Dr. Yvonne Lawley and Dr. Jason Gibbs are testing different on-farm approaches to provide habitat for wild bees and insects that benefit crops as part of a healthy agro-ecosystem. In this podcast we learn about their latest research, plus the many differences between wild bees and honey bees. For starters, Manitoba is home to more than 360 species of wild bees!
Jason Gibbs is an assistant professor in entomology at the University of Manitoba. His research includes pollinator ecology and diversity in agricultural landscapes and native bee conservation. Yvonne Lawley is an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba specializing in corn and soybean agronomy, cover crops and cropping systems design research.
Dr. Yvonne Lawley and Dr. Jason Gibbs are testing different on-farm approaches to provide habitat for wild bees and insects that benefit crops as part of a healthy agro-ecosystem. In this podcast we learn about their latest research, plus the many differences between wild bees and honey bees. For starters, Manitoba is home to more than 360 species of wild bees!
Jason Gibbs is an assistant professor in entomology at the University of Manitoba. His research includes pollinator ecology and diversity in agricultural landscapes and native bee conservation. Yvonne Lawley is an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba specializing in corn and soybean agronomy, cover crops and cropping systems design research.
Welcome to the Manitoba agriculture and food knowledge exchange podcast. I'm your host, Jordan Cieciwa. And today we are talking about pollinators and pollinator habitat. Specifically, we're going to focus right in on bees and what they do for the environment and how farmers and producers can support them in all the excellent things that they do at the backbone of food production. So of course, with everything that we do, we want to go get some experts and both of our experts can be found in the faculty of agricultural and food sciences at the University of Manitoba. First, we've got Dr. Yvonne Lawley, and she's the assistant professor in the plant science department at the university of Manitoba. She's an expert in cropping system design. Next, we've got Dr. Jason Gibbs, assistant professor in the department of entomology. He's an expert in the diversity of wild bees in North America. Both of them are going to be chatting quite a bit. So let's jump right into this Dr. Gibbs, what makes bees so beneficial?
Jason Gibbs:Well, bees are the primary pollinators of flowering plants. A lot of different insects will visit plants to collect, to eat pollen, to drink nectar. Bees are really the only insects that actually entirely use pollen and nectar for their entire food supply. So bees are very effective. They're very efficient and they visit flowers a lot. The benefit of that is that all those plants are things that we eat. All those plants are sequestering carbon, they're releasing oxygen. They're sort of the basis of ecosystems generally. And so bees are this kind of eco... Keystone group of insects that are sort of benefiting, you know, ecosystems broadly.
Jordan Cieciwa:I love that because it is, you know, you see these. Talking to somebody that loves to go out and hike, you see bees bouncing from flower to flower. Their life seems pretty good. And as small as they are, like you said, they're the cornerstone to most ecosystems. Now, when we take that into account, why is their habitat important?
Jason Gibbs:Well, bees need basically three things. They need flowers that they can use to sort of feed their offspring. They need a place to nest and they need a safe place where they're not going to get killed, basically. And so having habitat on the landscape is really important to sort of sustain bees and not necessarily, they're not always the same habitat. So sometimes the places where they nest are not the same place, where they forge for flowers.
Jordan Cieciwa:Interesting. Now let's talk a little bit about the farming side of this, because this is something I think I know personally, as I'm driving down the highway, you'll see boxes or beehives once in a while. What, what do farmers typically do with bees?
Yvonne Lawley:Well, I think in Manitoba anyway, around the prairies, we have specialization in terms of the farmers that are working with bees and then the farmers that maybe some of the crops get serviced by bees. And so I think, you know, the general farmer in Manitoba may not be, especially if we're talking about grain crops, they may not be thinking too much about bees, but we have some farmers and a lot of farmers in Manitoba whose bread and butter is bees. And they're looking for places where those bees can forage. I think for those farmers, they're looking for flowering plants at critical times in a year. So if we take a look at the crops that we commonly grow in Manitoba, we have both cereal crops. And then we have sort of these broad leaf crops that tend to have more flowers. So the cereal crops, half of our rotation is in those cereal crops. You know, half of the landscape, half of the agricultural landscape isn't providing that habitat for forage, I guess, for bees to feed. So if we look at them, those broad leaf crops in rotation, only some of them are really good providers, probably the most familiar crop that we have across the prairies is canola. And it is a really good source of forage for bees, but they're only blooming for a certain number of weeks out of the whole growing season. And so, you know, farmers who work with bees are really looking for the flowers early in the season, and then late into the season, Jason works with wild bees as well. So those bees are foraging for themselves. And we also need habitat that provides those resources through that entire growing season.
Jordan Cieciwa:Let's talk about that a little more, cause I know you had mentioned when we were chatting off air, that there is, there's a difference between honeybees, that I grew up in a small town where I actually worked in apiaries my whole life. And I didn't realize, and I don't know why, cause I've seen bees nowhere near mankind, and I've seen bees completely in a manmade contained. So let's talk a little bit about wild bees.
Jason Gibbs:Yeah. So while bees are native to Manitoba, we have somewhere about around 360 species in the province and a lot of them are actually solitary. They don't have these sort of complex societies like honeybees, they don't move. Don't make honey generally speaking. They don't sting very often or at all and then sort of live their life. And they sort of collect pollen and nectar and provide for their nest. And there's this sort of the free sort of pollination service that's out there. They're pulling in all the wild plants and they're visiting some of the crops and they're doing a lot of pollination for us. But a lot of that just kind of goes under the radar. Honeybees are actually European species and you know, obviously they make honey, which we love to eat, but they're also incredibly important for agriculture because they're the only kind of bee that you can kind of spontaneously move from one spot to the other and get pollination on a large scale. When you also have a leaf cutter bees in Manitoba, which are used to pollinate some crops like alfalfa, but generally speaking, those are the only two sort of managed pollinators that we can use on a large scale. But all the wild bees are out there in the background and they're doing their work and they're everywhere, they're in your lawn, I can almost guarantee it, but we generally don't see them.
Jordan Cieciwa:So right now, I don't know if you can tell by my face, but I'm completely fascinated. 360 different varieties of bees in Manitoba.
Jason Gibbs:Yeah. That's... we're actively sort of figuring that out. So when I started at the U of M three years ago, there was only about 230 species that were known for the province. So there's a huge amount of diversity that people have just haven't been noticing basically, that's because there wasn't people looking. So, but now that we're here and now that there are students that are doing research on wild bees and the province, we're finding all kinds of interesting new records. Some of these bees are, you know, very different from sort of thing that you might expect to be here.
Jordan Cieciwa:Interesting. I'm loving this because I'm so, I am a proud,Manitoban, been here my whole life and right now, to have never known, if you had said there was five different types of bees I'd have been like, I still don't believe you, but yeah.
Jason Gibbs:I think most people are familiar with bumblebees. They're pretty fuzzy and large. We actually have 29 different kinds of bumblebees and it depends on, you know, you can't see them all in one place. So some of them you'd have to go up to Churchill to see, cause they sort of are found in different locations, but there's at least a dozen species that you could sort of find in a given day, if you look where you are.
Jordan Cieciwa:And you have to look really hard. And that's the point I guess, is taking it all in and knowing what you're looking for. What do we need to know about creating habitats for bees and beneficial insects and Manitoba?
Jason Gibbs:I mean, I would say that, you know, it's easier and cheaper to keep habitat than it is to make habitat. So if there's, you know, shelter belts, you know, by pairing areas, sort of wild spots, you know leave those, if you can. And they also provide habitat for bees and other beneficial insects. And then, you know, alternatively, if you don't have those spots of their patches of land that, you know, aren't productive, aren't being used, simply planting flowers is something that can be effective. Native plants are always generally speaking better for native bees, but if you're really interested in honeybees, then, you know, certain things, certain clovers and things like that are known to be good for them, but that's something that basically anyone can do. So, you know, if you have a meter square piece of lawn that you're not using plant it with some flowers and that's going to benefit.
Jordan Cieciwa:And that's just something that every single one of us can do, not just the farming community who could, acres and acres of this, or like we were saying the slews, because if you've been on a farm, you've seen those areas and that's what we avoid typically. But, but making that a beneficial habitat is that simple to do? Like, do you just leave it alone?
Jason Gibbs:Well, there's a couple of, yeah, there's a couple of different ways to approach it. One is to kind of let it go fallow and just kind of let it do its own thing. And the seed bank will kind of take care of that. I suppose. Yvonne probably knows more about that than I do. But the other approach is take, you know, a more active strategy in which she sort of, you sort of see it down, but sort of plants that you think would be beneficial if it has a flower it's probably useful.
Jordan Cieciwa:So this will speak to that a little bit more of creating a useful little habitat for our bee friends. Yeah.
Yvonne Lawley:So one of the reasons that we're talking about pollinator habitats on this podcast is we have a project started in Manitoba to try and document, you know, if you are going to take this effort to create this habitat or enhance this habitat on a farm landscape, what is its impact? And I think that's really important, to have an intention for that area. We've talked about sort of areas that are being used within the farm or within a field that are less productive. And I think, instead of thinking about that area, as you know, a negative, an unproductive area, we can rethink that area and think about what other services that area can provide to the whole ecosystem that supports the crops that we're trying to grow and manage us as farmers as human beings, because we need those products from agriculture to feed ourselves. So we need, we can be intentional about those areas that we want to create. And we've started this project to try and quantify in Manitoba what impact those habitats can have. If we take this intentional approach to designing a farm landscape that has space for pollinators, when we sat down and figured out, okay, what are we going to do with our habitat, areas with the farmers that we're collaborating. We have 15 different fields that we're following in Manitoba. So it's quite extensive collaboration with farmers. We had a few things that we wanted to do at these habitats. So one is, we wanted to get flowers started right away. And so we looked to annual species that we know, and we plant them in the ground. They're gonna grow and they're gonna flower right away. But then thinking about that community of plants over time, we wanted to include some perennial species that we knew would, you know, if we plant them once, then they'll hopefully over winter and keep flowering. The other thing that perennial plants can bring is if they're already established, then they usually start flowering earlier in the season. And some of them can flower later into the season than many of the annual plants do. So we wanted to have a community of plants that had perennials in it. And as Jason mentioned, there are different kinds of perennial plants as well. There are native perennials, and then there's sort of the perennials that we've domesticated as agricultural forage crops. So some of the different species that we included in our pollinator mix were for the annuals, buckwheat and sunflower, and the very beautiful plant with purple flowers called Cecilia. That might be a little less common, but bees really love the phacelia. If you want to talk about a plant that's buzzing, it's phacelia. And then some of the, uh, like the domesticated perennial species like Jason had mentioned clovers. We included some alfalfa, some Persian Clover and, interesting, biannual plant that grows for two year cycle that's chicory. We also had some native species like the purple and white Prairie Clover. And then we also had a few grasses, perennial, native grasses, like little blue Stem and blue Grama. And one of the reasons that we, you know, as I mentioned earlier, grasses don't flower, but they provide important habitat. The protection, the coverage that will hopefully provide those spaces, especially for many of those native bees that might be groundbreaking to give them the habitat that they need for the rest of their lives.
Jordan Cieciwa:Fascinating. So let me recap. This is basically the study of the work that you guys are doing is to intentionally go to farmers and say, can we create the habitat and see what works best? I'm sorry if I'm reading into this too much, but then with the decision being, now, we can make this available to all farmers in Manitoba to say, here's what we know, these grasses, these plants more bees, is that kind of the extent of this?
Yvonne Lawley:That's really the hypothesis we want to test is if we can establish this habitat, you know, we know from other areas of North America that they've done work and found positive benefits to pollinators and beneficials. If we take this here to the Prairies, we have those same impacts here. I think some of the questions that are going to flow out of this project is how do we make this manageable for farmers who are managing a lot of other things on their farm? How do we make it accessible? And so I think there'll be more questions that this one experiment generates.
Jordan Cieciwa:I guess that's the typical thing with all the experiments is if you've done it right, you should get a couple answers, but you get a lot more questions and that's, I guess that's what we're...
Jason Gibbs:Yeah. And one of the things that sort of we're focused on bees to a certain extent, but there's also a lot of other beneficial types of insects. So there are insects, of course, that feed on crops and we don't like those. But there's a lot of insects that actually feed on those pests. And so we're also monitoring these habitats to see whether or not they're changing the abundance of those beneficial predatory insects. And you know, we're collaborating with other people in the faculty to make sure that there aren't any negative side effects of these plantings, don't want bees to sort of pop up in farmer's fields. So we're sort of monitoring these for sort of multiple benefits. But then, you know, we expect that as this sort of progresses, we're going to learn, you know, which plants didn't actually come up, you know, which plants are not as attractive to bees as other plants. And so we'll, you know, we're sort of working towards figuring out how to sort of improve the selection of those plants that benefit farmers, as Yvonne said, to make it more, to make it easier for farmers to actually implement this in practice, we're trying to learn the mistakes in the project, so they don't have to.
Jordan Cieciwa:Outstanding. You know what this has been, this is fascinating. And I appreciate both of you giving me your time, cause this is exactly what I'd love to hear about is there is a solution based approach to making sure that the environment, the Manitoba, my home, my environment is being taken care of. And I, so I appreciate this work for that reason. And I can't wait to get back in and hear about the results of this and see what you guys come up with for, for farmers and, and for all the producers that do tune into this, keep an eye out on this, this work, because it's g onna, it definitely will change the landscape of Manitoba, making it a better environment for those insects that we want around. So to both of you, dr. Yvonne, dr. Jason, thank you for your time. And we'll talk again soon.
Yvonne Lawley:Thank you. Thanks.