About This Project

Bees are vital pollinators, but they face many threats. Unknown to many, most bees spend the majority of their life as larvae, shielded from the environment only by the material they nest in and their nest cells. This project uses a sandstone-excavating bee, Anthophora pueblo, to test how nest substrates differ in their protective ability and whether or not this impacts the larvae themselves. These results have implications for how climate change may affect bees differently based on substrate.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Deserts are challenging environments that force organisms to adapt or perish. Prior research has tested how bees are impacted by short periods of intense heat (Cane 2011), and proper humidity is necessary for successful development (May 1972), but little is known about how nest material choice alters these factors in natural systems. Bees nest in many substrates, and certain substrates provide better insulation from the environment. As such, females nesting in certain materials may be able to invest less in protecting each egg they lay. We will investigate this possibility by exposing a sandstone-nesting bee, Anthophora pueblo (Orr 2016), to differing lab-controlled environmental regimes that are based on conditions we measure for other nesting materials in the field.

What is the significance of this project?

This experiment will be the first to rigorously characterize the effect of nest substrate choice on temperature and humidity regulation in desert bee larvae. In doing so, this project is an important next step in developing our knowledge of Anthophora pueblo, and the data generated and new nest sites discovered here will prove invaluable for future projects on the conservation status of this unusual species. This research will also expand our knowledge of bees in deserts overall, where bees are most species-rich (Michener 1979). This study also has implications for bee responses to climate change, as deserts and many other environments are expected to become hotter and drier in the future (Dai 2011; Diffenbaugh 2013).

What are the goals of the project?

The recently-described Anthophora pueblo is the ideal system for this study because the sandstone it nests within provides an unusual point of comparison to other locally available substrates, and its desert environment faces both high seasonal temperature variation and low humidity. We will take field readings of temperature and humidity in winter and summer inside available substrates across multiple sites using iButtons. We will collect nest cells the next year and expose the cells to environmental regimes based on the field data for different substrates, using lab incubators. Measures of mass and mortality will be used to judge the effect of these regimes on larval health.