Collecting Bees
A note here regarding bee research and my art work, and a common reaction from those working outside of the world of melittology and entomology - “Why are their dead bees in your art? Aren’t you trying to save them?”
While many animals can be counted and identified from obvious physical characteristics i.e. flight patterns and songs of birds, fur color and face shape of bears, size and fur patterns of large cats, it’s nearly impossible to identify the species of most bees from a distance. While most folks think of honey bees when they think of bees, this is only one species of about 4,000 in North America!
While in-field DNA sequencing is in development for bee identification, for now we must rely on expert bee taxonomists to identify our bees. Under a powerful microscope, I can usually sort the bees into groups by genus, but to reach the level of ID needed for our research, we need to know the species of these bees.
Why? Because native bees and their habitats are vastly understudied in the US, and the world. We need to know which species are stable, and which species are on the decline and how and where they’re living to develop conservation plans for them.
There are literally trillions of bees on a given landscape, and I collect a small handful to monitor the population. Sometimes dozens, sometimes upwards of hundreds - but surely never enough to negatively effect the population.
After bees from our study plots are netted and trapped, and humanely and instantly euthanized, they are shipped to our contract taxonomist for ID. Our taxonomist inspects them under a microscope and looks for clues in their wings, faces, fuzz, and sometimes their genitals!! After the bees are identified, he provides us with spreadsheets full of data and returns the bees in a “pinned collection.” The bees stay with us, but the spreadsheets then go to another contractor who partners with us for data analysis and visualization. We work together to understand the bee communities on the agricultural landscapes that we work on.
In our projects, when we find a species that is uncommonly collected, rare, or known to be vulnerable or nearly endangered we share the data with the rancher or vineyard manager and come up with a plan to conserve this bee and the habitat we discovered them on. This can look like adjusting their grazing plan, planting more the flowers that this bee needs, or simply continuing to do exactly what they were doing if they have a thriving community of bees that are in trouble elsewhere. If the later is the case, we share the management or stockmanship practices with others in the agricultural community with an aim to inspire them to replicate methods that provide excellent habitat for bees.
Typically bees from similar projects are kept in a private collection or submitted to a museum or a university’s entomological collection. Our bees are curated into a collection and either used in our own educational events, given to the rancher or wine maker for them to display and use for consumer education, or I use them to adorn my cyanotype pieces. I feel integrating them into the art is a beautiful way to ensure the bee “lives” years past her natural life and continues to inspire awe, wonder, and conservation.