About This Project

Bees are essential insects that help to provide us with hundreds of types of fruits, vegetables, and other foods. Despite their importance, human activity threatens bees across the world, especially via changes and losses in habitat. However, we still don't know what the best types of environments are for most wild bees (e.g. natural vs. managed agricultural lands). This project aims to use a novel method examining bee foraging behavior to let bees tell us where they prefer and thrive.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Bees are essential in the production of over 30% of the economically important crops worldwide. In other words, about 1 in 3 bites of food we take depends on bees! Despite their importance, human activity such as agricultural expansion and intensification threaten bees, especially wild, naturally occurring species (such as bumblebees), that provide pollination to crops free of charge across the US. To counteract declines, scientists are attempting to understand where wild bees are most abundant and likely to provide pollination so that those areas can be conserved. But how these areas contribute to bee success functionally is not yet understood. Without understanding how bees use these environments, we will not be able to develop relevant and meaningful conservation strategies.

What is the significance of this project?

While scientists have a rough idea of what types of areas are best for wild bees, we still do not know the underlying mechanisms driving "bee friendly" areas, nor do we have any empirical data from the perspective of the bee that supports our conclusions thus far. For example, most studies utilize the abundance and diversity of bees to judge how good certain environments are for bees. However, having data from bee behavior itself is akin to interviewing a bee and asking, "What makes a good habitat for you?" Using radio-tracking of bumblebees, we can determine behavioral patterns driven by the environment that we can use as a metric to judge how suitable different habitats are. Combining these data with existing models of bee abundance will provide a more complete picture.

What are the goals of the project?

We have successfully completed a pilot study in 2015, so we know that we can indeed use radio-tagging to track bees and their responses to the landscape they live in.

In 2016, we will first determine if different landscape types in southern Wisconsin (e.g., natural vs. agricultural) differ in what they offer for bee food (flowers). After that, we will measure bumblebee foraging times in these different landscape types to see if foraging time is related to aspects of the bee's environment (e.g. food availability, distance to food).

We predict that diverse environments (those with a mix of natural and human-modified landscapes) will contain the most resources for bees, and that bee foraging times will be the shortest there, since they can easily locate and exploit these resources.