No one has ever created a comprehensive catalog of the more than 300 species of bees native to Vermont — until now.
The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department and the Vermont Center for Ecological Studies are planning a three-year survey of the state’s wild bee population.
“We have some historical data from museums and from a few collectors who have been out there for a while, but we’ve never even had a complete checklist of what species are here,” said Mark Ferguson, a zoologist at the fish and wildlife department.
The Center for Ecostudies has been collecting specimens for the project, called the Vermont Wild Bee Survey, since 2019. Ferguson said collection needs to occur over multiple years to ensure that normal year-to-year variation does not significantly skew the results.
“We’re in kind of a dry spell and that can affect abundance in different species,” Ferguson said. “I’m not seeing many bumblebees, which is very different from last year.”
Ferguson said the data will then be compared to historical information and collections. He hopes the project will also provide a dataset for future comparisons, giving researchers a better sense of change in the state’s bee populations. The survey will also help the Center for Ecostudies and Vermont Fish & Wildlife identify the habitats, conservation status and needs of the state’s wild bees.
Vermont Fish & Wildlife has conducted atlas surveys for other wildlife in the past, including birds and butterflies. But bees, Ferguson said, are a little different.
Previous survey subjects could often be identified by the relatively untrained eye, allowing everyday nature enthusiasts to get involved in data collection, but the general public usually can’t identify bees down to the species level, he said.
Members of the public are invited to submit photos of bees to an iNaturalist page, but the bulk of specimen collection falls on dedicated members of the project, Ferguson said.
Project members collect specimens in a few different ways. One way is simply using a net to capture bees they spot while in the field.
“Everyone thinks, ‘Well, how do you not get stung?’ And sometimes you get stung. That’s the way it is,” Ferguson said.
Another way the researchers capture specimens is by setting up “bee bowls” — which Ferguson described as colorful cups full of soapy water. The team returns a day later to extract any bees, blow-dry them and identify them.
Unfortunately, collecting and identifying specimens does mean that some bees have to die. But the bees are “by no means wasted,” Ferguson said.
“They become part of a collection, which over time provides some really good information,” he said.
Historical collections were very useful for previous bee studies, Ferguson said. A 2012 to 2014 study of the state’s 17 types of bumblebees found that the populations of several species had declined or disappeared from the state.
Ferguson said three types of bumblebees — Ashton’s cuckoo, rusty-patched and American — have not been seen since around 1999 or 2000.
Ferguson said there is no smoking gun when it comes to the decline in bee populations. Disease is one factor, but pesticides and habitat loss also come into play.
Ferguson said there are a number of things Vermonters can do to help curb the decline, including leaving parts of their lawns unmowed, using insect-friendly pesticides and avoiding more nefarious types like neonicotinoids.
“If we can kind of let go of our perfectionist tendencies and say, ‘That’s OK,’ let a weedy patch here and there stay in place, that can be beneficial to insects and pollinators,” he said.
Many bees are ground-nesters, he said, so it can also be helpful to leave bare patches of dirt undisturbed. He recommended waiting to brush hog fields until October.
Though we may think of them as individual species, Ferguson said, each type of bee is an important part of a system. For example, some bees are specialists, he said. A recently discovered bee pollinates only a rare type of rhododendron native to Vermont, Ferguson said.
“Anytime you lose a species, it’s going to have some level of impact,” he said. “We may not recognize it. We may not be able to observe it. But it is a change to the entire system.”
