[Pollinator] Bumble Bee Plant Survey - Recruiting Pitch

[Droege, Sam]

All

We (USGS/FWS Native Bee Lab) have developed a simple Plant/Bumble Bee Survey that permits anyone to survey what plants Bumble Bees use anywhere there are Bumble Bees (literally).

We call it "Ask a Bumble Bee."

We are recruiting individuals and networks such as Master Naturalist, Master Gardeners, State and Federal biologists and similar entities to encourage and redistribute to their members.

Our goal is to quantify which plants bumble bees use, rank them by that use, and also identify which ones they don't use.
(you would think we would already know this, but we mostly have anecdotal and scattered studies that largely don't quantify the plants they don't use).  See the bottom of this email for what we did with our 2021 pilot data.

So:

  *   You don't need to identify bumble bee species (though our goal is to get you there)
  *   Everything is non-lethal
  *   You only need a cellphone (for taking pictures of plants), pencil, paper
  *   You can survey any location where bumble bees occur
  *   Your garden, arboretums, parks, plantings, natural areas, refuges, urban, suburban, farm, wilderness, roadsides, and weedy patches are all places we would like you to survey. The richer the plant diversity, the more plants are competing for bumble bees and clearer preference will be
  *   You can survey a site repeatedly throughout the year.

The target regions are the states: ME,NH,VT,CT,MA,RI,NY,NJ,VA,MD,DC,WV.  What if you are not in those states or are in Canada, can you participate?  Yes! And, we will process data from the primary states first and those outside later.

Can you just use the protocol for one of your projects?  Sure, and encouraged.

Basic instructions (see attached for details).


  *   Half hour walk
  *   You can take whatever path you like
  *   Take notes about all the blooming plants to 10 feet on either side or that path (yes, including invasives and garden flowering that are not native)
  *   Count all the bees (and carpenter bees!) along this route and note what flowers are they on
  *   Take pictures of all the flowering species (so we can check ids).
  *   Take pictures of your field sheets and upload all the pictures using your phone (no apps to download!)
  *   Done (but we want you do more than one really)

How will this help anything?


  *   It allows us to quantify what bumble bees use (by species) and don't use
  *   Plant use information can be plugged into planting guides
  *   We can look at differences among regions and plant combinations
  *   We can identify overlooked bumble bee plants
  *   We can look at non-native and native plants
  *   We can downvote currently favored bumble bee plants (if they get a low score)
  *   We can compare use across states, urban/non-urban, parks, etc.
  *   We can look at bumble bee counts and their relationship to location and the plants at that location
  *   You can get copies of all the data and use it however, you like (for example, you might want to compare bumble bees use of an area that you have begun planting to one that you have not)
  *   Researchers can play with these data in any way they like.
  *   We can assign your area (for example a park or a group of people like PA Master Gardeners) a project code and generate separate reports of results just for you.

How can I get involved?:  Just email Jenan El-Hifnawi bumblebeecount at gmail.com<mailto:bumblebeecount at gmail.com> (copied) our fabulous coordinator and she will sign you up and can answer detailed questions.

When do things start?:  Once you see the first bumble bee, of course.  We are particularly interested in what flowers emerging queen's use.  The poor things have been sitting underground all winter and are vulnerable to starvation if there are no plants to feed on.  No queens, no bumble bees.  So, we want to figure out what good queen food is.

Now for Some Pilot Results:

We completed about 100 surveys during the pilot project (thanks participants!), mostly these came from the end of the bumble bee season.  We extracted data for each plant that occurred on at least 10 of those surveys and created an index of use (we can send you details about that index if you wish).

Remember this only includes a subset of the region's plants...so just compare the use from among this list.  If a plant is not included that is your fav, it could score high, but we did not get enough surveys (Hint:  You could change that this year).

The bigger the index number the "better" the plant for bumble bees (yes, we know that we are lumping all sorts of Bumble Bees together here, but have removed that carpenter bee use data).

Plants that had Bumble Bees:

Cup plant in only vaguely native to the region (occurs only naturally in VA, but look at its use!).  Interesting to see how low the "Susans" score as well as Dandelions.

[Table  Description automatically generated]

Plants that no Bumble Bee Visited:  Interesting to see that Yarrow, Fleabane, and Queen Anne's Lace had no use.

[Table  Description automatically generated]
Sam and Jenan

Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now
Most likely, you think we hated the elephant,
the golden toad, the thylacine and all variations
of whale harpooned or hacked into extinction.
It must seem like we sought to leave you nothing
but benzene, mercury, the stomachs
of seagulls rippled with jet fuel and plastic.

You probably doubt that we were capable of joy,
but I assure you we were.
We still had the night sky back then,
and like our ancestors, we admired
its illuminated doodles
of scorpion outlines and upside-down ladles.
Absolutely, there were some forests left!
Absolutely, we still had some lakes!
I'm saying, it wasn't all lead paint and sulfur dioxide.
There were bees back then, and they pollinated
a euphoria of flowers so we might
contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,
"Hey guys, what's transcendence?"

And then all the bees were dead.

      - Matthew Olzmann





Be Kinder than Necessary

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