Brookings buzzing is the bee’s knees

More than two people have asked how many bees I counted. They were referring to my article last spring about planting sunflowers as part of a nationwide Citsci (Citizen Science) project called the Great Sunflower Project. The object is to count pollinators visiting the sunflowers and other plants in August. Why count pollinators? Where did the ingredients for your lunch and dinner come from? One of every three bites you took probably came from a plant pollinated by wild pollinators.

Citsci means non-scientist volunteers making observations and measurements of natural resources.

The data are sent to real scientists who are studying large-scale trends in the natural world. Citsci benefits “Cit” (citizens) by increasing our awareness of the process of science and our environment, and Citsci benefits the “sci” (scientists) because they get free data that no laboratory alone could collect. Watch Citsci in action on the PBS series titled Nature: American Spring LIVE.

About the Great Sunflower Project — it’s more about bees and other pollinators than sunflowers. Some 100,000 bee-counters across the USA plant the same sunflower (Lemon Queen) and then count the pollinators that visit the flowers. They also report pollinators that visit other plants. The Great Sunflower Project shows that Citsci can yield reliable ecological data that is accepted by peer reviewed science journals.

This year I had some amazing help from my phone. In the past I had to report many pollinators as “unknown species.” But this year I used a free app for my iPhone from iNaturalist, a free, online tool to identify plants and insects. The iNaturalist app is an amazing story of a student project in 2005 that grew into one of the world’s largest biodiversity platforms, connecting millions of people to nature while helping science and conservation (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/about).

Come with me to count bees. Here we are at a sunflower plant with 2 dozen blooms. I take a photo of a sunflower leaf with the iNaturalist APP, and learn that this is the common sunflower (Helianthus annuus). The scientists at sunflower headquarters will be impressed! My common sunflower is buzzing with bees, but not honey bees, the pollinators are mostly bumblebees. I focus the phone on some bumblebees and learn that two species are present, the brown-belted bumblebee, and the common eastern bumblebee. They have a scientific genus name that is memorable – Bombus. One of the benefits of participating in a Citsci projects is learning about our environment, so I’m glad you asked!

There are 29 species of bumblebees in South Dakota. I looked up the life history of Bombus bees. Their biology is as fascinating and complex as that of the well-known honey bee - but different. In brief, bumblebees have a small hive underground where the queen lays eggs in wax nectar incubation pots. She warms the incubators by shivering her flight muscles. The young are all female worker bees that handle nest construction, defense, and foraging for pollen for the incubators and nectar for their own energy. I’ve seen bumblebees crawling into a rocky crevice in my garden, where in late summer, the queen will lay eggs that will become male drones and virgin queens. For the next step in the life cycle, I am reminded of a poem Mom use to tell me – “The sex of a bee is hard to see, But he can tell and so can she.” Newly mated queens hibernate alone underground during winter.

About my bee counting data - the protocol is “don’t count insects, count every time an insect lands on a flower because that’s when pollination occurs.” I made several counts on different plants at different times. For example, on a sunflower plant, in a 5-minute counting time, I recorded 9 honey bees, 7 bumblebees, and 3 unknown insects. Over on the coneflowers (20 blooms) I counted 1 green bee, 16 bumblebees, and 4 unknown insects.

The tiger lilies taught a lesson of the value of plant diversity. My tiger lilies did not attract insects. In 10 minutes, I saw 2 hummingbird landings, 5 swallowtail butterfly landings, and 2 Monarch butterfly landings. On another plant, a succulent named Stonecrop, there were so many bumblebees and other insects (butterflies, ants, beetles, true flies) that I had to limit my count to six flowers and recorded 30 bumblebee touchdowns in 6 minutes.

It was easy to report my data to the Citsci website by filling in a few lines on their standard data sheet (https://www.greatsunflower.org/). I immediately saw how my raw data became pollinator statistics. I have been doing this for 14 years, and the Citsci site has kept my past data. I could see my previous reports were about the same as the ones from this year. The top Citscientist, Dr Gretchen Lebuhn at San Francisco State University, who is called the Queen Bee (of course), meshes my data with nationwide data and delivers results in easy-to-understand maps and graphs. She reports that some parts of the nation are “under-served” by pollinators, which you can easily see on her pollination services map of the USA. Teachers, the site has lesson plans and other educational material about pollinators.

The official insect of South Dakoka is the honey bee. The City of Brookings is a Bee City), and SDSU is a Bee Campus, as designated by Bee City USA (https://beecityusa.org/about/.

They have gotten these titles for promising to have certain bee-haviors like planting native flora, protecting native bee nest sites, reducing pesticide use, and educating the public about pollinators. Four South Dakota campuses and 5 cities are on the Bee City map.

In 2015, Brookings Mayor Tim Reed signed The Mayor’s Monarch Pledge, one of only 3 South Dakota cities to get involved with this National Wildlife Federation project to conserve Monarch butterflies. The Brookings Wildlife Federation asked Mayor Reed to take the pledge. The National Wildlife Federation also has gardening for wildlife advice for private residences, schools and church properties. The NWF says that native plant gardening has impacts on wildlife, biodiversity, people, and climate.

Why all the interest in pollinators? Because their populations are declining and the decline is not in our best interest – recall the cliché about “one in every three bites.”

Recent publications report that one in five native pollinator species in North America are threatened. Beekeepers have lost colonies due to climate stress, disease and pesticides.

What will poet Ogden Nash do? He admitted in the following poem that he eats a vegetable that depends on pollination and he eats honey that is made by bees.

I eat my peas with honey.
I’ve done it all my life
It makes the peas taste funny
But it keeps them on the knife!