Bees are key to pollination, but their population has been shrinking since 2014. Climate change is one of the reasons for the decline, and there is an active effort to support the survival of bees and other essential insects that help the ecosystem.
As part of its Greenseeker Series, Rhode Island PBS Weekly looks at how researchers at the University of Rhode Island are trying to survey and support local bees.
The full interview can be viewed here.
Casey Johnson says she chases bees for a living.
“I literally go around with some vials and a net and I go to flowers and net bees and collect them,” says Johnson, a researcher at the URI Bee Lab.
Johnson has been busy collecting these insects to study at the lab’s 85-acre farm in Kingston. She is grappling with global warming, and so are the bees — who are feeling the sting of climate change.
“For one thing, global warming is slowly shifting ranges of certain species of bees,” Johnson says. “So bees might be moving to higher altitudes or higher latitudes as well, moving a bit farther north as our climate is warming.
“They’re declining, not just in general and relative abundance, but they’re also declining in the species richness, which means we’re losing species and species ranges are shifting,” she adds. “We’re losing species without even ever really knowing that they’ve existed in a space.”
Whether they exist or are becoming extinct is the quest of a wide-ranging project: the first bee census taken in Rhode Island Johnson and her team are collecting bees to gen an historic snapshot of their local population.
The lab’s director, Steven Alm, says there are more than 250 species of bees in Rhode Island. He says the bees — both wild and native species — are vital to the state’s ecosystem and the food chain. The insects are responsible for more than 100 crops consumed and used by people each day.
Alm adds that nearly 80% of plants need pollen grains containing reproductive cells, which in turn, are transferred to the male and female parts of the flower.
“Almost a third of our diet is responsible to animal pollinators, mostly bees,” Alm says. “So yeah, it was very important in our diet to have all this variety of fruits and vegetables.
“It’s pollinating all the native plants. And so that relationship would be lost if we don’t have them. Alm says, “We had twelve species of bumblebees before we started this survey. We were only able to find five of them, so we have lost five species of bumblebees. And the number of flowers they pollinate is enormous”.
Alm said there have been several factors contributing to the diminishing bee population — pesticides, parasites and invasive plants have played a role. But the biggest culprit has been global warming.
“You get flowers and the bees out of sync because maybe the temperatures will force the flowers to come on earlier. And the bees aren’t quite ready yet,” he says.
That causes bees to begin foraging when the plants are past their prime. Also, more frequent and intense storms caused by climate change have affected the majroity of bees that live and raise their young underground.
“If we have these flash floods that could be flooding areas where there’s ground-nesting bees and impacting them,” Johnson says. “But also having all of this rain leads to limited foraging ability because the bees don’t fly in the rain.”
To help conserve the bee population, researchers at the lab have been constructing bumblebee nesting boxes.
Ren Johnson, a graduate research assistant at the lab, says the nesting boxes buried in the ground contain a rodent aroma — what bees might discover in abandoned chipmunk or field mice burrows where they like to build nests — to lure the insects. The boxes are like an underground birdhouse.
Three hundred of these boxes have been placed around Rhode Island.
Managed honey bees can flourish in hives because their keepers can add sugar water and pollen when flowers are scarce. Native and wild bees do not have that luxury.
But Casey Johnson said residents can help by expanding their gardens. More blooms result in more bees.
“Planting a diversity of flowers, both in bloom times,” she says. “So you have things blooming from April all the way down to the fall and October is ideal and having a variety of flower types, so different color flowers,”
Bees prefer yellow, white and blue native flowers. A listing of suggested varieties can be found on the URI Bee Lab website.
Alm says he is encouraged by the public’s interest.
“We’re seeing more and more people very interested in helping out and doing what they can,” he says. “So yeah, we’re very encouraged.”
“The word is getting out, that these bees are in trouble and that we need to be doing more for them because we need them all,” Casey Johnson says.
