If Nevada’s bumble bees went extinct, what would the local ecosystem look like? This is a question the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas is trying to answer, and its organizers are calling for volunteers to help.
The main job of a bumble bee is pollination. That helps local flora reproduce, and the flora provide homes and food for a variety of animals; in turn, larger animals get food to survive, and the effects bloom from there. Currently, there are four species in Nevada that are of conservation concern: the Western bumble bee, Suckley’s cuckoo bumble bee, the American bumble bee, and the Morrison bumble bee. The threats to their populations include climate change, disease, pesticide use and competition from commercial bees.
For the second year, the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation is running the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas—a study that collects information about bumble bee habitats in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada—to better understand and protect the region’s bumble bees. This research program is the first of its kind in Nevada, as the state’s size and remoteness have made it difficult for researchers to gather information.
“It takes a lot of work to get coverage,” said Amy Dolan, a conservation biologist who works for Xerces. She noted that studies typically involve small parties (like universities or researchers) going out to one specific region, making it difficult to cover enough territory to fully understand bees.
“That’s partly what the atlas is trying to do—evenly survey this whole area to figure out, well, where are the bee species now, and what habitats are they relying on, and what flowers are they using to help to survive in these conditions?” Dolan said. “It’s just helping us figure out where they are, and what they’re using, so that we can help land managers make evidence-based decisions on how to manage lands with pollinators in mind.”
The organization is calling on volunteers to help run this study. Volunteers don’t need a background in ecology or entomology, but do need to commit to a training session and two 45-minute surveys of a 50-square-kilometer area. The training, Dolan said, is to ensure volunteers understand the research protocol so that they can collect reliable data.
Local knowledge is one of the most important things volunteers can bring to the study (along with enthusiasm and a willingness to learn). The organizers are not from Nevada, so they aren’t necessarily familiar with our landscape. Locals may know better where to look for flowers.
Dolan said there is still much to learn about bees. That suits her just fine; the mysteries of the bug world made her fall in love with entomology in the first place.
“It’s this beautiful area of science … things that every ecosystem relies on and people tend to overlook,” she said.
She spent most of her career as a science teacher in middle and high school. The school at which she taught in Arizona brought in an entomologist to lead a biology elective.
“My students loved that,” she said. “But apparently, I loved it more.”
The experience inspired her to go back to school and get a master’s degree in entomology. For her master’s project, she focused on insects associated with huckleberry plants. Bumble bees are the main pollinators of these plants.
“And then that started my deep dive into falling in love with bumble bees,” Dolan said. “They can be so diverse—like, shiny blue and shiny purple, and just crazy colors and shapes and sizes. They’re awesome.”
Some years after she finished her degree, she found a posting for the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas coordinator job. “Multiple people said it sounded like I wrote that job description for myself, because it’s all these things that I really enjoy doing in the Mountain West—these beautiful landscapes that I love exploring,” she said.
Dolan said volunteers might find anywhere from one to 30 bumble bees while conducting their field work. Volunteers can expect to explore a space the size of two football fields to search for bumblebees for 45 minutes. She said groups can break up the time, so that if three people split the area, they each survey for 15 minutes. Volunteers capture every bumblebee they see during that time in a net, put it into a vial, and then put that vile on ice.
“It sounds weird, but it doesn’t hurt the bumblebees,” she said. The ice “knocks out” the bees, so that at the end of the 45-minute search time, you can take close photos of each. As the bees warm up, they regain mobility and fly away. Volunteers are asked to record the habitat, including the flowers or plants on which they found the bees. Dolan estimates that surveying and record-taking should take about two hours. Volunteers commit to conducting two surveys over the summer.
For more information about volunteering for the Mountain States Bumble Bee Atlas, contact Amy Dolan at amy.dolan@xerces.org, or visit the Xerces website at www.bumblebeeatlas.org/pages/mountain-states to sign up for the next training webinar, which takes place at 5:30 p.m., Tuesday, March 11.