"Studying pollinators and how they interact in the wild is time consuming, expensive, and tedious.
Officials determined in the 1980s that apiaries only need a “categorical exclusion” — a designation that calls for little or no analysis and public notice. At that time, less was known about native bees and how they interact with honey bees.
Studying pollinators and how they interact in the wild is time consuming, expensive, and tedious. Scientists agree more analysis is needed to better understand if honey bees’ voracious appetites strip the land of food for native bees; if pollinators can transmit diseases and parasites to one another; and if honey bees’ preference for invasive plants will alter ecosystems.
Researchers are working on two projects in Utah they hope will answer these questions.
Adee Honey Farms, the nation’s largest private beekeeper, contributed 60 colonies toward a four-year project in the Manti-la Sal National Forest designed by the Forest Service and Brigham Young University to determine honey bees’ impacts on native bee populations. Manti-la Sal managers wrote on the forest’s website that the results, expected this year, could “serve as a model” for other districts. The service’s Intermountain region, where Adee still wants to summer its bees, denied interview requests for this article.
Scientists at a USDA native bee lab in Logan are searching for answers to how pollinators interact at 7,500 feet in Utah’s Strawberry Valley. Here, quaking aspen and towering pinyon pines tremble in a summer breeze alongside 48 buzzing honey bee hives and eight native bumble bee colonies housed in plastic crates. Snowberry bushes, goldenrod, and horsemint — a nutritious mix that makes for healthy bees and honey that doesn’t granulate — surround the site on a cattle ranch. A control site hosting only native bees is located in a national forest in the region.
Back in the lab, scientists will identify pollen removed from the honey bee and bumble bee hives at the Strawberry Valley site. This information will help pinpoint the flowers each species visit, said Diana Cox-Foster, the lab’s research leader.
To gain insight into native bee activity, Cox-Foster and her colleagues will use Dixie-Cup-shaped “bee bowls” and nets to capture endemic species and cameras to study foraging rates. The data will help scientists quantify forage needed by different species, gain insight into the ecosystem’s carrying capacity, and determine if pathogens move between species. It will also provide information on whether honey bees compete with wild bees for food.
The multi-year study, funded by Project Apis m., a nonprofit funded in part by beekeepers, Costco, and The National Honey Board, was “politically hot enough that we needed to have stakeholder approval across groups,” Cox-Foster said, including from the American Honey Bee Producers, the American Beekeeping Association, the Forest Service, and Xerces. It began this spring.
“We know competition happens, but we don’t know how intense it is, how much it affects native bees, and how much it varies from year to year,” said Vincent Tepedino, an entomologist who specializes in bee behavior, ecology, and rare plant pollination who worked at the USDA bee lab in Logan for 26 years.
Standing in a 2-acre garden behind the bee lab, Tepedino and Cane pointed out how honey bees from hives in suburban back yards overtook flowers carefully tended by scientists in the lab’s garden.
The scientists point out the honey bees — the insects with orange bands on their abdomens — that were flying from one lavender Phacelia flower to another. Several wild bee species, including a gray-striped ground-nesting mining bee and a furry bumble bee, vied for space on the spiky blooms.
“There are no feral honey bees in Utah — the winters are too long and cold,” Cane said. “This is essentially the most intact native bee fauna in the U.S. It’s worth protecting.”"
Source: JENNIFER OLDHAM, SEPTEMBER 15, 2020
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