[Pollinator] [EXTERNAL] Fwd: bee declines

[Droege, Sam]

All

There are quite a number of unresolved biological and statistical issues with the GBIF anlaysis paper cited in the original message.

Just one example, but a big one.  The authors do not cite the paper by Colla et al. listed below.  The Colla et al. paper uses the same time periods and comes to the opposite conclusion, documenting that almost all the species in Eastern North America do persist.  The ones that were not recorded in the recent time period were ultra rare to begin with or had taxonomic issues and might not be species at all.  Additionally, about 8 or so of the "missing" species of the 37 documented as not found in the recent time period have been found over the last few years.  They were just rare, and people were not looking in the right places, so they were not found which is different from being absent.

Here is the paper.

https://bioone.org/journals/Journal-of-the-Kansas-Entomological-Society/volume-85/issue-1/JKES110726.1/Documenting-Persistence-of-Most-Eastern-North-American-Bee-Species-Hymenoptera/10.2317/JKES110726.1.short
Documenting Persistence of Most Eastern North American Bee Species (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila) to 1990–2009 - BIOONE<https://bioone.org/journals/Journal-of-the-Kansas-Entomological-Society/volume-85/issue-1/JKES110726.1/Documenting-Persistence-of-Most-Eastern-North-American-Bee-Species-Hymenoptera/10.2317/JKES110726.1.short>
The status of wild bees, the major group of pollinators in most biomes, has gained recognition as an important ecological and economic issue. Insufficient baseline data and taxonomic expertise for this understudied group has hindered efforts to assess the conservation status of the majority of wild bee species. To more objectively address their current conservation status, we drew upon museum ...
bioone.org

The core issue here at hand in explaining the different conclusions between the 2 papers is that prior to the 90s GBIF data (all bee data really) is largely comprised of museum data.  How did those specimens get into museums? Museum specimens were collected mostly by people whose job/life was collecting rare bees and they hunted them purposefully and in biodiverse landscapes.  It was cool to be a collector, particularly when so many new species were being discovered.  In the field they ignored the common bees, collecting only uncommon ones and a look alikes; after pinning up their catch they added to their museum collections all the rare and only some or none of the common species.  Current GBIF data has little of this hunted specimen data (particularly in North America) but incorporates primarily data like ours at the USGS Bee Lab, standardized surveys using traps and mass surveys in often disturbed and agriculture landscapes. Lots of halictids due to trapping biases (netting has its own biases, btw), in paricular.  The USGS Bee Lab has 28,000 records of Augochlorella aurata alone, for example.    Thus, the pattern of increased numbers raw bee specimen records recently, but decreased species richness is to be expected and this paper nicely shows that graphically.  The results though are not biologically interpretable or correctable because there is no means of correcting for the collection biases in the early period.....you just don't have any idea on the bees and the numbers of those bees what was passed over when collecting or captured but later thrown away.

There are still bee hunters around and the Colla et al. while not a sophisticated paper in some ways, did contact all (there are not many!) of the bee hunters (many of which do not contribute to GBIF) and nicely show that North America is not a continent of global loss of bee species, the opposite is more likely ... we still have a chance to conserve our bees because most or all species remain.

Finally, recall there is an important contrast between loss of species, fewer numbers of bee individuals, and lower numbers of bees at the average point of in a landscape.  We do not have to demonstrate that conversion of native habitat to a road or house causes a complete loss of all bee species and individuals on those indurated footprints.  We also know intuitively that highly modified landscapes such as lawns, row crops, and similar will lose much of their bee biodiversity, there are papers that document that, but you just have to look at the changes in the plant communities to get the answer yourself.  Many bees are highly specialized in their pollen use...most of those plant species disappear in culturally modified locations (re: your lawn) but the hidden silver lining here is that you can also return those bees to these modified landscape if you just return those plant species (re: flip your lawn).

So, be careful, this paper is, I believe, at minimum very misleading.  It fits our narrative of bees are disappearing and the insect apocalypse is upon us, but unfortunately, this paper does not document that.

sam

"...and though the holes were rather small, they had to count them all..."

A day in the life.
Sargent Peppers
Beatles



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Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Pollinator] Fwd: bee declines




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---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Stephen Buchmann <buchmann.stephen at gmail.com<mailto:buchmann.stephen at gmail.com>>
Date: Sun, Jan 24, 2021 at 7:29 AM
Subject: bee declines


Stephen Buchmann
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