Words & Photos by Isaac Wasserman

Related story: It Takes A Swarm

It is hard to spot the 22 volunteers working on a hillside in southwestern Oregon. Almost all of them wear earth-toned clothing that blends into dark charred trees and brown colors of the landscape. 

But Ellen Silva, wearing a royal blue shirt and a rainbow bandolier strapped across her torso, stands out. Like other volunteers on the steep terrain, she stands still, bent forward, holding a net. She focuses intently on a small patch of the season’s first wildflowers. Suddenly, she swings her net, looks inside and smiles. She caught a bee. 

Ellen pulls one of the dozen vials from her rainbow bandolier. Ever so carefully, she scrapes the bee from her net into the vial, which holds a small cotton piece saturated with a few drops of ethyl acetate, a central nervous system toxin. The bee dies. Ellen places the vial and dead bee back into her “bandolier of death,” as she calls it.

Ellen says that when she retired from her profession as a chemical engineer, she thought to herself, “this is my chance. I can be a naturalist now.”

But Ellen is not a general naturalist studying just any plant or animal. She’s a melittologist, or someone who studies the biodiversity of bees. She travels all around Oregon as a member of the Master Mellitologist program, an Oregon State University extension program that empowers community scientists like Ellen to participate in education, training and community outreach about wild Oregon bees. 

About 85 of the master melittologist program’s more than 200 members, mostly retired, contribute bee specimens to one of the world’s largest data sets of wild bees and their plant associations. The ever-growing public data set, called the Oregon Bee Altas, informs scientists about the status and habits of wild bees across the state.

Since the Oregon Bee Atlas began in 2018, a small army of volunteer bee collectors has filled more than a thousand collection boxes with about 390,000 bee specimens — each pinned delicately to the box’s foam base. Each box holds about 200 bees collected by an individual community scientist. The boxes line shelves in the Oregon State University office of Lincoln Best, the lead taxonomist for the Oregon Bee Atlas. “It’s like we’ve created a natural history museum in five years,” said Lincoln.

For each bee the volunteers collect, they record data on species, location and time of collection, how the bee was collected, the collector, the identifier and related plant species information such as the flower where the bee was found.

“Fundamentally, this project starts to tell us which species occur in the state, which genera occur in the state, where those bees occur, when they are active, and the plants they are visiting,” says Lincoln.

Lincoln and other scientists are able to use the individual bee data to create a larger picture about bees in Oregon. They can create time charts that show when species are most active, draw maps that show where different species are living and examine which plant varieties, specific species of bees gravitate towards and why. 

Healthy wild bee populations and healthy natural landscapes like forests and grasslands go hand in hand. Certain plants can only be pollinated by certain bees. When wild bees thrive, so do the plants they pollinate. But the plants all around those plants thrive, too. That’s why maintaining strong bee biodiversity is so important to the whole ecosystem.

Because of that, Lincoln says the Oregon Bee Atlas is helping to educate organizations and the public about restoration and conservation efforts after landscapes have been disrupted by clearcuts, wildfires and major construction projects like highways. Contributions to the Oregon Bee Atlas helps policymakers assess bee population decline too. Information can support whether threatened or endangered protection status may be warranted under the Endangered Species Act.

Bee experts think anywhere from 750 to 800 bee species live in Oregon, dispersed over the state’s more than 98,000 square miles. They are difficult to count. Lincoln says identifying bees is nothing like studying bears, for example, which you can tag and identify without hands-on inspection and a microscope. “We don’t know how many bees are out there,” he says.

The data would be impossible to collect without the help of people like Ellen, Lincoln says. 

Ellen says she can collect 60 to 100 bees in one afternoon. During the 2022 collection season from March to October she gathered 1400 specimens. While 1,400 bees dying for science may sound like a massacre, it’s a small percentage of the species’ total numbers and it’s a necessary price to understand the health of wild bee populations.

“It’s not just killing bees to kill bees. We are trying to create a scientific record that ties as much information as possible to that one bee,” says Ellen. ”And that creates value in that death.” 

Ellen also says other day-to-day activities like driving a car, applying lawn pesticides or converting natural landscapes into suburban housing harm bee populations far more than collecting atlas bees. Just driving to one of her collection outings is likely doing more harm.

“Among all threats to bees, collecting a few specimens for study has no measurable impact to their populations,” Lincoln says. 

The morning after Ellen collects bees in rural Southern Oregon, she works with a microscope she brought from home in the corner of the third floor motel room where she sorts and identifies her collected bees. Fellow community scientist Noelle Landauer sits on the bed nearby. Bee taxonomy jargon about species classification taxonomy fills the air while Ellen sorts through her previous day’s catch. 

Ellen says a couple of traits on a bee’s body need magnification from a microscope for proper identification. “But then you get it under the scope, and it just opens up, and you can see the detail and the beauty, even down to the level of the differences in pitting on the skin,” Ellen says. 

She slides a pin through the bee’s body and carefully places it in her collection box for safekeeping. The empty bandolier of death lies on the table next to Ellen, at rest after another busy day of collecting. 

“I think to have a good life, you’ve got to have a hard problem to work on. You have to have the chance to give back. And you have to have time to goof off,” says Ellen. For her, being a master melittologist accomplishes all three. “It’s what makes a good life for me.”