Saving Bees of All Stripes

It’s time to put the conservation spotlight on native bees.

Hundreds of bug corpses line up in neat little rows within several shadow boxes. At first glance, they appear uniform, each one pinned to the board through plump thoraxes right between a pair of translucent papery wings. Upon closer inspection, I notice the difference in size. Some are barely larger than the pin itself, while others are nearly the size of my thumb. Some are an inky black, others sparkle in tones of emerald green and even one is cerulean blue.

            A pair of brown eyes, magnified by round spectacles, peer intently at the bodies. Although he’s seen the boxes countless times, ecologist Dr. Paul CaraDonna marvels at the diversity before him. “They’re all native bees,” he says with a tinge of pride, leaning in to note their differences.

            “Even those?” I point to a cluster of what appear to be flies.

Yes, they’re also bees, as it turns out. They’re small carpenter bees, Ceratina, a genus which contains hundreds of species across the globe and forego hives to live in solitary homes of dead wood.

“And this one?” I gesture towards the blue one.

It’s the blue orchard mason bee, Osmia lignaria, an American species which builds its nest in the reeds with mud walls to partition sections for each egg. 

There are an estimated 30,000 native bee species around the world, but the estimate varies by source, according to CaraDonna.

 Still, 30,000 signifies a vast array of species, orders of magnitude larger than the only two yellow-and-black striped species I can identify — the petite elegant honey bee and the fat fuzzy bumble bee. 

CaraDonna doesn’t blame anyone for their lack of  awareness about the diversity of bee species. He thought bumble bees were the queens of honey bees until his junior year of college. When it comes to bee conservation, ignorance is not bliss. “When you combine [lack of awareness] with what I refer to as ‘the buzz about bees,’ there’s so much attention on honey bees, which ends up putting native bees in the shadows so you never really hear about them,” CaraDonna explains.

In 2017 Honey Nut Cheerios aired commercials launching a campaign to “Bring Back the Bees”. In their commercials Buzz the honey bee, the breakfast cereal mascot, goes missing from the cereal box. The boxes included packets of wildflower seeds for consumers to plant. Other bee conservation campaigns also place the honey bee front and center. As it turns out, though, the honey bee is the wrong poster child for the burgeoning bee conservation movement.

There are seven species of honey bees, but the European honey bee, Apis mellifera, is the most common. They’re a domesticated species native to Great Britain, exported around the world to pollinate flowering crops and produce honey. These populations are heavily monitored by beekeepers at apiaries, according to CaraDonna’s colleagues among bee experts around the world. Dr. Bill Kunin, professor of ecology at University of Leeds in England, tells me, in a video call: “There’s evidence there’s been a pretty big decline in honey bee colonies in the second half of the twentieth century, probably because in World War II, there was sugar rationing. During this time, people kept honey bees, because making your own honey didn’t affect the sugar ration. Once the ration was let up, people went back to buying sugar, so people didn’t need bees. It’s not a natural process; it’s a human cultural issue.”

            Concern focused on honey bees actually led to an upswing in their populations in the last decade. Like Dr. CaraDonna, Kunin argues that native bees deserve more attention. They’ve been hard hit by habitat destruction, spread of disease, toxic pesticides, climate change, and even competition with honey bees for resources.

            Honey bees are important to pollinating crops, but so are native bees. In 2013, a study found that native bee species across six continents were actually more effective pollinators than domesticated honey bees. Native bees help increase the richness and diversity of pollinated crops, which comprise a third of the world’s food. Yet In order to restore populations of native bees, conservationists first have to understand them.

Ecologists don’t have enough information about native bees, CaraDonna and Kunin explain. There are still thousands of undiscovered and undocumented species across the globe. While the U.S. Geological Survey is working on cataloguing different bee species, research is mainly centered on the causes of decline in already-identified species.

Furthermore, the addition of honey bees to the wild don’t simply pollinate more plants with native bees. Besides fighting for resources, CaraDonna finds that increased interaction between honey bees and native bees can lead to the spread of fungal parasites and other diseases, like the Deformed Wing Virus, which affects bee longevity.

            “There’s concern that native bees are getting infected by honey bees,” CaraDonna says. “Let’s say a honey bee goes into a flower and they get all their germs in it. Then later, you get a native bee going in too, so a flower is like an STD transmission device, if you will.”

Francis’ letter on environmental protection, will push the president towards more pollinator-friendly action.Although Trump attended the G7 Summit, he has to yet to commit to the 2015 Paris Agreement.

President Trump has a history of shifting his stance, though. In February, he froze a regulation which would have otherwise listed the rusty-patched bumble bee, Bombus affinis, as the first bee under the Endangered Species Act in the continental United States. He later reversed the order on March 21. The rusty-patched bumble bee, a pollinator vital to cranberries, tomatoes and peppers, has lost nearly 90 percent of its population over the past 20 years. It joins seven species of Hawaiian yellow-faced bees added to the list in September 2016.

            A few months earlier, the Obama administration released a report, The Pollinator Partnership Plan, which aims to reduce losses of honey bee populations during the winter and restore seven million acres of land for native pollinators within the next five years. American ecologists intend to carry out the plan, but Trumps’ lack of support for the EPA may halt their efforts.

Across the globe, scientists and policy-makers elsewhere are working, with a sense of urgency, to save bees of all stripes. The European Union placed a temporary ban on several pesticides which contain neonicotinoids. The tiniest dosage of this class of pesticides proved fatal to honey bees and native bees alike. A temporary ban may become permanent before the end of the year, according to The Guardian.

            “Even neonicotinoid doses below fatal still affect the bee’s nervous system,” Kunin says. “They become worse at navigating; they get lost, it takes longer for each trip to a flower, and they collect less pollen, so the economy of the hive goes down.”

            Across Europe, there are environmental laws in place to help bees, such as Norway’s Nature Diversity Act, which aims to maintain natural habitats to support diverse ecosystems. Dr. Anders Nielsen, a professor of bioscience at the University of Oslo in Norway, began a four-year long project in April to study the interim effects of different pesticides on bees. He, like CaraDonna and Kunin, believes climate change is the biggest factor in bee decline.

In a study that compared North American and European bees, Nielsen found that rising temperatures forced bees in the south to migrate north. When it’s too hot in the north, though, they eventually die since there’s nowhere else to go. Nielsen believes community awareness and involvement are the first step to preventing bee decline. “A few of my master students are involved in an NGO called “Let the Bumble Bee Buzz.” They teach the general public, teachers and children about bumble bees and m to keep flowers all the way through summer,” Nielsen says. “Your single contribution doesn’t matter a lot, but if a lot of people do it, it can change the urban ecosystem.”

Back in Chicago’s Botanic Gardens, the annual “Butterflies & Blooms” exhibition opened to the public on May 27. In this public education effort, visitors step into a mesh-cage enclosure to surround themselves with butterflies from across the globe. On a recent afternoon, parents and children stared in awe at the swirling colors fluttering around them. A blonde preschooler squealed in delight when a blue butterfly alighted on her hair. A mother lifted her son up to a glass window for a closer look at hundreds of chrysalises.

The scene reminded me of excursions from toddlerhood through high school when my own parents used to take me to science museums, botanic gardens and national parks. I remember the electric charge of discovery, and I know that these excited kids could very well be the next scientists, researchers and activists who will protect pollinators and the planet.

            CaraDonna, for one, feels that getting people excited about environmental education is vital. He owns several high-definition prints of bees, blown up to be the size of a dog, hoping people will appreciate the diversity and importance of his metallic green, fuzzy gold and bright blue bees. “It’s a cool message that these native bees are doing a good job and are actually quite helpful for agriculture in addition to natural ecosystems, suggesting that it’s worth our time to actually conserve them and think about the services they provide, not only for nature but also for humans more directly.”

            In woodlands bordering the botanic gardens, Dr. CaraDonna’s research partner and Northwestern graduate student Nathan Lamb has just started a new line of research on revitalizing oak forests north of Chicago. His findings may help bring back native flora and fauna in order to rebalance the ecological communities there. Among his important goals is restoring shelter and resources like indigenous plants and pollen for native bees to also thrive.

On this clear, breezy day in early May, Lamb treks through the forest preserves. Dressed in a simple plaid button-up and a navy baseball cap, he carries a backpack full of lab equipment and field guides. His blonde beard is as thick as the shrubbery. “I just like being outside,” he says, pointing out the trout lilies scattered on the ground.

We spot a dark gray bee nestled inside a purple geranium. It’s wrapped around the pollen stalks. “Aw, look at him sleeping,” Lamb murmurs as if the bee were a puppy. I snap a few pictures as he begins marking down locations for soil samples.  “Nature does provide us with a refuge from everyday life,” Lamb says. “We should value our natural areas, because once they’re gone, we don’t get them back.” The preserve is a refuge from the nearby highway, its roar overtaken by the drumming of woodpeckers and the rustling of tall grass in the breeze.

Lamb squats down to peer at the different plants and bugs on the forest floor. If everyone embraced the earth the way he does, the bees would, naturally, have no need to worry.