Related story: Collecting For A Cause

Finally, I see it: the window that allows a view into Rebecca Hayes’ office, the glass dotted in hand-painted bees and flowers. When I’d reached out about a meeting to discuss Rebecca’s work in the UO Ponisio Lab, which focuses in part on bee conservation, she’d told me to look for that window.

The second eye-catcher is Rebecca herself. A 27-year-old PhD candidate, Rebecca is wearing a bright smile behind a pair of round glasses and a tie-dyed T-shirt, the pastels of which compliment her lavender hair, that sports a drawing of a bee.

Rebecca teaches me that bees are not a singular creature. There are hundreds of different species. Some are native to North America, like the long-horned bees copulating on Rebecca’s screen. But when most of us think of bees, we think honeybees, which are non-native, brought to this continent in the 1600s. When we try to understand pollinators in our river valley and beyond, that’s an important distinction.

On my next outing to learn more about this distinction between bees and why it matters, I find myself in the middle of an oak savannah — Mt. Pisgah, an arboretum just southeast of Eugene. Here, the bees are not skewered on pins. They are flying among the local plants and animals. I wonder if any of these bees are long-horned bees.

The Oregon Bee Atlas, an effort to catalog Oregon’s bee populations, has identified around 650 wild bee species in the state, and August expects that at least 100 more uncataloged bee species are out there. Native Oregon pollinators include species like western leafcutter bees, western bumblebees, blue orchard bees and, of course, long-horned bees. They come in various shapes, colors and sizes, and have different behaviors and timelines when it comes to nesting, interacting and pollinating. 

“There’s an extraordinary diversity,” August says, “and it’s one that people just aren’t really aware of.”

Native bees face several environmental obstacles, including habitat loss, pesticides, disease and invasive species, like honeybees. The loss of native bees, critical to native plant and crop pollination, would degrade the Willamette Valley’s rich ecology and natural beauty. Fortunately, across the river valley and in neighboring regions, scientists, conservationists and community members work to discover native bees’ whereabouts, maintain their well-being and enjoy their continued presence in our region. 

August says it was at Mt. Pisgah that his interest in bees blossomed ten years ago. 

August was exploring the region and admiring the flowers there when he noticed types of bees he’d never seen before. When he tried to look them up to identify them, there weren’t a lot of resources available to do so. 

The origins of his current work were “born out of an interest in what I was seeing, and the fact that I couldn’t find a lot of information about it,” he says. “I was just kind of stubborn about that.”

A decade later, August’s titles include bee taxonomist, educator, photographer and consultant.

He is interested in species distribution, specifically the more “oddball” pollinators that might fly under the radar. He finds out where bee populations are, as this species distribution provides information about the environment — the plants, the soil and the climate — and through comprehensive group efforts like that of the Oregon Bee Atlas, can inform conservation efforts through contributions to population data. 

Bee identification begins by collecting the specimen — August usually uses a net — and hand-pinning it. The bee is then placed under a microscope for identification, though dissection is sometimes necessary, as well. 

Different indicators separate bee species from one another. August says these can include the ratio of certain antennal segments to others, the shape of hairs or even parts of the male genitalia (male bees in certain groups lack other defining characteristics). After being identified, the collected bee is labeled and documented. 

This process matters, August says, because effective conservation of bees cannot happen without understanding there are hundreds of different species in Oregon and beyond. 

August wants bee identification to be accessible to anyone. He says this work has long been restricted to academic institutions, but that historically in entomology — the study of insects — community scientists contributed a lot of the major work. Educating citizens — whether it’s to feed their curiosity or to get them involved in citizen science groups — is a return to the roots of this kind of work. 

Though August wears many hats, all of his work centers building a sense of place for those who reside in the Willamette Valley, home to such a rich diversity of plants and insects. 

“The longer I live here,” August says, “the more I appreciate the ecology.”

This ecology is at risk. The primary threats to native pollinators now are habitat loss and native plant diversity loss. For example, logging and pesticide use contribute to these losses, and damage and fragment bees’ food sources.

The Ponisio Lab looks at bee gut microbes, or the bacteria and other microorganisms that live in the digestive tract, to learn more about bee community health, as well as the health of individual bees. Rebecca says there isn’t much information out there about variation of gut microbes between bee species, so she is looking at a range of microbe communities in bees and then examining the patterns between species.

The bee currently on the counter has huge orange pollen sacs on either side of its body, which Rebecca removes prior to the procedure. 

“This is honestly like being murdered on your way home from Costco,” Rebecca says. “She had so much food.”

In order for any work of this nature to happen, the plants bees rely on must survive. Peyton Carl, an environmental science student in the ELP, is crouched over her patch of burn plot, examining the small, tentative seedlings emerging from the earth. In a brief pause from her work, Peyton tells me how rewarding she finds working in a habitat restoration project like this one, and how she hopes word about these projects can spread to other landowners outside Whitewater Ranch.

“I think the biggest thing is expanding the knowledge,” Peyton says, “and expanding everyone’s interest in native pollinators.” 

Before releasing the ELP teams to work in their plots, Lauren shared her pink and blue zinc sunscreens with the crew of students. Peyton has blended the two shades together, creating a soft lavender color now smeared across her nose and cheeks, a similar color to Rebecca’s hair when I first met her. I can’t help but think it’s the color of a flower a bee might like to visit.