are doing since 2003, and how they're doing since the monument was reduced in size and divided up by the Trump administration in 2017. We want to see how valuable collecting over a short time span (a week) can be for the on-going monitoring that's desperately needed to understand changes in bee populations.
The film will capture the real work being done and allow a wide audience to be introduced to this exquisitely beautiful world of native bees. And, ideally, inspire even greater action to protect these pristine, primitive places in our country!
In March we launched a fundraising campaign that runs through the end of April to help cover the costs of getting back out to the monument and doing this important work. We're particularly excited to have recently received the support of the Center for Biological Diversity, and we're extremely grateful for its generous contribution to the project. Combined with the incredible support we continue to receive from individuals across the country, our total is now over $13,000!
Obviously, we'd love to have you chip in a few dollars to support the project. But just as importantly: we'd love to have you share and promote the project with your network of family, friends and colleagues!
So check out the trailer, visit our webpage, get up to date with our updates and please let me know what you think about the Bees of GSENM project.
I'm going to be right here, in front of the computer, continuing to get the Bee Report newsletter back in action.
RETURN OF LONG-LOST BEES CREATING A LOT OF PRESIDIO BUZZ | San Francisco Chronicle
Here's a small but important victory for protecting wild places and the bees living there. Silver digger bees, known scientifically as Habropoda miserabilis, were probably common in San Francisco as late as the 1920s. They began to disappear as the vast coastal prairie on the western side of the city was paved over for development, and were all but gone by the mid-20th century. But their recent rediscovery is an example of how the removal of invasive plants and the restoration of dunes and grasses at a former military base have helped bring back this lost species that had thrived here for tens of thousands of years before the city was built.
FOR INSECT ECOLOGISTS, SOME RARE SPECIES INTERACTIONS ARE A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME | Entomology Today
Here's a thought-provoking piece from Elsa Youngsteadt, who I've previously interviewed for the Bee Report. In it, she makes an excellent point: when it comes to conservation, maybe we need to think about the interactions between species in an ecosystem and not just the individual species themselves.
An ecosystem is much more than an inventory of its species. It’s a web of interactions... But this web is fraying.
The “insect apocalypse” has become a household (if hyperbolic) phrase, as more studies point to loss of insect species and populations, alongside the ongoing, less newsy, threats to plants and vertebrates. But interactions often disappear before their participating species do – an advance wave of extinctions that weakens the stability and function of an ecosystem even while the once-interacting species are still around to be counted...
If these kinds of interactions are to persist, conservation management is likely required. Biotic interactions are rarely incorporated into conservation plans...
COMMERCIAL HONEY BEES THREATEN TO DISPLACE UTAH’S NATIVE BEES | High Country News
A push to store commercial honey bees in Utah’s Manti-La Sal National Forest could threaten its native bee diversity. Located about 100 miles north of Grand Staircase, the national forest is home to hundreds of native bee species, including the declining western bumble bee. Scientists worry that a large influx of honey bees could bring resource competition, disease and ecosystem impacts.
SIVANTO PESTICIDE COCKTAIL CAN HARM HONEY BEES | The Bee Report
Sivanto was developed by Bayer CropScience AG as a "bee safe" alternative to neonicotinoids. However, the active ingredient is flupyradifurone, which also acts as a systemic pesticide and affects an insect’s nervous system in the same way as neonics. A risk assessment by the EPA found flupyradifurone to be "practically non-toxic to young adult honeybees (Apis mellifera) on an acute contact basis" but "highly toxic to young adult bees on an acute oral exposure basis". Now new research shows that Sivanto poses a range of threats to honey bees depending on seasonality, bee age and use in combination with common chemicals such as fungicides.
PESTICIDES INFLUENCE GROUND-NESTING BEE DEVELOPMENT AND LONGEVITY | The Bee Report
This study looks at the non-target effects of pesticides on ground-nesting bees – the kind of bees that make up the majority of species in North America. Much of the research currently available on non-target effects of pesticides has been limited to honey and bumble bees, and their exposure to pesticides when collecting pollen and nectar. While these previous studies have shown that pesticide consumption by honey and bumble bees can have important ecological consequences, this new study is one of the first of its kind to determine the effects of contact with pesticides, such as those that occur in soils, that other bee species might encounter.
IMPACT OF URBANIZATION ON WILD BEES UNDERESTIMATED | The Bee Report
Wild bees are indispensable pollinators, supporting both agricultural productivity and the diversity of flowering plants worldwide. However, they're experiencing widespread declines resulting from multiple interacting factors. And a new study suggests that the effects of urbanization may have been underestimated to date. The researchers found that the sex ratio of the wild bees became more male biased as urbanization increased, mainly driven by a decline in medium- and large-bodied ground-nesting female bees.
PROTECTION SOUGHT FOR VANISHING NATIVE BEE FOUND IN FLORIDA | The Bee Report
The Center for Biological Diversity has filed a petition asking the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to give Endangered Species Act protection to the Gulf Coast solitary bee. This fuzzy, yellow-and-black-striped bee is a member of the oldest family of bees on Earth and the only known species of its subfamily in the eastern United States. It has been pushed to the brink of extinction by urbanization, pesticides and climate change-induced sea-level rise and storm surges. This petition is the second filed by the Center in the past six months to protect a native bee species; in October, the Center initiated the process to protect the Mojave poppy bee.
REPS. BLUMENAUER AND MCGOVERN REINTRODUCE LEGISLATION TO SAVE AMERICA’S POLLINATORS | The Bee Report
This legislation would suspend the use of neonicotinoids and establish a panel of experts to complete a thorough assessment of these insecticides, in order to ensure that any uses do no not cause unreasonable and adverse effects on pollinators. This is the fifth time in six years that the bill has been introduced in almost exactly the same form. In all previous cases, the bill was referred to the House Committee on Agriculture but got no further. It'll be interesting to see how the bill might move this time around with a Democrat-controlled House.
INTRODUCING BEESCAPE: A NEW ONLINE TOOL AND COMMUNITY TO SUPPORT BEES | The Bee Report
Beescape.org is a new online tool and community designed to enable beekeepers – or anyone interested in bees – to understand the specific stressors to which the bees in their managed hives, home gardens or farms are exposed. Leveraging the power of modern mapping technology, users can select a specific location and obtain these landscape-quality scores for the surrounding region, up to 5 kilometers away. They also can examine the crops that are being grown in the areas around them. Information on the site is currently limited to Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois. But the researchers in charge of Beescape are also looking to leverage the power of modern citizen science to expand that coverage. Folks with honey bee hives or wild bee hotels are welcome to participate!
CODIFYING THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF HONEY BEES | The Bee Report
A team of researchers has decoded the language of honey bees – the waggle dance – in such a way that will allow other scientists across the globe to interpret the insects’ highly sophisticated and complex communications. While that's pretty cool all on its own, for me the most exciting potential outcome of their work is this:
"The bees can tell us in high spatial and temporal resolution where forage is available and at what times of the year. So, if you want to build a mall for example, we would know if prime pollinator habitat would be destroyed. And, where bees forage, other species forage as well. Conservation efforts can follow."
BEES THAT DRINK HUMAN TEARS | JSTOR
I'm sure you saw the headlines this week: Taiwanese woman has bees living in her eye and drinking her tears. If not, you can read some of the various coverage and watch the Taiwanese broadcast to get the backstory. However, these stingless bees are actually quite well-known. "On man the bees were relatively gentle visitors, mostly landing on the lower eyelashes from where they imbibed tears... often singly but occasionally in congregations of 5-7 per eye," report researchers in this paper from 2009. This was news to me and countless other people. What seemed to be the strangest bee story of the year actually turned out to be one of the most interesting and informative.
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