2023
2023
“There is this mammalian instinct to find things whether it’s food or water or whatever,” said Ellen Silva. “Whenever you catch a bee you get a burst of serotonin.” One of 85 bee collectors contributing to the Oregon Bee Atlas, Ellen hunts for wild bees in a springtime flower-strewn southern Oregon landscape.
Words & Photos by Isaac Wasserman
Related story: It Takes A Swarm
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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.
“Since I am retired, I like being a student again,” said Pat Wheeler, a former professor of oceanography. “Except I have been an apprentice for too long. I want to move on to the journey-person level.”
Lincoln Best, left, Oregon Bee Atlas lead taxonomist, and Karen Wright, Washington Bee Atlas lead taxonomist, inspect a bee in a jar near the Illinois River in Southern Oregon in April 2023. While the Master Melittologist program is largely Oregonians, many other states and Canadian provinces have collectors, atlases and research programs of their own.
A Cobalt Blue Mason Bee in the Oregon Bee Lab at Oregon State University. These solitary native bees are more efficient pollinators than European honeybees.
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.
“They’re not just bee hunters anymore. They’re just scientists, which is awesome,” said Lincoln Best, teaching students about wild bee taxonomy after a long collection day at bee school at the Siskiyou Field Institute in southwestern Oregon. “It means that our capacity and ability to generate all the data is growing, so our production is going to grow.”
“It’s a community of naturalists and natural historians,” Lincoln says. “This isn’t so far off an 18th century or 19th century butterfly collection, right? Where you go out in nature and you’re hiking around and observing, studying and learning about all these things.” In addition to spending days collecting bees, there are classroom opportunities for students to learn about bee biology, to bond and to form community.
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.
Scott Sublettes searches for bees in the steep terrain of a recently burned section of Rogue Siskiyou National Forest. This late April bee gathering event in southwest Oregon was among the earliest of the 2023 season. Gathering season extends another six months when collectors will travel through deserts, coastal environments, mountains and more.
Everyone has their bee collection technique. Master beekeeper and retired mechanical engineer Katharina Davitt turned a simple kids toy into a vacuum that can suck several bees from a flower at once. In her first season as a Master Melittologist, she collected nearly 2000 bees, more than any other collector in the program.
Starting his third year in the Master Melittologist program, Scott Sublettes started collecting following a career keeping sheep – when his wife urged him to find a new passion after surgery on both shoulders.
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.
Ellen pins bees after a long day of collection in her Ashland, Oregon motel room during a multi-day bee gathering event in April.“There are a couple of traits that you look at the bee with your naked eye and you can’t really see it. 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,” said Silva. “It is just amazing. Kind of a moment of pure joy.”
Ellen carefully pins a bee in the genus Bombus, or bumblebee under the bright light of her microscope in her Ashland, Oregon motel room after a collection event in southwestern Oregon. “You know, we’re killing these bees. ‘You say you value the biodiversity and yet you’re killing them?’ It’s a question that I ask all the time of myself,” said Silva. “It’s not just killing bees to kill bees. We are trying to create a scientific record that ties together as much information as possible.” Silva feels proud she contributes to science and bee research in Oregon.
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.”
A case of bees in the genus Bombus, or bumblebee, sits in the Oregon Bee Lab in April. “We know many of the bees that occur in Oregon, but we don’t know all of them. And realistically, we know almost nothing about any particular one,” Lincoln said. “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.” He says that the atlas isn’t explicitly about saving a particular bee, rather it is about understanding them — the good, bad and ugly.
“Pick a bee,” said Lincoln Best. “I can take you to the naturalist record for the flower that this bee was collected off of, show you who collected it, where they were on a map and when they did it. For any bee in this room. It’s all inventoried. It’s ridiculous.” In the past five years, the master melittologists have contributed about 390,000 specimens to the atlas.
Boxes containing hundreds of thousands of bees line the shelves at the Oregon Bee lab in Corvallis, Oregon. Each box is from a different community scientist. “They’re not just bee hunters anymore,” said Lincoln, who has been training people on pollinator collection and taxonomy for more than a decade. “They’re scientists, which is awesome, because it means that our capacity and ability to generate more and more and more data is growing.”
“When I retired, I finally had time to play in the field,” said Ellen while hunting for bees in southern Oregon this spring with the rainbow straps of her bandolier of death criss-crossed around her body.
SOURCES
General Background Information Sources
Oregon Bee Atlas (Plant Images/sampleid). iNaturalist. (2018, March 16). https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/oregon-bee-atlas-plant-images-sampleid
Oregon State University. (2022, August 11). Oregon Bee Atlas. OSU Extension Service. https://extension.oregonstate.edu/bee-atlas
Report pollinator health. National Conference of State Legislatures. (2023, April 19). https://www.ncsl.org/environment-and-natural-resources/pollinator-health#:~:text=Pollinators%20play%20a%20key%20role,butterflies%2C%20lizards%20and%20other%20insects
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It’s wonderful, Ellen, that you have found something that you enjoy doing so much!!! Seems like the “retired life” agrees with you!
Dan and I enjoyed reading about it and also found an article about Wilson’s success with chess playing!
How is Karen Jane?
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