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9 recordsLinked to original sources
USGS2015

Bees: An up-close look at pollinators around the world

While we eat, work, and sleep, bees are busy around the world. More than 20,000 species are in constant motion! They pollinate plants of all types and keep our natural world intact. In Bees, you'll find a new way to appreciate these tiny wonders. Sam Droege and Laurence Packer present more than 100 of the most eye-catching bees from around the world as you've never seen them: up-close and with stunning detail. You'll stare into alien-like faces. You'll get lost in mesmerizing colors and patterns, patches and stripes of arresting yellow or blue. Whether you linger on your first close look at the Western Domesticated Honey Bee or excitedly flip straight to the rare Dinagapostemon sicheli, there's no doubt you'll be blown away by the beauty of bees.

Book↗
USGS2018

Description of disparate responses of two indoor feral bee colonies

As is sometimes the case, field research does not always go according to plan. This is especially true when the research involves free-ranging animals. We recently conducted a preliminary field study that involved placing a beehive in a tent and individually releasing marked honey bees (Apis mellifera) outdoors to study their ability to locate sugar water rewards by following olfactory cues. Herein, we relay our experiences with two beehives and their disparate responses to being held in tents We believe our observations, although anecdotal, can provide much needed guidance to researchers and beekeepers who may need to temporarily hold honey bee colonies in tents or other enclosures.

Bee World↗
USGS2019

Understanding and mitigating bee drownings in open feeders

Whereas open feeders are relatively inexpensive and are easily set up and maintained, they do present a drowning hazard to bees. We observed that bees feeding off the walls of the open container fell into the sugar water because of their incarnation, interactions with other bees and when shooed off the feeder walls while removing the feeder for cleaning. Twigs, angled laths and utility screen perches permitted bees to exploit more of the sugar water surface area and provided drowning bees a platform for self-rescue. Because angled laths and utility screen perches extended over the entire feeder, they offered greater feeding surface area and increased the chances that a drowning bee would quickly encounter the perches for self-rescue than twig perches. Additionally, bees were less likely to fall into the sugar water when removing the angled lath and utility screen perches from the feeders than when removing twigs. Our anecdotal observations identified three characteristics of perches that can mitigate for the drowning hazard. Perches need to: 1. Allow bees to use a greater surface area of the sugar water to reduce crowding while feeding from the container walls. 2. Encompass most of the feeder to improve the chances that drowning bees will encounter the perch and be able to rescue themselves. 3. Allow bees to quickly extricate themselves from the sugar water to minimize sugar crystallization on the bees. The information presented herein provides a practical window into the factors that lead to bee drownings and the type of mitigation that is required. It is of note that we used the three perch types to develop perch characteristics for mitigating drowning hazards. Novice researchers can apply these principles to customize perches based on their specific needs.

Bee World↗
USGS2025

Estimating occupancy of focal bee species

Current bee monitoring efforts have a limited capacity for understanding factors affecting wild bee population changes, including the effects of management. To improve the effectiveness of wild bee monitoring, we first discuss principles of biological monitoring and provide a framework to design monitoring projects to estimate species occupancy, where occupancy is defined as the probability that a Sampling Unit or site is occupied by the focal species. Monitoring practitioners should first define the desired goal or question of monitoring and secondly select the appropriate state variable for monitoring ( e.g ., species richness, occupancy, abundance). These represent two critical, yet often overlooked, steps in the development of wild bee monitoring projects. As with all forms of demographic monitoring, practitioners who are interested in estimating species occupancy will need to develop a sampling scheme tailored to meet their monitoring objectives. Defining key sampling terms will provide the architecture of their scheme, including the Area of Interest, Sampling Unit, Season, and Replicate Survey. We also highlight data standards, including core data fields that must be collected during Surveys for bee occupancy data and additional, recommended data fields . We illustrate how these monitoring concepts are being applied to the design of a real-world monitoring project for the federally endangered rusty patched bumble bee ( Bombus affinis Cresson). This framework was developed in association with the U.S. National Native Bee Monitoring Network.

Journal of Melittology↗
USGS2014

Mapping large-area landscape suitability for honey bees to assess the influence of land-use change on sustainability of national pollination services

Pollination is a critical ecosystem service affected by various drivers of land-use change, such as policies and programs aimed at land resources, market values for crop commodities, local land-management decisions, and shifts in climate. The United States is the world's most active market for pollination services by honey bees, and the Northern Great Plains provide the majority of bee colonies used to meet the Nation's annual pollination needs. Legislation requiring increased production of biofuel crops, increasing commodity prices for crops of little nutritional value for bees in the Northern Great Plains, and reductions in government programs aimed at promoting land conservation are converging to alter the regional landscape in ways that challenge beekeepers to provide adequate numbers of hives for national pollination services. We developed a spatially explicit model that identifies sites with the potential to support large apiaries based on local-scale land-cover requirements for honey bees. We produced maps of potential apiary locations for North Dakota, a leading producer of honey, based on land-cover maps representing (1) an annual time series compiled from existing operational products and (2) a realistic scenario of land change. We found that existing land-cover products lack sufficient local accuracy to monitor actual changes in landscape suitability for honey bees, but our model proved informative for evaluating effects on suitability under scenarios of land change. The scenario we implemented was aligned with current drivers of land-use change in the Northern Great Plains and highlighted the importance of conservation lands in landscapes intensively and extensively managed for crops.

PLoS ONE↗
USGS2023

Pollinator conservation and climate science at the U.S. Geological Survey

Introduction Ecosystems—whether agricultural, urban, or natural—depend on pollinators, great and small. Pollinators in the form of bees, birds, butterflies, bats, and even moths provide vital, but often invisible services, from contributing to biodiverse terrestrial wildlife and plant communities to supporting healthy watersheds. Pollinator declines worldwide have been noted as land-use and climate changes occur on the landscape. This is alarming because up to 75 percent of crop species that are important for human food production depend on pollinators for production. Biodiversity of pollinators in the United States includes more than 4,000 species of insects, birds, and mammals. Pollinator species in the United States are in crisis based on broad-scale changes in land-use and climate. The Committee on the Status of Pollinators in North America summarized active and passive management alternatives to benefit pollinators and reduce their decline. Because assessment of pollinators in the United States has historically lagged behind other regions of the world, the Committee challenged the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to develop conservation plans, for pollinators, including quantification of the effects of climate change. As an example of the immediate need to focus efforts on pollinator conservation, Inouye and others cited the USFWS’s 2017 listing of the rusty-patched bumble bee ( Bombus affinis ) as Endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973. Strategies are developed to accomplish pollinator conservation goals and the USGS is contributing scientific expertise toward those goals.

Fact Sheet↗
USGS2020

An updated genetic marker for detection of Lake Sinai Virus and metagenetic applications

Background Lake Sinai Viruses (LSV) are common RNA viruses of honey bees ( Apis mellifera ) that frequently reach high abundance but are not linked to overt disease. LSVs are genetically heterogeneous and collectively widespread, but despite frequent detection in surveys, the ecological and geographic factors structuring their distribution in A. mellifera are not understood. Even less is known about their distribution in other species. Better understanding of LSV prevalence and ecology have been hampered by high sequence diversity within the LSV clade. Methods Here we report a new polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay that is compatible with currently known lineages with minimal primer degeneracy, producing an expected 365 bp amplicon suitable for end-point PCR and metagenetic sequencing. Using the Illumina MiSeq platform, we performed pilot metagenetic assessments of three sample sets, each representing a distinct variable that might structure LSV diversity (geography, tissue, and species). Results The first sample set in our pilot assessment compared cDNA pools from managed A. mellifera hives in California ( n = 8) and Maryland ( n = 6) that had previously been evaluated for LSV2, confirming that the primers co-amplify divergent lineages in real-world samples. The second sample set included cDNA pools derived from different tissues (thorax vs. abdomen, n = 24 paired samples), collected from managed A. mellifera hives in North Dakota. End-point detection of LSV frequently differed between the two tissue types; LSV metagenetic composition was similar in one pair of sequenced samples but divergent in a second pair. Overall, LSV1 and intermediate lineages were common in these samples whereas variants clustering with LSV2 were rare. The third sample set included cDNA from individual pollinator specimens collected from diverse landscapes in the vicinity of Lincoln, Nebraska. We detected LSV in the bee Halictus ligatus (four of 63 specimens tested, 6.3%) at a similar rate as A. mellifera (nine of 115 specimens, 7.8%), but only one H. ligatus sequencing library yielded sufficient data for compositional analysis. Sequenced samples often contained multiple divergent LSV lineages, including individual specimens. While these studies were exploratory rather than statistically powerful tests of hypotheses, they illustrate the utility of high-throughput sequencing for understanding LSV transmission within and among species.

California, Maryland, Nebraska↗