Diario del proyecto The B-Team: Central NY Native Bee Survey

The season is drawing to a close. I'm still seeing a few stray bees/wasps on sunny days, but even those that have strayed indoors seem to be waning now.

Thank you to everyone who participated, and especially to those who were identifiers for us! Over 200 species in our nine counties! I think that is pretty fantastic.

I've been collating the data from this year today and was nearly jumping up and down about 15 minutes ago when I saw one Rusty-patch bumble bee recorded by Molly Jacobson in Syracuse. Then I read her notes: they were from a collection - not a current live specimen recorded in the field. My bubble burst. Moral of the story: don't count your bumblebees until you've read all the data!

I'm looking forward to next year - and I hope I can get out in the field a bit more myself.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving and a good winter, everyone! See you in 2024.

Ellen

Good day, B-Team!

We are having some wonderful weather these last few days. Supposedly up to about 80 today! That's too warm for me, but the bees will be happy.

I was lucky to be able to spend some time over the weekend with Molly Jacobson, Pollinator Ecologist at SUNY ESF. We talked bees, bee ID, and how our B-Team can help inform her studies at ESF. It is always wonderful to meet with people who really know their stuff, and Molly was no exception.

Right now we should be on the lookout for Andrena asteris, the aster mining bee. Some might think we are bit late in the season, but with this warm weather and plenty of asters still in bloom, we could easily still find this bee. According to https://val.vtecostudies.org/projects/vtbees/andrena-asteris/ , this is a fairly easy bee to ID (highlight and left click on that website and select "go to" to see that page).

This next spring, I am hoping to bump up our observations of the early spring bees. This is when many of the specialists are out and about - it would be great if we can document some of the species that are lesser known.

So, stay tuned.

And thank you to everyone who has added data to our project (whether you knew you did or not). While our B-Team is pretty new, any and all bee data is important, because we don't know what we don't know. More eyes on the landscape can help researchers build cases for declining species, and likewise, can also help researchers determine if some "rare" species are doing better than thought!

Keep up the good work!

Summer is in full swing. Today it is raining, quite hard, so we aren't out collecting bee data, but boy oh boy have we had some great finds already this summer!

We have been most excited by the sighting of three northern amber bumblebees (B. borealis), which are critically imperiled in New York State.

From the NY Natural Heritage Program website: There is a single record from central NY post-2000 as well as the 1990s (Richardson 2013 and Yanega 2013). The species was previously primarily known from the Adirondacks, although there are no records from there since 1980 despite sampling effort. Vermont survey efforts in 2012 suggest this species could be stable to slightly increasing in this neighboring state (Vermont Center for Ecostudies 2013); however, it appears to never have been a common species in NY and the limited data suggest a strong decline. Its decline has been attributed mainly to threats such as habitat loss, pesticides, and urbanization (Schweitzer et al. 2012) as well as pollution and invasive species. It does not appear to be experiencing high susceptiblity to the N. bombi pathogen as with Bombus and Thoracobomus sub-genera.

Short-term Trends
There is a single record from central NY post-2000 (Richardson 2013 and Yanega 2013). Vermont survey efforts in 2012 suggest this species could be stable to slightly increasing in this neighboring state (Vermont Center for Ecostudies 2013); however, it appears to never have been a common species in NY and the data suggest a strong decline (95% decline short-term, Richardson 2013 and Yanega 2013).

Long-term Trends
There are three occurrences in NY since 1980 (Richardson 2013 and Yanega 2013). The species was primarily known from the Adirondacks, although there are no records from there since 1980 despite sampling effort. B. borealis appears to never have been a common species in NY and the data suggest a strong decline (96% decline long-term, Richardson 2013 and Yanega 2013).

We welcome Matt McGreary to the B-Team! Matt is a student at Colgate University who will be helping us out in getting the B-Team up and running this spring.

I've been out and about the last few mornings, chasing birds, and noticing that other than autumn olive and Asian honeysuckles, there really isn't an awful lot blooming right now. It's a regular food desert out there for our native bees. This should be of concern to everyone!

Add to this that the deer have wreaked havoc on the forest understory, there isn't a lot in bloom there, either. The spring ephemerals are mostly finished (buttercups and celendine are about it where I have been lately), as are the trees. There are no (or very very few) native flowering shrubs - the deer have eaten them all.

So, my friends - plant native plants!!! Please! In many an urban landscape, homeowners have found that plant it and they will come" is a truism. It really does work.

For those who are really interested, check out Homegrown National Park (https://www.homegrownnationalpark.org/). It is a great initiative to get people across the nation (dare I say world?) to add native plants to their gardens, no matter how small! Get yourself on the map. Help birds, bees and other pollinators.

Dear Friends -

Twenty years ago, if you had told anyone that I was going to be an advocate for bees, they probably would've laughed in your face. I was notorious for my fear of bees. Badly stung as a child, to me the only good bee was a dead bee. The mere sound of buzzing was liable to send me into a panic.

But, working as a naturalist, I decided that I needed to learn about bees - not to love them, but to understand them. My journey began with honeybees in an indoor hive where I worked, and compassion kicked in that summer when the hives on the property were diagnosed with Foul Brood and had to be destroyed. It was heart-breaking to watch the worker bees return to where the hive had been and find it now in a pit, going up in flames and smoke.

By the time I was working as a naturalist in the Adirondacks, I was hooked on macrophotography and gardening - which meant I was now sneaking up on bees to take their pictures.

Circumstances found me moving to the Midwest in 2010. It was while I was in Illinois that I truly became a bee advocate. I started to stalk the bees in my native wildflower gardens, and discovered that I was hosting the federally endangered Rusty-patched Bumblebee! Then Bell Bowl Prairie hit the news - a 14-acre remnant gravel prairie (about 25% of that type left in IL) that was slated for demolition by the Greater Chicago-Rockford Airport. RPBs were documented on the property, but that didn't matter - in early March 2023, the prairie was bulldozed despite the efforts of hundreds of people to save it.

The more I learned about our native pollinators, the more I knew that I had to do what I could to help them. Native bees are given short shrift by the pollinator industry - they are all about the honeybee, which is not indigenous to this continent. Many species of plants are exclusively dependent on the services of our native bees, and many of our food crops are best-pollinated by them as well, not by honeybees.

Besides, they are beautiful. They are complex. They have interesting life histories. The majority of them are harmless to people. And they are killed, mostly, because of our ignorance and dispassion.

Yes, I now love them.

Now that I am back in Central New York, where I grew up, I am determined to discover which bees are (still) here. The RPB was once common here - but it's been some time since it was last seen. Other species are also in decline...and we may not even know just how many.

I hope you will join me on this journey to document the native bees of Central New York. Who is here - and who is not!

Happy bee-watching!