Alaska and Beyond: Native Bee Conservation and Monitoring

From chasing bumble bees in Alaska to understanding native bee populations nationwide, this scientist is on a mission to better understand these important insects. 

In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Hollis Woodard. Hollis is a Professor of Entomology at the University of California, Riverside and PI — the Principal Investigator, i.e., the person leading the project — of the US National Native Bee Monitoring Research Coordination Network. She received a PhD in Biology in 2012 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied the molecular basis of social evolution in bees. She is broadly interested in native bee ecology, evolution, social behavior, and conservation, and has worked with laboratory-reared bees and the wild bees of Alaska, California, Maine, and Vermont — and is a collaborator with Xerces on the State of the Bees project.

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Photo: (c) beaucheminalex (CC BY-NC)

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

Transcript

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Rachel: 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/give.

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

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

Matthew: I give a lot of talks about pollinator conservation and native bees, and there are a couple of things that people are regularly surprised by. First, just how many species of bees there are. Second, that we know comparatively little about many of them. Understanding bee populations is a conservation priority, and I’m glad to say that there is a growing number of scientists that are working to fill this knowledge gap.

Matthew: We are joined today by one of those scientists, Dr. Hollis Woodard, who will tell us more about some of the work that is being done. Hollis is a professor of entomology at the University of California, Riverside, and PI—i.e., the Principal Investigator, the person leading the project—of the U.S. National Native Bee Monitoring Research Coordination Network. She received a PhD in biology in 2012 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she studied the molecular basis of social evolution in bees. She is broadly interested in native bee ecology, evolution, social behavior, and conservation, and has worked with laboratory-reared bees and the wild bees of Alaska, California, Maine, and Vermont. And is a collaborator with Xerces on the State of the Bees project.

Matthew: It's a lot of stuff you do, Hollis. But thank you for making time for us today.

Hollis: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Rachel: So one of the places that Matthew mentioned that you have worked with bees is in Alaska. And when people think of Alaska, they often think of large animals like bears, wolves, caribou. But you were there to find bumble bees. So to start, what sparked your interest to study bumble bees in Alaska?

Hollis: I'm a bumble bee organismal biologist. That mostly—that means that I'm really driven by trying to understand how they operate, like how individuals operate. So I've worked on bumble bee brains, and ovaries, and the fat body, which is like the liver-like tissue. I first became interested in going to Alaska because I'd read some of Bernd Heinrich's work about working in the subarctic and the High Arctic with bumble bees. And one of the things I was super interested in was the idea that—. Because I also mostly work on bumble bee queens. And I've done a lot of work about how they go through overwintering, and how they come out of overwintering and initiate nests, and the process of ovary development during that period, and egg laying. So a lot of my career has focused on some of those processes. 
And in the Arctic, Heinrich showed pretty convincingly that bumble bee queens do this special thing where they generate heat in the thorax for flight. So, all bumble bees do this. But in the Arctic, it looks like the queens take some of that heat, and they shunt it to their abdomens, and that allows their ovaries to develop more rapidly. And in the Arctic where the season is a lot shorter, they need to kind of come out and get going, and get their nests established. That might be an adaptation that allows the queens to start their nests more readily. And so he showed this through a series of experiments, fairly compellingly, and I was really interested in that general idea in queens.

Hollis: And so I started going up to Alaska in 2016. And really, at the beginning it was just, "What is this place like? I've never even been there before." Haha. So I wanted to get like, get my bearings, or even try to. Because, you know, it takes time to get your bearings, especially in a place as big and complex as Alaska. So I just wanted to know how—can you find bumble bees? Where are queens? What are some good species to try to work with? The end goal is to ramp up to work on that process of ovarian development. In the interim, I've become far more interested—I'm still interested in those questions—but I'm a lot more interested now in conservation. And so that's been driving my career, especially in the last five to 10 years. And so I've been thinking a lot more now about Alaska as a place where we can ask some questions that are important for bumble bee conservation.

Rachel: Yeah, definitely. So you've kind of already touched on the purpose of your research, and the questions that you're trying to answer. You also talked a little bit about the diversity of Alaska, and it is—it's a large state. A lot of people don't realize how large it is. It's actually twice the size of Texas. It's so diverse. And so when you do research in Alaska, where do you go? Did you travel throughout the state? Just give our listeners an idea of the mass amount of land to cover to look for bumble bees.

Hollis: Yeah. Well, one of the things I quickly learned about Alaska is just how hard it is to get around. So I did a few trips where I flew into Fairbanks. And then from Fairbanks, one trip we drove up on the Dalton Highway, which I think is the highway where Ice Road Truckers—if you're familiar with the show—I think they are driving on that road. And we—you can drive all the way up to the coast in the northern part of the state, though. So you drive over the Brooks Range on this road. And that was incredible. And you see bumble bees the whole way. And then I've flown into Anchorage a few times, and I ended up working quite a bit in the Anchorage area. Beyond that, it is so challenging to get around. You need money to get on a small plane. There are few other roads that you can travel, but it's just really difficult. And that's one pla—one reason why Alaska, historically, had been really under sampled when it comes to bees. Although my collaborator at the University of Alaska Anchorage started the Alaska Bee Atlas project and had a great kind of coordinated project where we had folks collecting bees from around the state. They filled in a lot of really fundamental gaps about bee biodiversity in Alaska. But to do that, you have to have a lot of connections with people, and getting people who are already in small villages and other remote places to collect for you. And so, I learned pretty quickly that it's not so easy to travel around, and you need to be really on point with your questions, and how to try to answer them in a system like that.

Rachel: Definitely. And no pun intended here, but was the driving force for the areas that you chose accessibility then?

Hollis: It kind of was. The biggest project that we ended up running in Alaska—we're still working through the samples and data now—we did a huge sampling of bees from all around the entire Anchorage area. And so there are bumble bees everywhere. Everywhere. And so we collected on this kind of grid across the entire Anchorage Bowl. And that project, it was partly inspired by the fact that, yeah, if you want to get out in more remote places to do a kind of grid sampling like that, you would have to hike…a lot. Haha. It would be really difficult. And so working in Anchorage, you can get in a car and zip around to different super natural areas, that are not very developed, but you can get to them more easily. Yeah. And it was for that reason—that travel is just complicated.

Rachel: You mentioned the season. What is—what would be the season where bumble bees are actually out and active?

Hollis: Well, in the Anchorage area, which is a little bit milder and you have a longer season, things start in May. And then by August they're winding up. But the higher north you go, or the higher in elevation you go, it gets shorter and shorter. And so in the High Arctic, it might be maybe a month and a half that the whole thing happens. The entire nesting cycle. Queens come out, they start their nest, they produce maybe a few cohorts of worker brood, and then they switch to reproductives, and then the season ends. So it's super truncated.

Matthew: You're in Southern California now, so you probably have bumble bees all year.

Hollis: Yeah. Interestingly, here in Southern California, it's also very short. Because it gets too hot and all the resources just are no longer available. If you go to the coast, though, yeah, you can find bumble bees year-round, or nearly year-round.

Matthew: Your work in Alaska—what did you find out from that research?

Hollis: As I said, we're still digging through some of our data. But I do have a few things we've learned so far. And these are unpublished. But one finding is that in more developed areas in Anchorage, we find the bumble bees are bigger. Their body size is larger than if we sample in more natural areas. And this is all just in the Anchorage bowl area, so it's not a massive area. So we don't really know why that is. In fact, if you were to just think about it, you might think a more developed area would have fewer flowers. And given that body size is often positively associated with how much food an animal has, you might think you'd find smaller bees in the more developed areas. In fact, that's what we thought we were gonna see. But in fact, we saw the complete opposite, and the pattern is extremely strong. And so we're still trying to figure out why that is.

Hollis: We do have one working hypothesis, that I may end up getting to go back to Alaska next year to try to test, which would be extremely exciting. I think what might be happening is that in the more developed areas, they're warming up faster. There's this urban heat island effect. And so the season kicks off a little earlier in the more developed areas. If that's true, and the queens come out earlier, and they get started on their nests earlier, bumble bees do a thing where as colonies develop, the workers on average tend to get larger. And so it's possible that in these urban or more developed areas, they're getting the chance to come out and get started earlier. And they're producing those larger workers because the season's just earlier in those areas.

Hollis: So I'm hoping to get to go back and test that idea. And one of the ways you would test that idea is you go visit the two types of areas, and you look to see whether the queens are coming out earlier in the more developed areas. So it could be as simple as walking around, and walking transects, and just looking to see, “Am I seeing queens flying in these more developed areas before I see it in the natural?” So, yeah, I would love to go do that and might get to do it next year.

Matthew: We'll keep our fingers crossed for you. One of the things that you mentioned earlier and I was intrigued by—. I knew that bumble bees could heat themselves up. And for any of our listeners who are interested, I know that the BBC Planet Earth have a lovely segment of—using infrared cameras—that shows a bumble bee warming up inside a flower. And it's just, it's a great thing for people to chase down and watch. But you also said that there's a possibility they might transfer heat from their thorax to their abdomen. Is that something that you had any opportunity to investigate while you were there?

Hollis: Not while I was there. But around the time that I first started going to Alaska, I purchased a thermal imaging setup to use in the lab, and so we've been studying this process in the lab. And Heinrich, in his original work, even in the su—not even in the Arctic, so just in temperate areas—he showed that heat is—it moves from the thorax into the abdomen. And they do that to release the heat. In the Arctic, instead of releasing it from the abdomen, they're like holding it and retaining it. So we've been looking at that process in Bombus impatiens, which is the commercially reared bumble bee that you can work with in laboratories here in the U.S. the most readily. And so we've been doing some work on queen incubation of brood, and male incubation of brood. So I have a student, Megan Moore, who has found that male bumble bees, when they're in the nest, they'll actually do some incubating of brood. And they'll heat their thorax, and they'll get on the brood. And they take this very distinctive posture, and they are transferring the heat to the brood, which queens and workers do, as well. So we've been studying that phenomenon in the lab. And then the dream would be to take that and do comparative studies in the Arctic, as well, but we haven't done that yet.

Matthew: I know there's—at least I think I know—that there's one or two species that occur more frequently in the Arctic than elsewhere. Is it Bombus polaris? Am I correct?

Hollis: Yeah.

Matthew: And so I was just wondering is that a species that's has greater heat transfer or some other adaptation to those conditions?

Hollis: Yes. So that would be, that's one of the species that Heinrich looked at when he was looking at the retention of the heat in the abdomen by the queens. And so that's a species—. The first time I ever went to Alaska, the goal was to even try to find that species. And it's a beautiful bumble bee. It's in a subgenus that's—we don't have here in California, for example. And so it's yeah, it's just an incredible—. They're really large-bodied, and really beautiful bumble bees.

Matthew: From what you've found so far, is there any significance, do you think, so far for bumble bee conservation?

Hollis: Yeah. Another result that I haven't talked about, that I didn't talk about is we've been looking at diploid males. I don't know if you've had anyone on Bug Banter that's talked about haplodiploidy and the diploid male phenomenon in bees. But bees have this system of sex determination where females usually are diploid. Just like humans, we have two copies of the genome. And then males are haploid. They only have one copy of the genome. But if a queen mates with a male that's really closely related to her, they can produce a diploid male. And these diploid males have, we think, reduced fitness relative to males that are haploid. And so you can look at the proportion of diploid males in populations to try to get a sense of how healthy the population might be, like at the genetic level, at least. So we've been looking at proportions of these diploid males in Bombus flavifrons, which is the species that's most commonly observed in the Anchorage area. And we found that there are very low levels of diploidy in males in this species. And so, that gives us a hint that they might be not very inbred in the greater Anchorage area.

Hollis: And now we're using genetic data to try to get a sense of how they're moving around the landscape, and whether that might be supporting kind of admixture across the area. But we don't have those data analyzed yet to give you a sense of that. But I am very interested in the idea of diploid males in general, though. They could be a good marker of how inbred a population is for bees, a nice like genetic marker. So you could collect just a tissue sample—non-lethally—from bees across an area, and you can look at the frequencies of these diploid males using molecular techniques that are not very expensive. And so, it's something I'm interested in helping to develop as a marker.

Matthew: Yeah, no, that's great. I was gonna ask whether your findings were specific to Alaska, or broader. But it seems like they're broader.

Hollis: Yeah. They're both. They are—. Everything is so context-dependent. In fact, that result I was telling you about that they’re—the bumble bees we’ve seen in Anchorage for this one species—they're larger in the developed areas. People have found the exact opposite in other places. And so in some ways it is maybe Alaska-specific. But in other ways—. You know, flavifrons is found outside of Alaska, so you can find it in the Lower 48. But you can also—. Just learning about the species there could tell us something about the species potentially in other places, too. So, it's both

Rachel: I'm just curious. Oftentimes when we have guests, we'll ask about the diversity of different species across the landscape. Alaska, compared to other states, what is bumble bee diversity look like? Is it lower than other states, higher, sort of average?

Hollis: It's fairly high because you get—south of the Brooks Range you'll get some of the species that you might find in the Lower 48, too. But then they have—up in mostly north of the Brooks Range, you get all these other species that otherwise you don't see, like these Alpina Bombus, like Bombus polaris. So that one, that species and some of the species in that subgenus have like a circumboreal range. So you can find them in Russia, and then you can find them in the northern part of Alaska—or southern, but only up at high elevations. So they have this interesting—Alaska has this interesting kind of confluence of these different types of bumble bees, some of which you just don't see anywhere else.

Rachel: That's very cool. So I have to ask, because I have spent a significant amount of time in the state, and I love Alaska. It's one of my favorite places in the whole world. And it is really wild. I mean, people think of it as the “last frontier.” Do you have any memorable experiences, whether with bees or other wildlife, or while you were doing your field work?

Hollis: I think I was so focused on the bees, to be honest. I did learn to become comfortable, even when I was on the Anchorage campus, that a moose might just walk right by you, and you need to be chill. Haha. You know, not—like just act normal and keep walking. To me, that's just completely, obviously very different. And then, yeah, I don't know how he would feel about being called wildlife, but probably one of the most interesting encounters I had in Alaska is that the first time we went, Jim Gorman, who was the science editor for The New York Times, came on our trip with us. Along with Katey Orlinsky, this amazing photographer. And they captured the whole trip. They went out with us on the Dalton Highway. They were with us for most of the entire trip. And we had all these incredible conversations, and we just became friends from the trip. And I've even gone to visit Jim and his wife at their cabin that they have in upstate New York to like hang out with them. We just became really close. And I think—. You'll see this in his writing. He's written a lot about bumble bees because they're lovable, and he loves them. That was just a really cool encounter I had in Alaska. Haha. That, again, it's funny to think of him—or give that answer in a question about wildlife, but it was, yeah, it was a really cool interaction that we all had, to get to hang out with the New York Times crew.

Matthew: We often ask what seem like simple questions that go off in interesting tangents.

Hollis: I love a good tangent. Haha.

Matthew: Haha. Yeah, we're gonna have a, sort of a shift of gears here. And as I mentioned in the introduction, you are the principal investigator of the U.S. National Native Bee Monitoring Research Coordination Network. Can you tell us more about that network? And also, I have to ask, does it have a shorter name?

Hollis: Yeah, you can refer to it as the RCN. That's what we call it a lot, for simplicity's sake. So the goals of this effort—they were to try to basically take—in its first phase—was to take the pulse of the U.S. and try to get a sense [of] who all is monitoring bees? How do you even define monitoring? How are you doing it? What are the challenges you face? What are the opportunities? Might you be willing to coordinate if we have enough people and a critical mass of people who wanna monitor in similar ways, could we coordinate and work together in some ways? And if so, what would that look like? Those are some of the—basically a big scoping exercise to try to get a sense of how we could potentially end up with a large coordinated wild bee monitoring program for the U.S. And so I spent five years digging through all the different stakeholders and groups that are interested in those types of questions and participating in monitoring, and then tried to synthesize that information and look for opportunities, or blind spots, or things that we could do to help monitor bees better for conservation.

Matthew: Implicit in this whole conversation—in fact, I think I stated it at the beginning—that it's urgent. Conservation needs to understand bees better. So what's your take, or how would you describe the importance of this work?

Hollis: It's the thing I've become so motivated by. It's the part of my work—you know, I started this entire conversation telling you that I was working on bumble bee ovaries. And I'm still interested in them! But over time, you know, bumble bees are this group that we have some of the best evidence—partly because of the work of some of the folks from Xerces that participated in the IUCN bumble bee specialist group, and like helped lead the effort—we have some of the best evidence that bumble bees are in trouble. Lots of other bees, we're learning, also are imperiled in some, at some level. And so the need is there to try to protect bee populations. And then something I became really interested in is the idea of how do we build better and more coordinated systems and structures to try to do that? Because one thing I learned from working and leading the RCN is the idea that people are doing lots of different things different ways. And that's a good thing. We need that diversity. That's where a lot of initiative comes from, and a lot of on the ground action is happening through smaller projects. But at the same time, I'm really interested by the idea that if—sometimes—if people are willing and able, they could make some minor tweaks to what they're doing and participate and contribute to an even larger, bigger vision for how we could conserve bees across the U.S. There are lots of—just to give you one simple example—there are a lot of species that have ranges that span across many U.S. states, and so if people in one state are collecting data on this bee, it would be great to collect data in a similar way in the other states so that we can better put those data together and understand the status of that bee across its entire range.

Hollis: The need is there to conserve bees. And I think there are tons of opportunities to coordinate and cooperate more in doing so, and to improve the methods that we're using. A lot of my work is operating in that kind of space. Some of the things I've done along those lines—we had one big effort that was to develop some standardized protocols for collecting wild bee data. And I'm really proud of this protocol series because what we were doing with these protocols is trying to get people—. People collect data for all kinds of different reasons, and we wanted to be very respectful that people's aims are different. And if your aims are different, then, on some level, your approaches probably need to be different. But there are other ways that we could still do things, like if you're collecting data across different projects, if you're willing to annotate your data in a similar way, and collect the same information—even if some of the higher-level structure of your sampling is different—if you at least collect some of the same data fields, and report them to people, and make them accessible we can still put those data together in meaningful ways. And so the protocols were really focused on what is the lowest common denominator in terms of what people could do the same way, while they could still maintain their kind of independence and use the sampling framework that works best for them. So it's trying to find that way to get people to coordinate and buy into something while still being able to pursue the needs of their agency, for example. Or, let's say it's a local park and they're collecting data for some very specific reason, I want to find ways that they can continue to do that, but we can also put things together and coordinate.

Matthew: Yeah, no, it does make a great deal of sense that data from many different people would be compatible, if that's the right word, and can be combined. Because I know that it was just done for butterflies with the status of butterflies in the U.S. working group, where they pulled together, I forget how many tens of thousands of research or survey data from different surveys and were able to combine them and get a bigger picture. So that's awesome. Obviously, there are many different people involved in this network. Is it universities, agencies, individuals?

Hollis: It's really everybody. Less individual members of the public. But in total we had 800 people who participated in one or more of the series of, I think it was eight workshops that we held. And the workshops were, they were open to anyone who was collecting bee data or was interested in monitoring. And they came from all different—we had federal, state, academic, non-profit, independent consulting industry, EPA groups. Yeah, all kinds, all different federal kind of units. So, it was huge. And that was amazing because you would maybe start thinking something could be done one way and you'd think maybe, "Okay, this is a good way to—a good kind of path to start headed down." But then you would have all these other voices that were like, "That won't actually work with the way that we do things in our agency," or, "You're not thinking about how for an academic you might need to take into account such and such." And so it was so cool to have like all these different voices. Like, cool and a little overwhelming to have all these different voices, and trying to think, "How do we synergize all these people and all these different perspectives?" And it was such a fun kind of puzzle that was about people and their individual ways of thinking, and then that kind of like structured by the different like agencies or groups that they came from.

Hollis: And we were, again, trying to find the things that we had if not everyone agreeing on, at least the most critical mass across a wide kind of breadth of different perspectives. So yeah, I had these 800-plus people participating, and then there were 11 people who helped me co-organize the RCN, and Sarina Jepsen was one of them. And then we had groups. We tried to have folks from different, all the different perspectives, although that's hard to do with just 11 positions. But, so yeah, we got together. And then I learned that I'm really good at roping in other people if I learn that they're really good at something and they—. I'm listening, and I'm hearing that what they're saying, it just like rings true for what—how we could do things better. There were a lot of opportunities to try to co-opt people, and bring them in, and get them to help even more. And so I had a lot of kinda rockstar people who ended up being my go-to person when it comes to like digitization and data management, or the protocol series. Hannah Levenson from NC State was someone who became a huge part of the RCN, and et cetera. Yeah. It was a, just a massive effort.

Hollis: And now it's—. The project that funded the original RCN, which was—came from funding from USDA's Pollinator Health Program. That project term has ended, but the RCN has branched out into a couple new major initiatives. So one of them is the State of the Bees project that I'm co-organizing with Xerces. And the goal of that project is to identify or evaluate the extinction risk of all bees in the U.S. Because that's never been done. So we're trying to do that. But not only that, in the spirit of the RCN, is to think a little bit more about how we do that, and try to come up with more standardized and transparent methods for evaluating extinction risk, while working under the IUCN and Nature Serve frameworks for doing so.

Hollis: And we're doing the thing I learned to do, which is: don't do anything in a vacuum. Invite folks who are experts, and try to get them to help and participate. So that project has been a big open initiative to try to first develop the methods. And now we're in the process of evaluating species and getting a bunch of experts across the U.S. to assess the assessments. So that's one project. 
Another project that came out of the RCN, and I really think of it as being like the next phase, is that I'm working with USGS scientists who are coordinating the North American Bat Monitoring Program. And we're building a U.S. Wild Bee Monitoring Program. I learned that NABat, which is the North American Bat Monitoring Program, is an excellent model for how you can monitor species and build really cool information systems for doing that. And they got really excited about bees. And we're excited about their system. And now we're all working together to build a bee monitoring program. So that's another like, I guess, offshoot that came out of the RCN, as a way it's still going.

Rachel: That's wonderful. It sounds like you're the perfect person to do what you're doing in bringing people together, and recognizing people's strengths. And it's exciting to see people collaborate, because we really do need that. And Xerces is so based on collaboration. We can't do our work just among our staff. We really depend on our partners and appreciate that. And there's so many great people doing good work out there.

Rachel: You had talked about the bee project, and trying to survey or get an understanding of all the native bees in the U.S., and their status, which is a huge, massive undertaking. And we've talked a lot about surveying native bees and the challenges they face. And on the Monitoring Network website—which we'll definitely put in the show notes for people who are interested—summarizes various elements of the network's work. And one of those mentions a “taxonomic bottleneck.” Can you explain what that is, and is it a major challenge to you for your work?

Hollis: Yeah. I would—if I were to sum up the challenge of bee monitoring, I would say that—I would divide it into a few sub-challenges. And one of the greatest ones is definitely this taxonomic bottleneck. Taxonomy is the description and characterization of species. But when people use that phrase, what they're usually referring to is the fact that a lot of folks have collected a lot of bees, or a lot of bee data, so they—you don't need to collect the actual bee, necessarily. You could have photographs, you could have tissue, et cetera—they've collected a lot of things, and yet for a lot of bee species, they're very difficult to identify to species. And so you have these massive kind of blocks in data and information flow. And it's something—. We have thousands of bee species here in the U.S. A lot of them are really difficult to identify. And so, in some cases, there are very few human beings, and in some cases, literally one human being, who can identify some things to species like, with confidence, at this point. And so you have a very unsustainable situation.

Hollis: And I'm very excited about the promise of AI and molecular approaches for getting things identified to species more rapidly. But the truth is, those approaches are still not really scalable and implementable in the ways that we all want them to be right now. And so we continue to be stuck in a situation where the pace at which we can get the endpoint, the data, species-level information, is still way slower relative to how readily those data could be collected, or bees could be collected in the first place. And so, you know, there are a couple paths forward to deal with that. One of them that I mentioned are these newer technologies.

Hollis: Another way I'm really excited about is the idea that there are all these people now in the U.S. that are super excited about bees, and have taken it upon themselves to learn how to identify them. And maybe there are some bee groups that are like extremely challenging, like those ones I said only one person can identify. But a lot of the other bee species, they can identify them to species pretty readily. And so, the phrase for those folks is the parataxonomists. They're people who are, maybe not like a traditional bee taxonomist describing species and stuff, but they're certainly very good at looking at bee specimens, or data, and like identifying things to species. And so, that's one way that we're trying to like overcome that bottleneck.

Hollis: And then another thing, a challenge for bee monitoring that I'm—I've become really excited about is bee research and monitoring for a long time has been really focused on the community level. Collect everything, or try to sample everything. Do that through time, and then try to infer trends in individual species. But that's actually very difficult to do. If you go to a place at one point in time and you see 10 individuals. And then you go the next year and you see 2,000. And then you go the next year and you see one. And let's say you collected once or twice a year each of those three years. You have no idea if the differences in the counts across those years is really meaningful. Was the sun just shining really bright one day, and, you know, more bees were flying? But really, the population has crashed. You just saw a bunch of them on that one day in that one place. It's very difficult to take count data and try to get meaningful trends. Maybe for species where there are just like tons and tons of individuals, and they're really easy to observe, you could have these huge numbers and look at changes. But for a lot of bee species, you might only see one on a given day, and whether or not you see that one, it's hard to make sense of that. So I've gotten really excited about occupancy modeling, and the idea of like detectability. So detection probabilities and how you can build that into your sampling.

Hollis: And I've gotten really interested, too, in the idea of, “Yes, y'all, let's keep doing community surveys.” We need that information, too. We need community level data. But let's also try to get better kind of population level information, whether it be through occupancy modeling, or other approaches that are more focused on demography, like the level of population. So I think that's another way that we're gonna be able to make some better progress in bee monitoring. And all the great monitoring programs in the U.S.—and we have some amazing monitoring programs here in the U.S., in particular, I would say—a lot of them are focused on populations, you know. Because that's the level at which we really do conservation. And so, I'm excited about making progress in that area, too.

Rachel: Definitely. And that's the perfect segue to my next question. If people want to get involved in these monitoring efforts, what would you recommend that they look into or do?

Hollis: I would say, for a lot of bees in a lot of places, the power of the public comes from the fact that monitoring programs run by scientists, or employees of some state or federal governmental unit can only do so much sampling. The power of the people is being able to collect bee data in way more places at way more times than we could ever hope to do through a more coordinated organized monitoring approach. So when members of the public participate in a Bumble Bee Atlas project, for example, with Xerces, or when they snap a photo of a bee—better yet, a couple photos so you could try to really get it identified—and put those photos on iNaturalist, those data are—they have a value of their own that's outside of an organized monitoring program that I think is incredibly valuable. And scientists are going and taking those data, too, and using them to do very important things. Like trying to understand the range of an imperiled species, for example. So a person living in a state who happens to snap a photo of a bee that goes onto iNaturalist and can be identified, could completely extend our understanding of the range of that species, which is super powerful. Because now that state might have an imperiled bee species in their state that they had no idea.

Hollis: Another example is I've become really interested in the idea of lost species, and I actually co-founded, with Matt Forester—who I know has worked with Xerces, too—the Journal of Lost Species that's all framed around this concept. And a lost species is a species that hasn't been detected in the wild in 10 or more years. And I did a study recently, it was published a few years ago, where we looked through really easily accessible public bee data. And we asked: how many of U.S. bee species have—are there no records in public databases from the last 10 years? And it was more than half. And now, those bees are probably out there, many of them, most of them. I believe they're out there, we just don't have the record for it. So again, a member of the public who's just out in their garden taking a photo could rediscover one of these lost species. And now suddenly, something that hasn't been detected, you know, by scientists formally in 50 years—you could rediscover it. That's really cool. And a lot of these big, organized monitoring programs maybe aren't gonna be able to detect things at that kind of level. So yeah, I would say those are some ways to participate.

Matthew: I think it's so cool that there's the possibility of such a discovery.

Hollis: Yeah.

Matthew: And that anybody can do that. And maybe you just need to carry a phone with you. And, yeah. That's so cool. Thank you, Hollis. This has been a lovely conversation. I've really enjoyed it. And learned so much about both the work that you're doing, and also a number of broader issues within bee monitoring. As we wrap up, we have a couple of standard questions that we like to ask people. And again, another one of those questions that may seem simple, so I'm intrigued to see where we go with them. What inspired you to study bees?

Hollis: I originally wanted to be a primatologist. So I volunteered at some primate—mostly primate—kind of sanctuaries when I was in college, and that's what I thought I wanted to do. And what intrigued me the most was their social behavior. And then I took an evolution class, and we talked about social insects, and I started reading the work of E. O. Wilson, and I just became completely obsessed with social insects. And so that's how I got to working on bumble bees. But then, as I said, I started learning a little bit more about their status in the wild, and I got really—I'm still interested in social evolution, and social behavior, and I do still work on that in my lab—but the stuff we've been talking about more recently, that stuff has really captured my heart. And it's what I work on a lot more now. And then, just to bring things kind of full circle. One of the approaches I've been taking in the last few years for bee conservation is really leaning heavily on vertebrate conservation, and trying to understand more how it operates. And trying to see how we could take some of the kind of approaches that are more commonly applied in vertebrate conservation. Haven't found my primate connection quite yet. Haha. Mostly it's bats. Bats and herps. But still, trying to look at how we could take those approaches and apply them more in invertebrate conservation, and mostly specifically to bees. That's my little arc in how I got interested in bees, and then specifically bee conservation.

Rachel: I love that. I think that's the first time primates have come up on Bug Banter, but I think it's great. I love primates, too. All right, last question. If you could see any bug in the wild—and bug is a very loose term, really, for any invertebrate—what would it be and why?

Hollis: It would be Bombus franklini. So this is a bumble bee that used to be found in Northern California and Southern Oregon. It was last seen in 2006. So it is a lost species. And it's a bumble bee. And it always had, as far as we know, a really small range. And there are only so many observations of it. But like I said, no one's seen it in quite some time. And in the interim, it's become a federally listed bumble bee. So it's in this interesting position where, you know, if you read the recovery plan for Franklin’s, it's like, “Step one: We need to find it again." And so people have been looking and haven't seen it. But the efforts have been pretty targeted in some specific areas. And I actually have a project starting next year where we're gonna be trying to use eDNA methods to try to see if we can find signs of life for franklini. And then there are other researchers who've been doing a lot of boots-on-the-ground searching for it, too. So, that would be so incredible, because it's a little heartbreaking. In the interim, people have been working to protect it. I mean, you had to do the whole, the species status assessment happened. It's listed. People are poised to help this bee, but if you don't know where it is, you obviously can't do anything for it yet. We're all ready, you know, in a way to like help it. We just need to relocate it. So if someone could find it—I don't care if I find it, I just want someone to find it—if somebody could find it, and find—even just see one, that would unlock so much potential for trying to help that bee. And usually, when we're helping one bumble bee, we're actually—it ends up helping a lot of other things, too. Because a lot of the recovery kind of actions, and management recommendations for one bumble bee, they often support a broader cohort of bees, and even non-bees. So that would be super exciting to see.

Matthew: Yeah. But so, there's always hope. And I think a great example of an insect that wasn't seen and thought was extinct is the Fender's blue butterfly in the Willamette Valley of Western Oregon. Which is heavily populated and yet somehow this butterfly lived around the edges of the farmland and the vineyards for half a century, and nobody just saw it. And then someone came, stumbled across it one day.

Hollis: One reason why I've loved this journal—and we already have a few papers out, and we have a bunch more coming down the pipe—is a lot of the papers for Journal of Lost Species are rediscoveries. A fish no one's seen in 50 years washes ashore. No kidding. The ocean's a huge place. And people aren't looking in a lot of places. And so I think there are so many things that are still out there. We just have to look for them. And not just look, but actually take that photo, put that photo on iNaturalist. Make the information more available. I think a lot of these bees that I mentioned that we don't have records from the last 10 years—the overwhelming majority are right there in front of us. They're like hiding in plain sight. But if no one collects a record of seeing something, then we just don't know that it's still out there. So yeah, I love these rediscovery papers where people haven't seen something, and then suddenly there it is. And then the next thing you know, there are a bunch of them. And that's always exciting, because then you can try to do something for them to help them.

Rachel: Definitely. Well, Hollis, this has been really wonderful. It's so nice to sit down with you today. We so appreciate your time. Thank you. I've learned a lot, and I'm excited about the work that you're doing. It is really important, and I appreciate that you work with Xerces. And I look forward to hearing more about the research you're doing in Alaska, and the bee monitoring. So, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for joining us today.

Hollis: Love working with you guys. And nice to be here.

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

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