The Washington Bee Atlas: Discovering the Secrets of our Native Bees

In this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, host Erin Hoover speaks with Karen Wright from the Washington State Department of Agriculture about the Washington Bee Atlas and the importance of native bees.

Karen explains the difference between honey bees and native bees. She talks about how Washington state has around 600 known native bee species, with many more still undescribed. She also goes over how native bees are vital for pollinating about 80% of flowering plants, which is crucial for our ecosystems and agriculture.

Karen then discusses what the Washington Bee Atlas is and how to get involved with their project of documenting native bee diversity, tracking their distribution, and promoting bee conservation efforts. Listeners will learn how the Washington Bee Atlas leverages collaboration among researchers, volunteers, and the public to gather data on native bee populations.

• Washington Bee Atlas
• Master Melittologist Program
• Protecting Our Pollinators – How to Support Our Solitary Bees – Episode 016
• Bee Prepared: Overwintering Solitary Bees Made Simple – Episode 033
  

[00:00:00] Erin Hoover: Welcome to The Evergreen Thumb, episode 55.

My guest today is Karen Wright from the Washington State Department of Agriculture, and she’s here today to talk to us about the Washington Bee Atlas.

Karen, thanks for joining me today. Welcome to the show.

Karen Wright: Thank you, Erin.

So you’re here to talk to us about native bees and the Washington Bee Atlas.

What is the Difference Between Native Bees and Honey bees?

[00:00:21] Erin Hoover: So let’s start off by talking about what is a native bee, and how do they differ from honey bees?

[00:00:28] Karen Wright: So native bees are just basically vegetarian wasps. All adult insects, once they get their wings, uh, and their hard exoskeleton, they don’t really need to grow anymore. So they just drink nectar from flowers for sugar water, for energy to fly around.

[00:00:49] But it’s the larval stages that really need to grow. And wasps, most of them feed their young, their babies, animal protein. This can come in the form of either a caterpillar or a spider or some other kind of insect, or even McDonald’s hamburgers. Sometimes you see the yellowjackets in the, in the garbage cans.

[00:01:12] So wasps tend to feed their young, uh, animal protein, whereas bees is a group of wasps that have evolved to feed their young pollen. And pollen happens to be the part of the plant that is highest in nitrogen. So, uh, this is a really good source for the larvae to develop and grow.

So that’s what a native bee is, and how they differ from honey bees is really, how do they not differ?

[00:01:41] Honey bees are one of the strangest insects on the planet. They’re not native to North America. They’ve been domesticated. So the wild version of Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, no longer exists outside of domestication. So they are a really strange bee.

Uh, they have colonies with queens. They’re eusocial.

[00:02:07] Uh, they can live more than one year. They can generate their own heat. They have a language. They’re a very strange bee, whereas most native bees nest in the ground or some nest in hollow tubes. And some, like the carpenter bees, can actually dig their own holes into wood. But native bees. Each species is different.

[00:02:30] So when you say, “describe a bee”, there are so many different kinds of bees out there. It’s difficult, but honey bees are the weird ones.

Washington Native Bees Species

[00:02:39] Erin Hoover: Okay, so how many native bee species do we think we have in Washington?

[00:02:46] Karen Wright: We’re just hovering right around 600 species that we know of. Uh, there are several other species that likely occur here, but we haven’t found them yet, so probably a little bit more than 600, and that only includes the species that already have scientific names.

[00:03:02] Believe it or not, there are a lot of species in Washington that have never been given names. So, they’re just these undescribed species. You don’t have to go to the rainforest to find a new species. There’s lots of bees here that simply haven’t been described yet.

The Impact of Native Bees in Our Ecosystems and Gardens

[00:03:21] Erin Hoover: So why are native bees so important to our ecosystem and our gardens?

[00:03:26] Karen Wright: Of all the plants on the planet, uh, a lot of them are in the group of flowering plants and of the flowering plants, which is basically everything besides pine trees and some other weird groups; Of those flowering plants, about 80% of them are insect pollinated and of the insect pollinated plants, most of them are bee pollinated.

[00:03:50] A few are fly-pollinated or, um, pollinated by beetles. But almost all those insect-pollinated plants rely on bees to, um, to basically help them reproduce and create new seeds. And then in our gardens, a lot of our vegetables that we grow in our gardens still require pollination for fruit set and seed set.

[00:04:14] Now, some of the varieties that we have now, have been bred to not need pollination. They can reproduce and create fruits without pollination, but most of our vegetable plants still need pollination.

The Biggest Threats to Native Bees

[00:04:29] Erin Hoover: What are some of the biggest threats to native bees?

[00:04:33] Karen Wright: Just like almost all other wildlife, uh, most of the threats are development, and this can be either urban development or agricultural expansion.

[00:04:43] Pesticides are a big issue. Climate change is a big issue. Uh, whether or not the bees can keep up with the changing climate and change at the same pace that their host flowers change at is very important. So, um, and then a lot of bees get killed on your car bumper every day when you’re driving to work or going down the highway.

[00:05:04] So, um, luckily bees can reproduce fairly quickly, but uh, not all of them are super common. There are some really rare bees out there.

The Washington Bee Atlas

[00:05:14] Erin Hoover: So what is the Washington Bee Atlas, and what are some of its goals?

[00:05:20] Karen Wright: The Washington Bee Atlas was created just about two years ago. Um, and our goal is to map all 600-plus species of bees in the entire state and record all of the different floral host records for each species.

[00:05:38] That way we can map out where these species occur because not all of them occur everywhere. Some of them only occur in one little valley or um, one mountain range. So trying to figure out where all these bees live and what they pollinate. And what time of year they fly. Honey bees are out almost all year long, but most bees are out for a much shorter period of time.

[00:06:04] Some bees are as little as two weeks, are they flying around as adults above ground. The rest of the time they spend in their nest as either an egg, larvae or pupae. So, trying to figure what time of year the bees pollinate and what they pollinate. So all of that, uh, they hired me a couple of years ago to do this, but one person can’t do all 70,000 square miles of Washington State and on all several thousand species of wildflowers and crop types.

[00:06:34] So, um, our program, the Washington Bee Atlas, is a community science program where we train our volunteers to run around like a crazy person out in the field with a butterfly net and catching bees on pretty wildflowers and taking pictures with their phones to collect the data through the iNaturalist app.

[00:06:57] So, um, our volunteers catch the bees, they euthanize them and they pin and they label them, and we train them how to do this to professional museum standards. So all of the data that we collect is vetted and is scientifically good-quality data.

What the Washington Bee Atlas Program has Discovered So Far

[00:07:17] Erin Hoover: What have you learned so far through the Washington Bee Atlas?

[00:07:21] Karen Wright: Well, we’ve already found several new state records of bees that, um that we didn’t know occurred in Washington. Some of them, we already had an idea that maybe they did, because we know they occur either in BC or Idaho, or Oregon. But some of the species we’re finding have disjunct distributions, meaning that most of that species occurs in central to southern California, but then we have a pocket of them up here in Washington in the more arid areas.

[00:07:54] So some of the bees that we’re finding are a little bit more surprising than others, but we’re definitely adding more species to the state list and we’re definitely adding lots and lots of county level records and we hope eventually to come up with a both county lists of species that occur in each county, but also in all of the different eco regions in the state.

Volunteer Training for the Washington Bee Atlas

[00:08:19] Erin Hoover: So, what kind of training, I know you said it’s very museum quality, but what does the training to become a volunteer look like?

[00:08:27] Karen Wright: Well, we’re definitely not the first bee atlas. Um, Oregon State started a bee atlas, I think about seven years ago, and they have really had time to test it out, figure out how to run it correctly.

[00:08:44] They’ve made mistakes, and they’ve solved those mistakes, and they’ve really perfected their training program. So rather than reinvent the wheel, all of our volunteers here in Washington take the online portion of a course that’s offered through Oregon State’s extension program, and the course is called Master Melittology.

[00:09:06] Now, melittology is just a super fancy word for a bee scientist. There are two kinds of bee scientists in the world. Apiologists study only one species of bee, and that’s the honey bee, Apis mellifera. Melittologists study all the other 39,999 species of bees on the planet. So, um, there’s not that many of us compared to Apiologists.

[00:09:35] But uh, the course Master Melittology has been set up so that, uh our volunteers here in Washington can learn everything that they need to know, um, through online modules. But after they finish learning the basics there, then we have here in Washington, we have training sessions out in the field, and we also have microscope sessions where people can learn to identify bees to genus.

[00:09:56] Um, so we, we do the online training through Oregon State because they’ve really perfected it. There is a tuition fee for it, the course, but we do have scholarships available and, um, then we do all the in-person training here.

How to Get Involved

[00:10:11] Erin Hoover: How can the public get involved and get set up to take that training and become a Bee Atlas member?

[00:10:21] Karen Wright: So, uh, we have a webpage, uh, through the Washington Department of Agriculture, and if you go to the Department of Ag website and search for pollinators, you’ll find a tab there for the Bee Atlas, and then there’s a little button that you can press that says “become a volunteer” and so it’s not that hard.

[00:10:44] You just sign up online and that will start the process. After that, you’d get a couple emails from me with instructions on how to sign up for Master Melittology. We have like two forms of paperwork that need to be done only once and then it’s over. But, um, it’s really simple to join up and, um, and then get involved.

[00:11:05] Once you finish the Master Melittology training, then you can come and join us in the field and go look at pretty wildflowers.

How to Support Native Bees in Our Yards and Gardens

[00:11:14] Erin Hoover: Okay. And we’ll put a link to that in the show notes too, so listeners can find it if they’re interested in, in finding more.

Do you have suggestions how gardeners can support native bees in their yards and gardens?

[00:11:26] Karen Wright: Definitely. So, like the term native bee suggests, native flowers are definitely a good idea to support the most diversity of native bees. And that’s not to say that, uh, ornamental flowers don’t also help native bees. A lot of bees will go to non-native flowers, and if you like them and they’re pretty and they work in your yard, that’s great, but a lot of our native bees are specialized on only certain types of flowers that only occur naturally in the wild. So focusing on native plants is great, but not necessary.

[00:12:01] The other thing to think about is the substrate or the ground, and most of our native bees are ground nesters, and so each species of bee has, its specific soil type that it really likes. Some bees, like a lot of leaf litter, like some bumblebees, um, other bees like really hard-packed, uh, earth with no nothing else on it.

[00:12:31] These are the bees that you’ll see nesting on dirt roads and stuff like that. So having a walking path that you have compacted soil is good for some bees, and then other bees like sand, some bees like alkaline soil, so having a variety of substrates rather than just all one kind of thing can really help with nesting.

[00:12:54] Uh, the aspect also matters. So some bees will dig into a vertical dirt wall like you’d see on the side of an arroyo or a stream, and other bees will only nest on perfectly flat ground. So again, you the more different types of both substrates and flowers that you have, the more different types of bees you’re going to attract.

[00:13:19] Also thinking throughout the season, when you think about what to plant in your garden, don’t just think spring. You have to think all year long and have it so that your flowers are turning over through time and there to support the bees all year long. So you want some yellow flowers in the spring, some yellow flowers in the fall.

[00:13:40] You want some flowers with the deep tubes, uh, corollas in the spring and some with the deep ones in the fall and just, uh, likewise, you want some open flowers that have, that are easy access for the short tongue bees, both in the spring and the fall. So think about it throughout the entire season.

Common Mistakes When Trying to Help Bees

[00:14:01] Erin Hoover: What are some common mistakes that people make when trying to help bees, and how can we avoid them?

[00:14:06] Karen Wright: I would just say there that I would give a warning for anybody interested in managing bees, whether it’s honey bees or Mason bees or some other managed bee, that if you are going to manage bees you need to be very careful and you need to follow the instructions that you get when you purchase or get those bees.

[00:14:28] So keeping honey bee hives clean and safe, and disease free is incredibly important, as well as Mason bees. So, keeping your Mason bees, even if you’re just a hobby grower, keeping them free of parasites and pests and disease is probably the best way that you can ensure that they’re not going to infect the native wild occurring bees in your area.

[00:14:54] So I’m not saying that people shouldn’t manage bees or have a backyard hive or anything, but if you’re going to do that, you need to commit to doing it in a very responsible way that won’t threaten the native bees.

Habitat to Support Bees

[00:15:09] Erin Hoover: So are there specific habitat features that, um, help support the bees? I know you talked about like the aspect and the soil.

[00:15:17] Karen Wright: A few other things are hollow-stemmed plants. Uh, now a bunch of the bees in the Leafcutter family, in the Megachilidae family, they’ll nest in previously drilled hollow holes. And this can come in several different forms, but historically before humans were around, it was usually beetle holes in deadwood trees, so the beetle larvae would dig the holes and then the bees would nest in there after the beetles left.

[00:15:48] And the other place that these bees nest is in hollow plant stems. A lot of the plants that you have in your garden, after they’re dead for maybe one or two years, they have either a hollow stem or a pithy stem that is easy for the bees to excavate. And so not cleaning up your garden entirely, but leaving some of these hollow stem twigs around, uh, for several years is a good way to attract particular bees that nest in, in hollow plants.

Final Thoughts about Native Bees and The Washington Bee Atlas

[00:16:19] Erin Hoover: Is there anything else that you’d like to add about native bees or the bee atlas?

[00:16:25] Karen Wright: Uh, well, basically, uh, just a little bit of background on how little we know about the species of bees in Washington. So, um, I, I talked about having approximately 600 species of bees in the state, and right before I got here, several folks at WSDA and WSU were working on a paper to list all the species from Washington, from our historical data.

[00:16:52] And surprisingly, we know very little about most of the species of bees in the state. In fact, over 400, out of the 600 species, two thirds of them, we have 10 or fewer records in the historical data, meaning that we, if you look at a map of Washington state, which is huge, and you put 10 dots on it, that’s not gonna tell you very much about that bee or where it lives, or what it needs to survive.

[00:17:19] So collecting this data is really important to get an idea to on the species level. Each species is different. You can’t just say, “oh, I’m gonna help all bees”. Because every species has different requirements. And so learning about all the bees on the species level is incredibly important. And then that way we’ll know maybe 10 years down the line, we’ll know how our bees are doing.

[00:17:46] But right now we really can’t answer that question. If you wanna get involved, you don’t have to have any background in entomology or science at all. Most of our volunteers did not do science for their career. About half of our volunteers are retired and all you have to do is run around in the field with a butterfly net, looking at pretty flowers and enjoying the outdoors.

[00:18:11] So it’s not rocket science, it’s just having fun with like-minded people.

[00:18:17] Erin Hoover: All right. Great. Well, thank you for joining me today, Karen. This was, uh, very educational.

[00:18:22] Karen Wright: Thank you for having me, Erin.

[00:18:22] Erin Hoover: Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Evergreen Thumb, brought to you by the WSU Extension Master Gardener Program volunteers and sponsored by the Master Gardener Foundation of Washington State.

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