News: From the Garden
In previous reports published this spring, I described the Master Gardener Partnership with PSU professor Dr. Margarita López-Uribe and her staff to help survey our PA wild bee populations. This partnership has completed its fourth year with many positive findings.
Our statewide survey team of 20 Master Gardeners is well experienced in trapping, netting and curating bees from a wide variety of habitats all over the Commonwealth. Our camaraderie and common love for wild bees earned us the moniker of “Beeple” (much to the humor of my eyeball-rolling wife).
One of the joys we Beeple have is that we are constantly learning more and more about wild bees. For example: We learned that many adult bees are limited to a narrow season of activity. Some adult bees are only active in the spring,while others appear during later periods in the season.
Furthermore, while many bees gather pollen from a broad range of flowers, some bees are pollen specialists where they only feed from flowers of a particular family or single flower type. During the past two seasons, in order to collect data on these two wild bee concepts (seasonality and flower preferences), we expanded our collection efforts to include earlier spring and later fall sampling and to isolate bee netting to specific flowers.
During the four years of our Master Gardener wild bee project, we have collected thousands of wild bees from across the state. Processing all the bees we collect every year is very labor intensive and time-consuming. It usually takes PSU’s bee taxonomists over a year to accurately identify, verify and catalog a season’s collection. I collected about 70 bees from the Hummel Nature Trail in 2021 and 2022 and am finally getting back to you to report my findings.
Besides the occasional common honey bee, my Hummel Nature Trail collections found at least 27 other species of wild bees. These included three bumble (Bombus), three carpenter (Xylocopa & Ceratina), two furrow (Halictus), two leaf cutter (Megachile), three long-horn (Melissodes), four sweat (Lasioglossum & Ceratina) and three yellow-faced (Hylaeus) bee species.
In addition to the non-native common honeybees, I also found two other non-natives from Europe: the Alfalfa Leafcutter Bee (Megachile rotundata) and the Oblong Woolcarder bee (Anthidium oblongatum). More interestingly, related to my previous “pollen specialist” comments above, I also found three such specialists: the Hibiscus Bee (Ptilothrix bombiformis), Squash Bee (Xenoglossa pruinose), and Spring Beauty Mining Bee (Andrena erigeniae, see above photo). As many of you woodland hikers may know, the Spring Beauty is a delightful peppermint candy-striped wildflower that blooms for only about a month in the spring. Being a Spring Beauty specialist, the appearance of this miner bee is limited to the flower’s April/May blooming time frame.
Being a self-professed “bug guy” and retired biologist, I, as well as my fellow Beeple community scientists, find our PA wild bee monitoring program very rewarding and exciting.
Our 2024 sample season was a great success, and planning is underway with some hints of new research questions to address in 2025.
Have a garden question? Penn State Extension Master Gardeners in Dauphin County are available to answer your garden questions year-round. Contact us by email at: dauphinmg@psu.edu, by phone at: 717-921-8803, or search for us on Google at:“Master Gardeners in Dauphin County.” Read more at https://news.thesunontheweb.com/articles/from-the-garden-34/
