Here a Bee, There a Bee, Everywhere a Wild Bee
After following a trail under hydroelectric lines and through Douglas fir forest, Rowan Rampton, then a graduate student in biology at the University of Calgary, emerges in a scrubby high-elevation grassland outside Castlegar in the west Kootenay mountains of British Columbia. The meadow is strewn with green-tinged serpentine rocks and alpine plants he’s hardly ever encountered before: purple onion grass, bitterroot, limestone hawksbeard. This is it, the botanical treasure chest he was steered to by a local botanist—a rich patch of biodiversity in an increasingly barren world, humming with life. Rampton unpacks his gear and gets busy catching bees.
His luck works for and against him that sunny June day, two summers ago. He quickly realizes he’s forgotten his ethanol for euthanizing specimens, so the eight plastic vials in his backpack will only hold one live bee each instead of scores of dead ones. But the constraint forces him to be choosy, collecting only bees he’s never seen before. Common bumblebees, pass; sweat bees, pass. He’s just about to head back with a handful of promising specimens when a tiny dark bee, smaller than an apple seed, on a bright yellow sedum flower catches his eye.
Rampton has clocked enough hours identifying wild bees to know when he’s spotted something novel, even at a glance. “Anything that is kind of black, stubby, and small with white stripes on the abdomen is usually going to be something interesting,” he says. He quickly nets and vials the bee to add to his collection.
There are over 3,000 known species of bees in western North America and identifying them is an arcane science. Even the field guide Common Bees of Western North America lumps bees into comically untechnical yet sensible groupings, such as “bees that are extremely large” and “bees that are very hairy.” To identify many bees to the species level often requires hours studying microscopic minutiae, like the patterns of wing venation, similar to the lead that joins stained glass, or the placement and morphology of pollen-collecting body hairs, known as scopa.
Despite knowing what species his mystery bee is not, Rampton cannot determine what it is. So when his mentor, Lincoln Best, a bee biologist—aka melittologist—and expert taxonomist with the Master Melittologist Program at Oregon State University (OSU) visits Calgary that fall, Rampton brings out his mystery specimen. Seeing it under the microscope, Best gets excited. It’s Hoplitis emarginata, he explains, a small stonecrop specialist that is related to the mason bee, known only from a handful of sightings and specimens from northern California and southern Oregon. Discovering one in the Kootenays, about 850 kilometers away, represents a giant northward range extension. “I know more about this bee [species] than anyone, and I’m shocked that it’s up here,” says Best. In fact, he suggests Rampton’s find could be a new species altogether, given that it was found foraging on a different type of sedum than the few found in Oregon and California.
The prospect of discovering a new bee species may seem quite momentous to a lay person. But to those hooked on wild bees, it happens remarkably often. Best works on the Oregon Bee Atlas, which began taking inventory of Oregon’s bee fauna in 2018 via citizen scientists trained to be master melittologists. At that time, the state’s checklist included just over 600 bee species. Within seven years, the list had grown to 750 species. With bee discoveries still rolling in, Best expects the species tally to eventually reach 800 or more.
Here in British Columbia, according to the Entomological Society of British Columbia, there are currently 483 known species of wild bees, nearly as many as the province’s birds. But in reality there are probably many, many more. In the past six years, 19 new species of bees have been recorded in the Kootenays alone from specimens collected by Rampton and Best, including at least two species new to science. Go coastal and the wild bee finds continue, with a new-for-British Columbia species found in the sands of Calvert Island, off the province’s central coast, in 2020. It would seem that whenever someone qualified bothers to look, they find a new species of wild bee. It’s an intoxicating rate of discovery, suggesting that high numbers of wild bee diversity remain to be discovered here. With the Native Bee Society of British Columbia launching the BC Bee Atlas this year, after three years of piloting, the number of wild bees known to live in the province will no doubt grow.
Conversely, this meteoric rate of discovery reflects how little is known about British Columbia’s wild bees in the first place. Perhaps eclipsed by the general public’s familiarity with the non-native European honeybees that are deployed in North American agriculture and honey production, their wild, endemic counterparts face huge gaps in knowledge, with some very basic questions unanswered: what native bee species live here, how they are doing, what floral and habitat resources they require to survive. “Our pollinators could be in dire straits or they could be fine … and we wouldn’t even have the data to know that,” says Risa Sargent, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of British Columbia. This is precisely why the dedicated efforts of wild bee melittologists like Rampton are so critical. After all, you can’t safeguard something if you don’t know it’s on the land in the first place.
Knowing so woefully little about wild bees is concerning, if not downright dangerous. Bees are a major pollinator for ecosystems the world over, instrumental in the reproduction of flowering plants, which includes everything from trees to wildflowers. By inadvertently moving pollen collected on their bodies to the female reproductive system of flowers, bees fertilize plants as they feed on their nectar and pollen, ensuring seed and fruit production. While other animals such as moths, flies, fruit bats, and hummingbirds contribute to the global pollination effort, bees have evolved an especially tight mutualism with flowering plants, and in many instances, there is no redundancy built into the system—just one species of bee specializes in one type of plant, and that plant relies on that one species of bee for pollination. In other words, bees need flowers, and flowers need bees. And because flowers are often the precedent for plant products that animals, including humans, rely on—everything from seeds to grains, fruit, vegetables, medicine, and spices—global ecosystems and humans need bees, too.
While European honeybees get most credit for crop pollination, wild bees in North America are also critical. This is in part because wild bees can be incredibly efficient at their work—a mere 100 native orchard mason bees can do the equivalent pollination work of tens of thousands of honeybees. All told, over 700 different species of wild bees are associated with the crops grown here in North America, and for many, like tomatoes, wild bee visitation results in larger and more numerous fruit. For others, such as apples, blueberries, and strawberries, wild bees maximize fruit quality and yield, helping farmers get the biggest bang out of their acreage, and delivering customers longer-lasting, juicier fruit. These incremental increases in the volume of wild-bee-pollinated produce, a result of wild bees doing a better pollination job on the flowers they visit, add up to an enormous amount of food. In Canada alone, according to research done by scientists in Brazil and Canada, wild-pollinator-dependent food crops produce enough to meet the nutritional needs of 24.4 million people each year and generate almost CAN $3-billion for the farming sector.
Lose wild bees, and you lose out on food, but that’s not the only type of crop at stake. Cotton production increases with wild bee pollination. Crops that feed livestock, such as alfalfa and soy, are more productive when wild bees are around. Then there are the world’s noncommercial plants—all the flowering trees, shrubs, and wildflowers. Without pollinators, one-third of the world’s flowering plant species would produce no seeds and three-quarters of the remaining plant species would suffer at least an 80 percent reduction in their fertility. “When you understand how much nature relies on these intricate linkages, it makes you see the vulnerability of the world more clearly,” says Sargent. “Most people don’t realize the gossamer web that connects us to all these natural processes that we rely on for civilization to function.”
Despite the elemental role pollinators play in global food production and ecosystem functioning writ large, evidence is mounting that the six-legged foundation that so many plants and the rest of us larger creatures rely on is beginning to crumble. The planet faces an urgent biodiversity crisis, with about half a million species of insects expected to face extinction in the coming decades. Already four in 10 bee species may be highly threatened, and rapid declines in wild bees have already been documented as habitat loss, pesticide use, climate change, and pathogens take their toll. Here in Canada, declines in seven species of bumblebees have been documented in recent decades in Ontario; the likelihood of a bumblebee population surviving in North America has declined by almost half in the past 35 years. This is a rate of decline “consistent with mass extinction” according to researchers. There’s more. Among wild bee species in North America, including Hawai’i, with enough data to be assessed, half are estimated to be in decline, with one in four facing a steepening risk of extinction. “It’s hard to say pesticide is killing the bees or climate change is killing the bees or outbreaks of disease are killing the bees,” says Juli Carrillo, a plant-insect ecologist at the University of British Columbia. “It’s all of those things together.”
For British Columbia’s wild bees, these kinds of eye-opening statistics can’t even be generated, so large is the chasm of scientific ignorance around population trends. At the same time, untold hotspots of wild bee diversity, and even new records of bees, are being discovered here—mostly because people simply haven’t looked before. This raises the possibility that this province is home to untold riches of wild bees precisely when, if global trends are to be believed, their numbers and ranges are contracting in response to the stressors of disease, climate change, and habitat loss. “Imagine you have a library, with everything in the world in it, and things are just being taken away, never to be seen again,” says Carillo.
There is resiliency in natural systems, but when we start to remove species, like the stones in a Roman arch, we undermine that resiliency and further accelerate declines. But the opposite also holds true: protect and nurture landscape, plant, and pollinator diversity, and those biological riches can better perpetuate themselves. But first, you have to know what you are protecting and where it is found. And that is where bee atlas initiatives, and the armies of expert bee taxonomists they train, come in.
In the glacier-smoothed foothills west of Oliver in British Columbia’s southern Okanagan region, there is a dirt road that quickly climbs into cattle country. Red-and-yellow blanket flowers punctuate the dry and crumbly earth underfoot, and Saskatoon bushes heave with berries. Swallows arc in the biting wind. But for the group of wild bee students scouring this landscape in June 2023, the birds and berries don’t matter. Instead, they are seeking this land’s bees—some no wider than the tine of a fork, some metallic blue, some fuzzy, some buzzy—floating jerkily above flowers as if on invisible puppet strings.
These students are here to attend the field component of the BC Native Bee Course, coordinated by the Native Bee Society of British Columbia and taught by Best and Bonnie Zand, a biologist from Comox, British Columbia, who is also an instructor in OSU’s Master Melittologist Program. This year there are 27 students, consisting of graduate students, biodiversity enthusiasts who regularly post to the iNaturalist app, and native plant landscapers. Fourteen of them are enrolled in the Master Melittologist Program and are well versed in the data collection protocols of the Oregon and BC Bee Atlases. This summer, the course was based in Penticton, switching between days in the lab—studying pinned specimens under microscopes—and time in the field.
Best, Zand, and their colleagues are taking what could be called a hivelike approach to wild bee research and conservation. Whereas most wild bees are solitary—eking out an existence on their own, scrabbling to build nests in the soil, or carefully laying eggs down the stalks of dead plants, one by one—some, like bumblebees, hive. They divide tasks and scale up. Similarly, the Master Melittologist and Oregon Bee Atlas programs are training everyday citizens to be melittologists who work with a collective purpose: to catalog and plumb the bee riches of a region by generating a wealth of standardized data on wild bees, including GPS coordinates of where a bee was found and the flowers it’s affiliated with. The bee atlas model has been so successful that it is being cloned in Washington State and New Mexico.
Because the bee atlas generates data on a massive geographical scale—across the state of Oregon, for instance—it reveals hotspots of astonishing bee biodiversity that have flown under the radar. “Some little nooks and crannies … actually have many hundreds of species that occur in small areas,” says Best. “Through that, we’re able to identify areas of extreme conservation value.” The area where the field course is taking place is a triumvirate of biogeoclimatic zones—bunch grass, ponderosa pine, and interior Douglas fir—overlap here like a Venn diagram and host hundreds of different bee species, making it rich fodder for melittology instruction.
Today, the students slowly stalk through a bunch grass ecosystem, their deliberate pace punctuated by the whip-fast flap of their nets. Then, typically, they come over to Best, a mystery bee buzzing around in their collection vial.
“I was going to say Eucera, but the size … ,” says one student.
Best interrupts—“Heart-shaped face? Outwardly arcuate posterior second return vein?”
They banter further until Best finally leads the student to the correct ID, a colletid bee, known for lining its brood cells with a cellophane-like substance it secretes from a specialized gland. At one point, Best stumbles upon a plant he’s never seen here before. Its stems are like pale green miniature pipe cleaners that twist up and end in curved sprays of minuscule flowers, which open like popcorn kernels. “This is the kind of plant where we would find new species or records of really rare bees,” he says. An entire subgenus of mason bees, Proteriades, relies solely on this genus of plant, Cryptantha. These bees have evolved Velcro-covered tongues to scrape the pollen out of the flower’s narrow corolla, and special brushes on their legs to comb pollen into a pile that it then packs onto its belly to take back to the nest for its larvae, which specialize in digesting this one plant’s pollen.
Best has seen only one of these bees in Canada before, near the Washington State border, and no specimens have ever been collected here. “If the weather was nice, I would sit here all day,” he says. “You wait a few days and then that one ridiculously rare bee shows up.” He seems wistful but brightens as he explains how, for tens of thousands of generations, every bee that’s specialized on Cryptantha at every stage of its life has subsisted entirely on the pollen and nectar of that single plant species. The plant’s pollen, molecularly speaking, is like a nutritional progenitor of the bee, the single source of all proteins and amino acids required to build a whole new bee. The plant’s nectar and pollen make the bee, and the bee makes more of the plants via pollination, which go on to sustain more bees. Their mutualism makes them as one. “The bee is almost like an extension of the plant because they consist of the same thing,” Best says.
As he shares this insight, Best watches his students from behind wire-frame glasses with the gaze of someone who’s waiting for the psychedelic they’ve just ingested to take effect. A group has gathered around the knee-high plant, and they all pause in almost devotional contemplation. One student is meditatively stroking the plant’s leaves. Then the spell is broken as they snap photos and confirm the genus spelling for their notes before walking on.
The more you dedicate yourself to the study of wild bees, the more novel discoveries you make, the drive to study them growing ad infinitum, like an entomological uroboros. “It’s endlessly satisfying,” says Best. “The bees themselves have such individually cool stories related to the flora that I think it’s the best story in ecology by far.” The rewards, in the currency of discovery, seem endless for melittologists like Zand and Best and their acolytes. In the summer of 2022, one of Best’s master melittology students at OSU came to class with a bee in their collection box that had only ever been spotted once before in Oregon, 90 years prior. Similarly, in 2023 one of Zand’s students collected a European bee species on Vancouver Island that had never been recorded in Canada. “The more you learn, the more you learn that there is more to learn,” says Zand. “It’s this never-ending line of inquiry.”
On another day of the field course, Best walks the native bee course students to a different field site, this one up a dirt road toward a small lake. After 15 minutes, the road’s surface becomes a fine silty dust, and that’s when everyone notices hundreds of shiny, black-looking snowberry bees, hovering centimeters above the road surface like an agitated school of fish. “This is the very beginning of the snowberry bloom, and so the bee patch isn’t even at full power. It’s just powering up,” Best says. “This whole road is just, like, black bees everywhere. It’s crazy.”
These bees, Dufourea holocyanea, rely on the pollen of the diminutive snowberry flower. Born as larvae the previous year, they have only recently emerged from their nests as adults after overwintering and are now in a rush to reproduce, provision their young, and perpetuate their annual life cycle while the snowberries are in bloom. Crouching down to look at the shoulder of the road reveals hundreds of tiny holes dug into the soil, no wider than a drinking straw, with snowberry bee mothers entering and emerging from them. Each of these minuscule burrows will contain between 10 and 50 brood cells, each equipped with a tiny nugget of snowberry pollen and nectar to feed its larvae. And because there is a species of cuckoo bee that subsists entirely by stealing food from the snowberry bee and eating its larvae, there’s a decent chance that several of these brood cells will also contain eggs of the snowberry cuckoo bee, which poaches the pollen ball from its host’s larvae—an act of theft known as kleptoparasitism.
Within minutes, the dusty roadside reveals the high-stakes drama of a nature documentary, just as complex as the savanna riches of sub-Saharan Africa, only a thousand times smaller. Students identify insects like a rapid-fire roll call: beewolves, predatory wasps that prey on bees; hummingbird clearwing moths, for whom snowberry is a host plant of its caterpillar; jewel wasps that shine brighter than an opal; and pompilid wasps that hunt spiders. At the base of a lone Douglas fir, antlion larvae lie in wait at the bottom of steep-sloped funnels of dirt for their prey, which they will liquefy and slurp up. There is also a furred bee fly that has a ginormous proboscis below oversized hangdog eyes. Despite its adorable countenance, its lifestyle is vicious. A female bee fly will carpet-bomb the snowberry bee nests with her eggs so that her larvae can feed on the snowberry bee’s pollen and larvae within.
Soon the only sounds are those of minuscule organisms at work—buzzing punctuation marks and the zings of tiny wings. “The synchronicity of all the relationships here just feels right,” says Lori Weidenhammer, author of Victory Gardens for Bees and member-at-large of the Native Bee Society of British Columbia, who regularly makes the pilgrimage to the bee course. It’s both a grand and vague statement, akin to an audience member describing the emotions elicited by a Mozart symphony rather than the details of the musical notes themselves. But the research literature bears out Weidenhammer’s intuition: the degree of “rightness” of such pockets of thriving plant and insect diversity is looking more and more significant. Dig into pretty much every major stressor of wild bees—disease, pesticides, the dual climate change impacts of warming and increased weather volatility—and you will find evidence in the scientific literature that biological and ecological richness itself is most protective against those same threats. The more species-rich an ecosystem, the more resilient it is in the face of destabilizing forces. “We know that biodiversity also brings stability to ecosystems by hedging in many different ways,” says Best.
Habitat and plant diversity are critical, too, as various studies show. For example, one study finds that bumblebees in landscapes with an abundance of flower types, especially in spring, have lower pathogen loads than those that are florally impoverished. There is even evidence that secondary plant compounds eaten by bees, in either nectar or pollen, may reduce their pathogen loads. Sunflower pollen, for example, dramatically reduces infection rates from parasitic pathogens in bumblebees. Wild blueberry nectar and pollen also reduces infections from a gut microbe in bumblebees. Unsurprisingly, a richness in floral species will increase the reproductive success of wild bees. Bees fed only on rapeseed flowers treated with insecticide, for instance, rear half as many larvae as bees fed on a more diverse mix of flowers. Most promisingly, the study also finds that a high diversity of flowering plants counteracts the negative effects of neonicotinoid exposure on bee reproductive success.
For Best, the bee atlases’ work uncovering nexuses of bee diversity dovetails tightly with land management, informing what habitat to protect from which threats, or which plants will host which bees and where. He’s seen how the Oregon Bee Atlas data has fed into municipal, regional, state, and federal governments in Oregon and Washington. Already the Oregon Bee Atlas has identified hyper-hotspots of biodiversity, many with a very small footprint. The hope is that a BC Bee Atlas will do the same here. The Native Bee Society of British Columbia is already in discussions with one unnamed municipality and Parks Canada about how the BC Bee Atlas could provide information on what wild bees are on the land, or inform future decisions around land protection for pollinators. But the remit, resources, and legislation to empower provincial or federal agencies to protect pollinators in British Columbia is embryonic. Oregon, for example, has state legislation that protects pollinators against pesticides, a pollinator health task force, and a bee-depicting license plate that directs funds to OSU’s pollinator initiatives. (Washington State has similar legislation and its own Pollinator Health Task Force.) The Oregon Bee Atlas receives major funding from the US Department of Agriculture and is a collaboration between two state agencies and two OSU programs, and the Washington Bee Atlas has a dedicated coordinator and full-time taxonomist on salary. In contrast, the BC Bee Atlas is run by the Native Bee Society of British Columbia, a volunteer organization, and is notably lacking in any similar levels of support or funding from government or academic institutions. Meanwhile, pollinator-packed habitats risk being lost in the cracks of British Columbia’s weak pollinator protections and lack of resources and funding.
The camas meadows of the west Kootenays may be the most jam-packed habitats in British Columbia when it comes to bee and plant species. Camas, or ʔitx̌ʷaʔ (it-kwah) as the plant is called by the Sinixt Nation, is a rare find in British Columbia’s interior and the west Kootenays are home to the largest concentration of camas outside the south coast. Each spring, camas still blankets pocket meadows in sky blue blooms, but these patches are remnants of a once much larger footprint shrunk by land-use changes and habitat destruction. In his research collaboration with the Kootenay Native Plant Society, conducted over two summer field seasons across eight field sites, Rowan Rampton has documented 207 different species of wild bees in these interior camas meadows, each no bigger than half a city block, and he believes continued surveys would turn up even more. To put those numbers in perspective, that level of bee biodiversity is equal to more than 40 percent of known BC bee species, and 25 percent of all the wild bees in Canada. Yet the fanfare about the astounding biodiversity recorded on these sites has been limited to the outer fringes of wild bee biology, leaving those in the know scratching their heads as to why these bee hotspots remain unprotected.
At one such meadow in Castlegar, Valerie Huff from the Kootenay Native Plant Society recalls breaking out into a dance when she chanced upon a sea of blue camas flowers as she explored the town’s riverside one spring day in 2010. Never before had she seen them carpet an area so entirely. As she took in the sight, she thought of Meriwether Lewis’s (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition) description of a camas meadow in Idaho: “It resembles lakes of fine clear water, so complete is this deseption that on first sight I could have swoarn it was water.” Huff’s next lasting impression was that the camas meadow was literally buzzing with life: “It’s just like, holy cow, there’s something really important going on here with respect to pollinators.” It took her seven years to secure the grant funding to study and affirm what she knew from spending time in these meadows—in part because the agency she applied to back then simply didn’t designate insects as wildlife, and research on them was therefore ineligible for funding. That has since changed, and Huff was able to secure the money from multiple sources to bring Rampton on board to do a deep dive into the camas meadows.
Thanks to his research, meticulously documenting the bees and plants in these rare habitats, she now knows that the sea of camas in Castlegar was possibly home to hundreds of species of flowering plants and bees thriving there in resilient orchestration. Since then, Huff has uncovered hundreds of similar pocket meadows in the area. But the first camas meadow that made her dance with joy? That same spot is now an outdoor Rotary fitness park, carpeted not in flowers and bees but in mowed lawn and outdoor rubber flooring.
