Pollinator Check-Up: Bee Health and Novel Monitoring Tools

In the face of insect decline, it is critical for us to understand pollinator health both in terms of influencing factors and how to monitor those impacts. Today we are specifically focusing on bees.

To talk about some exciting research in this field is Dr. Laura (la-u-ra) Figueroa (fig-eh-row-ah). Laura is an Assistant Professor in the Environmental Conservation Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was previously a National Science Foundation post-doctoral research fellow, and completed her PhD in entomology at Cornell University. Laura is broadly interested in insect conservation, with a focus on the health of pollinators in changing landscapes and the impacts of climate change. She has worked in temperate regions (primarily the Northeastern US) as well as in the tropics (in Costa Rica and in Colombia), and her active research program seeks to answer pressing questions in the field of pollinator conservation.

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Photo: Sara Morris / CC BY-NC 2.0

Thank you for listening! For more information go to xerces.org/bugbanter.

Transcript

Matthew: Welcome to Bug Banter with the Xerces Society where we explore the world of invertebrates and discover how to help these extraordinary animals. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate.

Rachel: Hi, I'm Rachel Dunham in Missoula, Montana.

Matthew: And I'm Matthew Shepherd in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel: In the face of insect decline, it is critical for us to understand pollinator health, both in terms of influencing factors and how to monitor those impacts. Today we are specifically focusing on bees. To talk about some exciting research in the field is Dr. Laura Figueroa. Laura is an assistant professor in the Environmental Conservation Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was previously a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow. And completed her PhD in Entomology at Cornell University.

Rachel: Laura is broadly interested in insect conservation with a focus on the health of pollinators and changing landscapes and in the impacts of climate change. She has worked in temperate regions, primarily in the Northeast U.S., as well as in the tropics in Costa Rica and in Columbia. Her active research program seeks to answer pressing questions in the field of pollinator conservation.

Rachel: Welcome to Bug Banter. We're super excited to have you here, Laura.

Laura: Thank you so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Matthew: Yeah, no, I really appreciate you making the time. I have to admit that when Rachel and I were planning this episode and thinking about bee health, we were joking around imagining like a bee in a tiny little doctor's office, but I'm sure that's really not what your research looks like. Could you start by defining pollinator health for us?

Laura: Totally. So there's a lot of parts that go into answering that question. We can think about—. At the core, the easiest way to think about it is survival, right? How long are bees around? What is their mortality? What is their survival? And that is just one aspect of it, because even if a bee is surviving, there can be quality of life elements. So for example, what is its reproductive output? How many offspring is it having, and also what is the quality of its offspring? Because there's a lot of research that shows that bees that are in more diversified, healthy landscapes have larger, healthier offspring. And so whenever I think about health, I think about how long are the bees surviving, how many offspring are they having? What is the quality of the offspring, and what is the diversity, for example, of the diet that it has access to? What is the number of stressors that it is exposed to? And how is this ultimately going to influence how it survives?

Matthew: Yeah. So obviously lots of different things that factor into it—as with our own health. So, is it possible to give a bee a health check? I mean, are there behaviors or other traits that we could be looking for?

Laura: That's an interesting question. So whenever I think about bee health, there are certainly ways of looking at assessing where they're at. You can look at disease incidents of how many pathogens does it have, how long has it lived? You can do that by looking at the wing wear. You can look at basically the asymmetry of its wings, and that's potentially evidence of the quality of the nutrients it had when it was during development. So more symmetrical bees had higher quality of nutrients during development, and more asymmetrical bees potentially were more stress during development.

Laura: And another part is just basically, yeah, what pesticides does it have in its—if you were to digest—if you were to look at its digestive tract—like what types of pesticides is it exposed to? There's also this fascinating world right now thinking about the microbiome and how healthy microbiomes are so much—are so important for the quality and health of the bees. And so you could look at, “Oh, these bees are having very diverse, healthy microbiomes,” while others—. I mean for a lot of the bees, it depends on which group you're talking about. Some of them certainly have a core microbiome, but beyond that, are you having some potentially problematic parasites? Are you having some problematic bacteria, versus having some beneficial microbes?

Matthew: You've already touched on this a little bit because you mentioned pesticides. But also you said pesticides in the digestive tract and that immediately made me think of that health clinic thing again, or like little tiny little—anyway. I mean, what kind of environmental factors contribute to or detract from pollinator health?

Laura: Yes. So there are a lot of different kinds of factors. We can think at local scale and landscape scale. So at the local scale you can think about where are the bees nesting? Like do they have suitable substrates for nesting? We know that the vast majority of bees nest underground. Are there conditions appropriate for that? But also there's some that nest in trees. There's some that nest in abandoned snail shells. You know, there's so many different types of substrates, so making sure that that's appropriate. Making sure that there are flowering plants that are blooming throughout the season, and are different morphologies, and so all of this is like the local scale.

Laura: But bees can forage quite far, right? And so you can even think about some of them will go kilometer distances foraging. And so it's not just what's in the immediate vicinity, but what's around, what in their foraging range. And so it's really important to think about that diversity of flowering resources and those nesting substrates that are available at this broader area for not only that bee and its immediate offspring, but at the larger scales. Once they reproduce what is available for them to disperse and to be successful in their quality of life.

Matthew: It sounds fundamentally that healthy bees come from kind of good conservation, good habitat.

Laura: Absolutely.

Matthew: Yeah.

Laura: Absolutely.

Matthew: Yeah.

Laura: And it also—. I will say we can't put all bees as like one category. There's 20,000 species of bees, and some of them are much more vulnerable or susceptible to certain stressors than others. And so I think, like everything in life, and certainly everything in nature, it's important to understand that within diversity, there's some groups that might be highly susceptible to temperature changes, but [they] might be more resilient to another stressor. And then another one might be highly vulnerable to the impacts of parasites, but might be able to do well with a less diverse diet. And so depending on which specific bee you're talking about, it would be important to make sure that you're addressing their needs.

Rachel: That is the perfect segue to my next question. For a lot of people, when we discuss pollinator decline, they often—well, especially with bees—they often think of honey bees. What kind of bees do you look at in your research?

Laura: Yeah, so I very much don't work on honey bees. I think honey bees are fascinating, and they—as a social system, and their just, their cognition—they're fascinating. They're one, you know—. And actually honey—the European honey bee is not the only species of honey bee. There's a lot of other species of honey bees, if you go to Southeast Asia, for example.

Laura: And so I work on other species of bees. I work on social and solitary bees. A lot of my work has focused on bumble bees, and so thinking about declines of bumble bees over time. I do a lot of work thinking about wild bee ecology in the Northeast region. And so wild bees in the Northeast include both native and non-native bees. And so, for example, honey—European honey bees being one example, but there's a lot of species of non-native bees beyond honey bees in the Northeast. And so we think again about how different communities are responding to these local and landscape stressors in the Northeast.

Laura: I also do a lot of work in the tropics, in the neotropics, in particular, in Costa Rica, where some of you might have heard of the term “vulture bees,” where there are these stingless bees that gather their protein needs—which again, normally when you think of like, “Where do bees get their protein?” It's pollen—but these bees, in particular, get their protein from meat. And like that—I'm talking about vertebrate carcasses. And so it can be fish, it can be frogs, it can be snakes, and that's where they're getting their protein. And some of them are exclusively necrophages, and some of them are like, “I'll take a little meat,” or, “I'll take a little flower.” You know, they, they're just kind of doing whatever. And then of course, you have the vast majority of bees that are only going to the flowers.

Laura: And so I work in these diversified systems where we try to understand why. Why did this happen? Where if we think about bees as a vegetarian wasp in the evolutionary tree, this group has reverted, and they're now getting, you know, more of this, more of their protein from meat. And so we try to understand the ecological patterns behind that. And again, when you think—when people—to your question—they're thinking about honey bees and bumble bees, they would never be thinking about necrophagous bees in the tropics, in the forest. And so there's a lot of diversity that comes along with that.

Rachel: I was just gonna mention the whole vegetarian wasp—I know that's a phrase Matthew uses a lot—so it is very interesting of why did they revert back to that. And people don't think about solitary bees. I think a lot of people don't even know solitary bees exist either. So yeah, it's a lot of really interesting and great questions that you're asking. And some probably complicated answers.

Laura: Totally. And with that, it's—. The needs of a social species are different than the needs of a solitary bee. And so if we think about even within the social species, there's gradients in terms of how many daughters are the queens having, and how many—how much worker capacity is there? Versus a solitary—I often present that as, you have an individual, like a single mom who is going, collecting pollen, making a ball—a pollen ball—laying her egg, and then they never interact. And I think that that's something that whenever I share that, most people are so surprised because the image that we have are of those queen bees, and like these thriving colonies.

Laura: For the social ones, another distinction that I always like to make is the importance of the cycle, the annual cycle. So if you think about, for example, honey bees, which have a queen. They can have up to 60,000 workers, which is—. Just think about the complexity of having 60,000 organisms interacting and working together. Those queens can live up to six years. That's very different than if we're talking about bumble bees, that have an annual cycle, where you have to have, you know, the queen basically starts like a solitary bee at the start of the spring—right now we're in the spring in the Northeast, there's a lot of bumble bee queens—they're basically a solitary bee for the start where they have to do everything. They have to go get the food, they, like they don't have any help. But eventually, their daughters are coming up and, you know, she can step back and focus on reproduction, and then her daughters can really take a lot of the heavy lifting. But what's interesting, in a juxtaposition to honey bees that have that, you know, they can live for multiple years, at the end of the year, just the reproductives start the cycle all over again, with just one-year cycle for most of the bees in the Northeast. And so again, that really influences how we think about their conservation of honey bees, of bumble bees, and again, of all of those solitary species.

Matthew: Amazing. Just what diversity of bees are truly out there. I've been giving talks about pollinator conservation for 20, 25 years now, and that's consistently one thing that people are surprised by. When you talk about the diversity and, as you say, they nest in the ground, they nest in twigs, et cetera, et cetera. And so those are some of the things—that fundamental information that we just repeat again, and again, and again. I saw on your web—one of your web pages, the phrase, “flowers as dirtiest doorknobs and pharmacies for bees.” What do you mean by that?

Laura: Yeah, so for most of the bees in the world, they are going to flowers to gather energy from nectar, and protein from pollen. And so they're really—. This area, where there's so much activity on the flowers. There are some that are specialized. So basically, there's a pollinator species that's really specialized on a type of flower. You can think about the squash bee, where they really primarily go to squash flowers. And then you can think about a species like the common Eastern bumble bee that will visit many, many different species of flowers—including the squash flower, but also milkweed, and other species of flowers. And so because there can be so much activity on these flowers, you can imagine that in the broader framework, they can be picking up a lot of different things.

Laura: We have found that—for the second part, of “the pharmacies”—there are certain types of compounds on the flowers that can be medicinal. And so if bees are exposed to a certain type of gut pathogen, and they have access to this pollen, they don't develop infection. And so then it's like, “Wow, okay, they can be pharmacies.” But at the same time—we all remember back when there was lockdown, we weren't trying to interact with shared surfaces because we didn't really know how COVID was spread—similarly, you can have some parasites that can be spread fecal-orally. And what can happen, what we found, and what the way—some of the ways that we've shown this in the lab is if you feed bees fluorescent dye, and you let them forage on flowers, and then you use a black light, you can see they actually defecate on plants, on the flowers. And if they're defecating on the flower, and then another bee is coming in and eating right where the other bee defecated, what would happen if the first one had an infection, right? And so then that is the “dirty doorknob” scenario where they're potentially picking up infection.

Laura: But then again, as I mentioned at the start, some of them also have these compounds that can be medicinal, like it can reduce infections. And so there's a lot of really interesting chemical ecology that's happening. There's a lot of interesting dynamics that can happen, and we find that it's not just a win-win, but that it's really a much more complex system at play.

Matthew: Yeah. Back to that complexity question again.

Laura: That's right.

Matthew: What have you found to be the most influential factors contributing to poor pollinator health?

Laura: Hmm. So I think there's consistently two factors. Again, that landscape level complexity of making sure that there is a high proportion of natural or semi-natural habitat in the environment. So for example, I'm in the Northeast, that can include a high proportion of forest. If we were in the desert Southwest, it wouldn't be proportion of forest, right? It would be different components of what is natural habitat. But it basically means environments where the bees can nest, where they can acquire food, where there can be a reduced level of stress. And so we, you know, we've talked about pesticides, we've talked—there's also thermal stress. So in urban settings, some environments that have a high proportion of impervious surface—and so what that means is a lot of cement. If you have a lot of just mostly cement, it can be quite hot, and there might not be other surfaces for the bees to interact with. And so making sure that there are places where there are reduced level of stressors, that's really important.

Laura: And we can think about that as a landscape scale—so really big at the, you know, multiple kilometer scale—and at the local scale. Where are they foraging in this small area? Do they have access to many different plants species? One—. There's a really great work that occurred in collaboration with Xerces that I saw some—not, I didn't do this, but other colleagues did this—of looking at pesticide pressure on plants. And so that there are some plants that are sold as pollinator, as like pollinator plants, and yet they can have pesticides. And so making sure that again, that the plants that they're accessing not only have a lot of diversity of proteins, and lipids, and elements, but also are not inadvertently exposing the bees to a lot of pesticides.

Matthew: Yeah, no, I'm glad you've noticed that research. Our staff enjoyed working on that. Some of the findings were quite striking—.

Laura: Definitely.

Matthew: —when you see the numbers of products that are found in those plants, you know, particularly those sold—. We did one on milkweeds, you know, away from bees, but on milkweeds because they're sold as monarch host plants, you know. “Buy this plant and do a good thing.” And then you discover that it's actually not all that good.

Matthew: It's often been said that there's the idea of death by a thousand cuts [that] has been used for insects. I mean, you've been talking about a lot of different things that affect bees, and I just wonder, do you feel like, you know, bees may be more vulnerable to the “thousand cuts” than others? Or do you think that they're just all likely to be badly impacted?

Laura: I think that it wouldn't be even just one category of all insects, or only some insects. I think within each group there's gonna be variation. So there's some bee species that are highly vulnerable and there are some that are more resilient. So we can look at, for example the bumble bees—Bombus, in the genus Bombus, all of the bumble bees—there's some species that have had range expansion over the past the hundred years, and you have some that have had massive range contractions. And so even saying bumble bees is not right because it depends on the species.
And you can have some groups where in certain habitats they're doing fine, and in others they're declining.

Laura: And so I think certainly the concept of death by a thousand cuts is generally very applicable to not even just insects, but diversity of life. So many species of plants, and vertebrates, and other like fungal diversity, right—like the broader framework of life on Earth is impacted by many different kinds of stressors. And so I was just mentioning, you know, pesticides, which can be like directly applied as intentionally to kill pests on an agricultural area. We were just talking about ones that [are] in the ornamental trade, but then there's also these sources of pesticides that one might not think of.

Laura: So for example, if people have pets at home, they might be—they don't want their pets to have fleas, and so then they actually can apply pesticides to their animals, and then those animals can then defecate, and then release those pesticides. I have a dear friend and colleague, Diana Obregon, who did her PhD at Cornell in entomology, and she was finding that what people are spraying to livestock is also—. Basically, it was this really interesting study. They found that if you spray livestock with a certain type of chemical compound to reduce its pests, those animals can defecate or urinate. And then the plants pick up those compounds, they chemically alter it, and then it's available for the flowers—in the flowers whenever the bees are picking it up. And so again, we might not be thinking, “Oh, livestock,” and then these indirect pathways. And so again, it all comes together of different ways that the bees are being exposed, where maybe if they were only exposed to one of them, they would be resilient.

Laura: You can think of, like even a human, like let's say you—like a person is exposed to a virus, but they have plenty of food, they've been sleeping well, they're emotionally doing well. They might not—they might recover fully, like they might not even have any symptoms. But imagine that they're hungry. Imagine that they've actually—they're living in an area that has a lot of pollution. Imagine that it's—there's heat island effect. Imagine all of these things coming together, there might be a higher probability that the immune system might be compromised, and then there's gonna be a greater impact, right? And so it's the same thing of we can't just think about any one thing in isolation—they're coming and happening together.

Matthew: I was interested that you mentioned, basically flea treatments and livestock treatments, and passing through the animal's body. Just in the last few weeks another coworker of ours, Laura Rost, who leads the Bee City, Bee Campus program, we were actually having a conversation about is this a big enough, significant enough issue to start flagging it in our work with the communities? And she actually was able to talk with, David Goulson in Britain at the University of Sussex, only because we knew that one of his folks in his lab had been working on this. The outcome from that conversation was interesting because he was saying that he thinks it's actually more that you treat your pet, and then your pet's hair—you snuggle up to your dog, you say hello—and then it gets transferred onto your clothes or the dog's bedding, and then it gets through the laundry and ends up in water. And so it's just like all these things that you are just not considering—the potential impacts and the pathways that these chemicals can pass through.

Laura: But one of the things about that—though I think it's really important to focus on, to highlight that, but to not end on that note. I mean, we're continuing the conversation, but I just wanna say one more point about the pesticides before we keep moving forward is—there was some really impactful work that came out a few years ago that was looking at the impact of integrated pest management and conventional agriculture. And so integrated pest management basically is saying it's a framework of agriculture that tries to be a little bit more in line with what's happening on the farm. And so, for example, instead of having calendar sprays of, “We spray, you know, once a month, no matter what,” it's—they only spray if there’s sufficiently high level of pest pressure. And so what can happen is that they can tolerate a little bit more pests. Like they're like that certain levels, so long as they're not above the threshold, it's like, that's okay.

Laura: And what they found is if by doing that type of framework—they applied way fewer pesticides, as you might expect—there was no noticeable impact on the yield of corn—that, which was the crop of interest—but surrounding there was watermelon. And when they did that, they had higher amounts of watermelon yields. So you are applying less, so you're—the farm workers are exposed to less. There's a lower economic cost. You're not having any negative—you know, there's the fear of like, “Oh, but if you don't do that, you're gonna have this massive decline in your yield.” No. And in fact, you had an increase for the pollinator-dependent crops.

Laura: And so I think the idea—it's not a binary of like, we should never, ever use pesticides in no context. Most things have nuance, and like we need to be able to have those conversations. But I think we need to acknowledge that there are alternatives that the data show can be fruitful and productive in many different ways.

Matthew: Yeah, definitely. And I totally agree with your comment about everything being nuanced. Too many conversations can be very like, “It's this or it's this.” But so, as I was saying to someone recently, so much of my life is in the gray area in between where we're talking about issues that are potentially complicated, but we have to have the difficult conversations, so.

Laura: That's right.

Matthew: Yeah.

Rachel: As a pet owner, it's like hard to—as that research has come out, I'm like, “Oh no.” So we're just more careful now, we brush our dog a lot more, we throw the fur away. Also being in Montana, like we're fortunate we don't have to do flea and tick for half the year because it's too cold anyway. So we try to be careful that way. Always clean up after he goes to the bathroom in the yard or when we're out in the woods. I hope that as research continues, maybe there's an alternative for both our pets, and that can protect insects from pesticides. But it is, yeah, it's a difficult balance to find.

Rachel: So I'm gonna bring us back to our earlier question that I asked about honey bees, specifically. Do the presence or interaction with honey bees or other non-native bees affect the health of bumble bees or our native wild bees?

Laura: Yeah, so this is an area where it can—. Sometimes the magnitude of actions that are happening can be hard to quantify a negative impact. But there's more and more data that's showing that there is a potentially negative competitive environment of honey bees on wild bees. And so I wanna highlight, Maureen Page, who's a postdoctoral research fellow at Cornell right now, and she did her PhD and is doing part of her postdoc thinking about those kinds of patterns. And there's—and she's one of a broad field and a broad literature of people thinking about these topics of how this can happen. Honey bees, again, they are amazing. Like they're—as a species, they are so efficient at gathering the food, at gathering the pollen, the nectar, and that makes them—. They've been an area of study for cognitive ecology because like their brains are so cool, and the way that they make decisions is fascinating. But then you can imagine if you're so efficient, and you have 60,000 workers—up, you know, up to that—how are others going to compete? And so I think that it's not that there always negative, but there certainly are data that show that under certain circumstances, they can compete with to the detriment of wild bees.

Rachel: It's interesting that you brought up Maureen. She's actually one of our Ambassadors. Haha.

Laura: Oh, that's great.

Rachel: And I didn't realize that was work she was doing. I know she had just moved and—. But yeah, she does outreach for us, and education, so I'll have to check in with her about that.

Laura: In the paper that I was talking about earlier, the colleagues that had looked at the relationship of integrated pest management versus conventional agriculture, they found that wild bees and not honey bees was associated with a higher watermelon yield. And so sometimes people think that it's just the honey bees that are doing all of the work, but actually there's a lot of data that showed that the wild bees are either, they're doing as much, if not more than honey bees.

Matthew: That actually reminds me of work done years ago by Claire Kremen when she was in California looking at watermelons. And it was some of the research that kind of sparked our early work with farmers, in that, you know, one of the most important of the pollinators of watermelon in California were sweat bees, and they may not carry much pollen, but they make lots of visits. It's always nice to hear that there's more evidence coming forward to support the important role of native pollinators.

Laura: You just mentioned, like sweat bees not caring as much, but you know, doing a very efficient job. That actually, if we are thinking more broadly within pollinators, there are some studies that show that some flies, even if per visit are not as good as bees at transferring pollen, there can be so many of them, that in some contexts, they can actually do more work than the bees.

Matthew: Totally. In prior Bug Banter episodes we've talked about monitoring as a key component of conservation because it gives us an insight into not only how pollinators are doing in terms of populations, but also can guide our conservation efforts. We were intrigued when we were learning about how you've been using non-lethal artificial intelligence-based approaches for monitoring work. I mean, how do you do that? I'm again—crazy mind I have—I'm like, “You've got robots out there?” I mean, how does this work?

Laura: Totally. So some, maybe some of you, or some of the listeners have an application on their phone called Merlin, which is basically a bioacoustics-based app where you can—if you don't, it's free. And it's by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology hosts it—where basically, you can download this app, and play it if you're hearing a bird song. And you play it and it'll tell you, “Oh, this bird song correlates to this species of bird.” And so the idea is that birds have certain calls that are associated with certain species. And I remember when I was a graduate student hearing a talk about a katydid—a researcher who studied katydids in Panama. And so what she found is, she was developing these bioacoustics models for identifying katydids. And so she basically trained a convolutional neural network, which is basically a type of AI system that based on a lot of data, she was able to differentiate the katydids—which are type of singing insect related to grasshoppers—based on the sounds that they make.

Laura: And so whenever COVID—whenever we were—whenever COVID was happening, my postdoctoral research plans had to be stopped because I was originally set to start field work in Columbia. But you could imagine that in 2020, I was not traveling to do field work in Columbia. And so at that time, I had—I was thinking about, “Okay, what are other ways that I can stay active and engage with my research in a local way?” And having done work with pollinator ecology for so long, when I'm outside, I can hear the difference between, for example, right now, this time of year, I can hear when there's a bumble bee queen out. And I can tell the difference, for example, from a honey bee, like there are—. Like flies sound different. And so I remembered hearing that katydid talk, and I knew about Merlin and the bird songs, and so I started this collaboration with members at the, of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics. It's a bit of a mouthful, but it's a great center with collaborators there—Laurel Symes, who's the assistant director. Can we develop a system like this for bees?

Laura: And so for the past five years we've been working on making this data set where we can—we've collected data of different bees in different contexts, and really having this broad diversity focused on dominant species because it takes—to have a robust model, you need so much data. So we focus on honey bees as a dominant non-native species, and bumble bees, the genus Bombus, that are the, you know, one of the dominant native bees in the region. And we've basically developed this convolutional neural network where you can develop—you can deploy a recorder out in your garden—and you know, some of these, they're weatherproof and you can put them out to record for two weeks at a time—and it can basically tell you—you know, when you, when you bring back the memory card and you put it through the system—it'll tell you when were the bees there. And so this is a, a way of basically gathering information about presence, activity period—so basically what time of day they were active—in a way that is non-lethal and standardized.

Matthew: That's really cool. I do use Merlin. Just last weekend I woke up and I was like, “What's that bird?” You know, it's warm enough to have the window open now, and I was like, “Hmm?” So I put Merlin at the window sill for a few minutes and it picked up more than 20 different species that morning, which is—.

Laura: That's great.

Matthew: —which is pretty cool. And I'm like, “I had no idea those birds were out there,” you know? Anyway, back to what we're talking about. You were saying that using the AI listening—at this point, I'm guessing that it's not fully developed to have a wide range of bees it identifies? So some of the normal survey monitoring techniques are, you know, pan traps, nets, visual surveys—do you feel there's like trade-offs between, or benefits of AI versus some of these more traditional approaches?

Laura: 100%. I think my approach is to think about this as a multifaceted toolkit. It's not that—. You know, you don't need, you don't use a wrench for everything, right? There's different times to use different tools. I think there certainly are times when it's appropriate to use pan trapping, especially because for some bees you can only identify them looking at the venation of the wings. That's not something that's going to be picked up with camera trapping or with bioacoustics. However, I do think it's important for us to promote much more intentional use of lethal sampling. Of, “When is it appropriate?” “Is it necessary for your research question?” And if it is, “Okay, great, then let's move forward.” Rather than just the default being like, “Let's use lethal sampling,” and not really have a plan in place for collecting, for pinning, for cleaning, for depositing them in a museum after. Because otherwise this can be—all those bees could have been collected in vain and I don't think that that's appropriate.

Laura: I do think that as a field we need to move towards being really intentional. And I think so many researchers are intentional. And I think we need to just promote that philosophy in emerging scientists in the field. And so I think there's a lot of different types of methods. You have pan trapping, we have camera trapping—that can either be a snapshot or a video. You can have eDNA, you can have bioacoustics, you can have a community, citizen science that's, you know, participatory science that's based on bio blitzes. All sorts of methods can be used and collectively come together to have a much better sense of the state of the field for the bees.

Matthew: No, this debate about lethal or non-lethal is one that's been rumbling on for a long time. I'm glad that there are new approaches coming forward to help us get a better picture.

Rachel: Something I love about your work is that you consider social justice when thinking about conservation and restoration for pollinators. What does this look like when applied to your methods, and how does it influence the outcomes?

Laura: I think there is a broad understanding in the field for—and this is backed by evidence and research—that having engagement from communities is very important for conservation action. And this is not unique to pollinators, this is broader within the field of conservation. You need to have community buy-in for there to be support, for there to be encouragement, and if there's any issues for the community to really rise up and say, “No, we really—this really matters to us.” And so what this can look like for me is a lot of public outreach and a lot of public facing events.

Laura: And so, for example, one of my master's students last summer was doing work in Holyoke, which has a lot of issues with air quality problems, and they have a lot of issues with many members of the community being Spanish speaking and not having enough support, and a lot of marginalized communities. And so by doing work in the community gardens there, and at the Holyoke Community College, we not only did research there, but we recruited members from our—to the field team from the community. And we're also doing events in Spanish to make sure that the community members understand like what is the importance of pollinators. Because again, we have to be able to reach community members where they are. And if language is a barrier, then let's go around it and actually speak in Spanish or whichever language, depending on where the work is happening. And so I think for me, it's more a matter of being intentional in the work that we do, and thinking about how is—how is the work going to be applied? Who gets to access it? And how can we move to be as sustainable as we possibly can?

Rachel: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that and thinking about that.

Matthew: Yeah. And it happens that we're at a point in time where these kind of things, that are just common sense, somehow have become problematic, which is sad. From what you've learned from your research, can you suggest ways that we can contribute to pollinator health?
How we can help the bees?

Laura: Yes, definitely. I think it's important for us to think about both individual and collective action—and collective action can happen at multiple scales. So at the individual level, I think planting pollinator habitat, it all adds up. And so I think if people can plant native species—. I think that's one thing that for a project that I started two years ago blew my mind. Where if you just go to the store and you buy like pollinator mix, even if it says like North—I found many packages that said Northeast pollinator mix, and they had a ton of non-native species. And so I think this is unfortunately a little bit of a low—. Like you'd have to be a little more intentional. But just check, make sure and see. There's the USDA PLANTS database can tell you, there's other ways of just like, you know, doing a quick Google search. “Oh, is this, are these species native to my region?” Great. And so planting native species. If there's not enough, you know, you don't have a backyard, but you have basically a window, seeing if you can have some pots outside of your window. Just having any little bit can add up. Especially because like will one container be enough? No. But if everyone adds containers, and at the scale of what's happening—. So if we think about like lawns in the U.S. make up about 2% of the surface of the land in the U.S. It's a massive amount actually, if you like put it into context. And so I think that can add up.

Laura: I think—. Thinking also within the garden, can there be more intentional use of pesticides there? Like, do you need to use pesticides? When and how can you have more perennial species that can provide resources throughout the season, right? So just thinking of intentional use. And Xerces, I know you all—I've recommended you all before—you have really great resources that are free for people to access of like, “Oh, I wanna plant pollinator habitat. How do I do this specific to my region?”

Laura: I think then at the collective scale, there is your local community. So again, can you get neighbors together to be like, “Okay, we're gonna gather seeds, and we're all gonna work to like plant these, and then have like a seed planting party on a weekend.” Or can we do it at your, you know, at the community garden, like having some organization levels there? And then again, can you advocate for policy that is going to work to promote conservation at your state, at the federal level, at your municipality? It depends on where you're working, but I think we need to do all of the scales at once. And one of the things that I would say is to come about it with joy. Not with a mindset of scarcity, of like, “Oh, that's so bad.” But it's like, no, we have—we can—we have power and we need to work towards doing the best that we can, and hoping that that'll be enough. And I think we just have to step forward with abundance.

Rachel: I love that mindset. I think it's so easy to get bogged down by all these issues, and especially like climate change, and like, “Ah, how am I supposed to change this? I'm one person.” But to think of it as like, but we can actually make a difference collectively. And yeah, I love that, you know, moving through with joy and seeing it as an opportunity. I appreciate that. Thank you.

Rachel: So we end all of our podcasts with two questions. This one is my favorite, so I'm excited that I get to ask it. What inspired you to become an entomologist and get into this field?

Laura: Yeah, so since I was a young child I've always loved being outside, which I know, I'm sure probably everyone you ask that says that. But it's true for me, I really love being in nature. When I was younger, I really wanted to be a herpetologist. I was in love with snakes and I was like, “I'm gonna study snakes.” When I got to college, I had the privilege of working at the Oklahoma Biological Survey with my mentor there, Dr. Liz Bergey, who kind of opened my eyes to the world of invertebrates. And one example that I can give about the difference between like vertebrates and invertebrates is that every single species, so 100% of bird species have been assessed for conservation concern, for conservation risk, while 1% of insects have been assessed for conservation need.

Laura: And so it's like, again, are snakes amazing? Yes, I love them. Are there so many different groups that are amazing? Absolutely. In a different world I would even maybe study fungi. Like there's so many different groups that I think are fascinating, but insects are so ecologically and economically important, and yet have been historically so vastly understudied that really I change—like that was a like a pivotal moment. And so I conducted my honors thesis on bumble bees and since then I've really kept track of bees as this like fascinating and ecologically foundational group, that is also beautiful and interesting, and I love to study them. So I think—. And also, as a—thinking about the time of day when you sample. When I was an undergrad, I went to a bat blitz and the sampling was from like 11 [PM] to 3 AM and that was not gonna work for me. Well, for bees, you get to do research from like 8 to 4 [PM] in the field, so it's also a perfect time to be in the field. So a lot of reasons. But I love bees and they're very important.

Rachel: I love that. I don't remember who it was, but someone had a similar reason why they didn't go into an area of study, because they had to get up early, and they were not a person to rise early, so they decided to do insects, and it was very similar. I think they studied butterflies and they're like, “I get to go out in the middle of the day when it's warm and the weather has to be good.” Haha.

Laura: Exactly.

Matthew: Yeah, I think it was someone who started with birds, that one Rachel, if I remember correctly. Our last question—it's always a little sad when I get to the end because it's been such a great conversation, so thank you so much—but, if you could see any bug in the wild, what would it be?

Laura: Oooh. So there is a species of gnat. It is—and you're like, “What? A gnat?” It is—. In New Zealand, there are these caves that—they're the bioluminescent Waitomo Caves. So there are these predatory flies that when they're larvae, they bioluminescence so that all of the organisms that are flying around—which use the stars to navigate—they get confused by these bioluminescent larvae in these caves, and then they trap them, and eat them. And so I've just seen so many pictures of these caves that basically look like starlight in a cave, and I would just love to go and see that.

Matthew: Anecdote from Rachel.

Rachel: I was gonna say, a few people have actually said that, but I got to go to New Zealand two years ago, and it was—. Yeah, we did the cave tour, and it was really incredible. And just to learn, too, that they are gnats. I think people—because they call them glow-worms—and so they think they're fireflies, and yeah, that becomes a whole thing. And it's like their saliva, and just the whole—it's magical. And then you think about, you're like, “Is that magical? Yes, it still is.” Haha.

Laura: Haha.

Rachel: Well, thank you so much. This has been—I feel like we could talk to you for hours.

Laura: Haha.

Rachel: You have so much amazing information. It's so fascinating. So thank you for your time today, and sharing. I do hope we have you back.

Laura: Thank you so much for inviting me. And I absolutely hope to come back and to chat about all the other projects that we have going on in the lab.

Rachel: Of course.

Matthew: That'd be wonderful.

Rachel: Bug Banter is brought to you by the Xerces Society, a donor-based nonprofit that is working to protect insects and other invertebrates—the life that sustains us.

Rachel: If you’re already a donor, thank you so much. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate. For information about this podcast and for show notes go to xerces.org/bugbanter.