[Pollinator] Volunteers to count bees on sunflowers in study

Thu Apr 3 11:43:34 PDT 2008

SFGate

Volunteers to count bees on sunflowers in study

Ron Sullivan, Joe Eaton

Wednesday, April 2, 2008
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2008/04/02/HODSVR2AC.DTL&o=0&type=printable>
Great Sunflower Project participants will use a certain t...

Here's another opportunity to do your bit for 
science without leaving your yard.

San Francisco State University biologist Gretchen 
LeBuhn wants you to grow a sunflower - not just 
any old sunflower, but the North American native 
species Helianthus annuus - and monitor the bee 
traffic once it blooms. It's called the Great 
Sunflower Project, and with it LeBuhn hopes to 
connect the ecosystem services of bees with issues of food security.

LeBuhn started out as a botanist but became 
fascinated with bees. When teaching a 
bee-identification course at the Southwest 
Research Center in Arizona, she realized how 
little most people know about this diverse (1,500 
species exist in California, 500 in the Bay Area) 
and ecologically vital group.
Honeybees are declining

"There's very good data that honeybees seem to be 
declining, and spotty data that native bees 
aren't doing well," she said. Several 
researchers, including Gordon Frankie at UC 
Berkeley, have been studying urban bee 
communities. But no one had attempted a 
continentwide survey of the state of the bees.

LeBuhn, who provides the seeds, wants Great 
Sunflower Project participants to use a specific 
kind of sunflower so their observations can be 
standardized. H. annuus is "a classic bee plant." 
Its long blooming season - potentially May to 
September - should attract a broad range of 
native bees that fly at different times of the year.

"Sunflowers are easy to grow, easy to watch bees 
on, and bees love them," she added. Schools, 
including San Francisco's Willie Brown Academy, 
and community gardens will have their own patches.

Bee watchers will be asked to spend half an hour 
- early in the day, before the pollen is depleted 
- on two Saturdays each month taking note of what 
kinds of bees visit their sunflowers and how long 
it takes for the first five to arrive. The 
identification part has been field-tested.

"We're comfortable that people can identify 
bumblebees," LeBuhn said, "and honeybees 
possibly." Other possibilities are large, 
solitary, shiny black carpenter bees and green 
"metallic" bees. Reporting "just bees" is fine, 
though. The time the bees spend at the sunflowers 
indicates how much pollination service the flower is getting.

That's where the food-security connection comes in.

"Worldwide, community gardens provide up to 15 to 
20 percent of food," explains LeBuhn. "For the 
urban poor in some countries, 60 to 80 percent of 
their food is what they raise. It's often the 
only material contribution women can make to the 
household economy. I'm interested in whether 
community gardens are getting enough pollinator services in urban settings."

Although it may not be the norm in the Bay Area, 
she said, community gardens in other countries 
can have high pesticide use - and beneficial 
insects like bees are not immune to pesticides. 
If funding is available, she'd like to take the 
Great Sunflower Project international.
Population problems

Honeybees beset by the mysterious colony collapse 
disorder have been in the headlines, but LeBuhn 
notes that some of North America's bumblebees are 
also in trouble. UC Davis Professor Emeritus 
Robbin Thorp said at least one species, the 
Franklin's bumblebee (Bombus franklini) of 
Northern California and southern Oregon, may already be extinct.

Thorp spends his summers searching for B. 
franklini in its narrow zone of distribution 
between the Coast Range and the Cascades-Sierra. 
Last year, he found none; in 2006, a single 
worker at Mount Ashland in Oregon. Franklin's 
bumblebee is a generalist, gathering pollen from 
lupines and poppies and nectaring at mints. The 
plants are still there, but the bee has gone 
missing before it could be listed as endangered.

"The western bumblebee, a close relative of 
Franklin's, was once common from Monterey County 
to southern British Columbia," Thorp said. "They 
are virtually undetectable in those areas now." 
Some eastern bumblebees are also declining.
Victims of success?

North American bumblebees may be victims of their 
success as pollinators; for certain crops, 
they're better than honeybees. The bumblebee's 
secret is the ability to vibrate its body by 
using its wing muscles, causing pollen release 
through pores in a flower's stamens.

"Buzz pollination" is crucial for hothouse 
tomatoes and peppers. Cranberries, strawberries 
and blueberries are also bumblebee-pollinated - 
all told, said Thorp, 15 percent of our food crops, valued at $3 billion.

Unlike honeybees' hives, bumblebee colonies die 
off annually, leaving newly mated queens to 
overwinter and start the cycle again in spring. 
The bumblebee trade has gone global, with North 
American queens shipped to Europe to rear 
colonies. "When the colonies were shipped back to 
us, I suspect they may have picked up diseases 
from European bumblebees," Thorp said. The main 
suspect is the microorganism nosema, present in 
commercial Western bumblebee stocks since 1998.

It's sobering to realize just how dependent we 
all are on pollinating insects, native and 
otherwise. LeBuhn's Great Sunflower Project might 
start to fill large gaps in our knowledge of what 
Edward O. Wilson calls "the little things that run the world."
Resources:

-- The Great Sunflower Project: 
<http://www.greatsunflower.org>www.greatsunflower.org. 
Includes a bee identification guide, to be published soon in book form.

-- Urban Bee Gardens: 
<http://nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens>nature.berkeley.edu/urbanbeegardens. 
Gordon Frankie's site.

-- Xerces Society Red List of Pollinator Insects: 
<http://links.sfgate.com/ZCWD>links.sfgate.com/ZCWD. 
The Xerces Society supports conservation of 
insects and other invertebrates. Its Red List identifies pollinators at risk.

-- "The Forgotten Pollinators" by Stephen L. 
Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan (Island Press; 1996; $30, paperback).

Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan are freelance nature 
and garden writers in Berkeley. E-mail them at 
<mailto:home at sfchronicle.com>home at sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/02/HODSVR2AC.DTL

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*************************
Scott Hoffman Black
Ecologist/Entomologist
Executive Director
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation
4828 SE Hawthorne
Portland, OR 97215
Direct line (503) 449-3792
sblack at xerces.org

The Xerces Society is an international, nonprofit 
organization that protects wildlife through the 
conservation of invertebrates and their habitat.

To join the Society, make a contribution, or read about our work,
please visit <http://www.xerces.org/>www.xerces.org.

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