Background
The pollination services provided by bees are essential for sustaining genetic diversity of flowering plants and vital for crop production in agricultural systems [Allen-Wardell et al. 1998]. Of the 124 major agricultural crops produced around the world, 87 (70%) benefit from bee pollination [Klein et al. 2007], which is estimated to contribute $170 billion to the global economy [Gallai et al. 2009]. Many nutritious ingredients in the human diet, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, oils and stimulants (e.g., coffee), are dependent on pollination by bees.
In eastern North America, early spring tree fruits including Apple (Malus pumila), highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum), sweet cherry (Prunus avium), and tart cherry (Prunus cerasus) are high-value crops that are entirely dependent on bee pollination. All these crops show regional evidence of pollinator limitation [Reilly et al. 2020]. Apples alone provide $861 million annually to 4,840 family farms covering 85,220 acres in the northeast [USDA 2017]. These farms are dependent on a reliable and effective community of bee pollinators.
Over the past 15 years, the Danforth lab has focused on understanding the role wild bees play in the pollination of apples, New York’s most high-value specialty crop. We have shown that wild bees are diverse, abundant, and effective apple pollinators. Based on extensive surveys in orchards from the Hudson Valley to Lake Ontario, we have documented over 120 wild bee species visiting apple flowers [Russo et al. 2015]. Furthermore, our experiments assessing pollinator effectiveness have shown that wild bees are 3-4 times more effective, on a per-visit basis, than honey bees [Park et al. 2016, Blitzer et al. 2016]. We demonstrate that the wild bee community contributes significantly to commercial apple production in NY and the broader Northeast and that reduced dependence on honey bees is realistic [Russo et al. 2017]. Indeed, a timely transition away from our reliance on a single species of non-native bee is necessitated by severe declines in domestic honey bee stocks [Potts et al. 2010] and significant threats, including the amplification of pathogens, that honey bees impose on native bees [Stout and Morales 2009].
The community of early spring apple pollinators consists primarily of solitary, ground-nesting bees in the genera Andrena, Colletes, and Augochlora. Seventy percent of the wild bee species that we have documented visiting apple flowers are ground nesting – meaning individual females construct below-ground burrows for rearing offspring. Our work clearly demonstrates the value of these bees as crop pollinators, but there is currently no effective strategy for (1) identifying their nesting sites, (2) enhancing habitat suitability for these ground-nesting species, and (3) preserving these valuable nesting sites once they are located. Therefore, we propose three intersecting research objectives that will provide the knowledge base to effectively support ecosystem and agricultural resilience and sustainable pollination management, while simultaneously promoting pollinator diversity.
In eastern North America, early spring tree fruits including Apple (Malus pumila), highbush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum), sweet cherry (Prunus avium), and tart cherry (Prunus cerasus) are high-value crops that are entirely dependent on bee pollination. All these crops show regional evidence of pollinator limitation [Reilly et al. 2020]. Apples alone provide $861 million annually to 4,840 family farms covering 85,220 acres in the northeast [USDA 2017]. These farms are dependent on a reliable and effective community of bee pollinators.
Over the past 15 years, the Danforth lab has focused on understanding the role wild bees play in the pollination of apples, New York’s most high-value specialty crop. We have shown that wild bees are diverse, abundant, and effective apple pollinators. Based on extensive surveys in orchards from the Hudson Valley to Lake Ontario, we have documented over 120 wild bee species visiting apple flowers [Russo et al. 2015]. Furthermore, our experiments assessing pollinator effectiveness have shown that wild bees are 3-4 times more effective, on a per-visit basis, than honey bees [Park et al. 2016, Blitzer et al. 2016]. We demonstrate that the wild bee community contributes significantly to commercial apple production in NY and the broader Northeast and that reduced dependence on honey bees is realistic [Russo et al. 2017]. Indeed, a timely transition away from our reliance on a single species of non-native bee is necessitated by severe declines in domestic honey bee stocks [Potts et al. 2010] and significant threats, including the amplification of pathogens, that honey bees impose on native bees [Stout and Morales 2009].
The community of early spring apple pollinators consists primarily of solitary, ground-nesting bees in the genera Andrena, Colletes, and Augochlora. Seventy percent of the wild bee species that we have documented visiting apple flowers are ground nesting – meaning individual females construct below-ground burrows for rearing offspring. Our work clearly demonstrates the value of these bees as crop pollinators, but there is currently no effective strategy for (1) identifying their nesting sites, (2) enhancing habitat suitability for these ground-nesting species, and (3) preserving these valuable nesting sites once they are located. Therefore, we propose three intersecting research objectives that will provide the knowledge base to effectively support ecosystem and agricultural resilience and sustainable pollination management, while simultaneously promoting pollinator diversity.
INTELLECTUAL Merit
Native bees maintain genetic diversity of flowering plants and provide efficient, yet underutilized, pollination services for a variety of high value crops. Thus far, a centralized accounting of diverse native bee nesting sites, as well as their requirements is missing and constitutes substantial knowledge gaps that has not been addressed. Our interdisciplinary partnership has developed an innovative approach to translate community engagement to address the vital environmental challenge of maintaining a robust and resilient bee community across the landscape. By engaging community scientists, we will create an interactive database of nesting bee localities and use this resource to make detailed assessments of native bee nesting site requirements. Further, modeling native bee distributions and their resource requirements will allow us to improve our discovery rates and provide the context for making data driven conservation recommendations. Additionally, some native bees may be increased in the landscape by creating nesting habitat, which can provide long-term benefits for crop production. Diversifying the pollinator portfolios of fruit producers is a proposed outcome that will generate long-term impact.
IMPACT
Education on the biology and ecology of native bees is severely lacking and consequently protections for pollinator diversity at the individual landowner and in the agricultural domain is limited, and too often misguided. Our outreach will connect individuals from different ages, diverse backgrounds and work experiences to share in community stewardship over vital natural resources in their environments. We contend that community stewardship of nesting sites will promote pollinator friendly actions, encourage lasting engagement and will expand the network locally, regionally and nationally. Through community and extension engagement, we will begin to change the opinion that non-native honey bees require our conservation, but rather that specific actions can be taken to promote and protect native bees in the landscape. By protecting and enhancing long-term nesting aggregations near farms and orchards, producers can reduce the cost associated with increasingly unavailable honey bees which will make production more resilient and sustainable over the long term. Protecting nesting sites also safeguards co-occurring species and enhances ecosystem stability.
Objectives
Objective 1 — Establishing Community Engagement: Through our network of community science practitioners and pollinator centric NGOs we will: 1) Engage with a community of naturalists, public land visitors, landowners and farmers in locating and reporting nesting aggregations of bees. Many bees nest in large, conspicuous aggregations which can be identified via flight activity of both males and females in the early spring through late summer. We will instruct participants to report basic observational information and upload pictures with GPS coordinates (via iNaturalist) to our database. Due to the widely scattered distribution of nesting aggregations, crowdsourcing is the only realistic way to build a nesting database — a successful strategy which was recently implemented in the UK [Maher et al. 2019]. 2) We will implement a ‘Bee Ambassador’ program where individuals can deepen their engagement in our program by assisting with bee identification at aggregations, monitor bee demographics and phenological activities through time, build-out the initiative by serving in public outreach events, or otherwise enhancing community engagement and education. 3) For rare species, and species that contribute substantially to pollination of high value crops, we will visit to verify the species identity, assess the population size, and collect additional biotic and abiotic data, such as soil characteristics, landscape cover and floral visitation data.
Objective 2 — Creation of a Knowledge Sharing Portal: We will synthesize the findings from community reporting to build a knowledge sharing portal that will 1) map all native nesting bee aggregations and model their distributions and resource requirements. We will then use a suitability analysis to identify candidate sites with comparable land cover, aspect, topography, and soil characteristics to known nest sites. The resulting models will guide the discovery of additional nesting sites and inform the resource requirements of bees needed to establish new nesting populations. All data will be made available as an interactive website to support further engagement with the community and inform conservation planning. 2) We will incorporate agricultural data, including crop type and crop phenology, into models to assess the pollination services of native bee populations at multiple scales. In so doing, we will provide data driven recommendations and leadership for integrating bee friendly policies and actions into management decisions that support pollination services and improve food production.
Objective 3 —Tools for Enhanced Management: We will develop procedures/protocols for enhancing ground-nesting bee activities in and around local orchards. We will achieve this by augmenting or creating suitable soil conditions for native bees on or nearby orchards. We have sampled soils from nesting aggregations and analyzed them at the Cornell Nutrient Analysis Laboratory. The soil texture of most bee aggregations approximates sandy loam (60% sand, 30% silt, 10% clay). Published results, show that creating tilled, well‑drained sites with the right soil texture can attract bees to nest in a particular location [Tsiolis et al. 2022]. Likewise, participating farmers can attract ground-nesting bees to nest nearby apple orchards, thereby diversifying pollinator services where they are needed. 2) We have begun to pilot transplanting of native bees to new localities with the correct soil conditions. This novel approach may to enhance pollinator services and to safeguard rare bee species — we believe this approach can transform human relationships with select native bees.
Objective 2 — Creation of a Knowledge Sharing Portal: We will synthesize the findings from community reporting to build a knowledge sharing portal that will 1) map all native nesting bee aggregations and model their distributions and resource requirements. We will then use a suitability analysis to identify candidate sites with comparable land cover, aspect, topography, and soil characteristics to known nest sites. The resulting models will guide the discovery of additional nesting sites and inform the resource requirements of bees needed to establish new nesting populations. All data will be made available as an interactive website to support further engagement with the community and inform conservation planning. 2) We will incorporate agricultural data, including crop type and crop phenology, into models to assess the pollination services of native bee populations at multiple scales. In so doing, we will provide data driven recommendations and leadership for integrating bee friendly policies and actions into management decisions that support pollination services and improve food production.
Objective 3 —Tools for Enhanced Management: We will develop procedures/protocols for enhancing ground-nesting bee activities in and around local orchards. We will achieve this by augmenting or creating suitable soil conditions for native bees on or nearby orchards. We have sampled soils from nesting aggregations and analyzed them at the Cornell Nutrient Analysis Laboratory. The soil texture of most bee aggregations approximates sandy loam (60% sand, 30% silt, 10% clay). Published results, show that creating tilled, well‑drained sites with the right soil texture can attract bees to nest in a particular location [Tsiolis et al. 2022]. Likewise, participating farmers can attract ground-nesting bees to nest nearby apple orchards, thereby diversifying pollinator services where they are needed. 2) We have begun to pilot transplanting of native bees to new localities with the correct soil conditions. This novel approach may to enhance pollinator services and to safeguard rare bee species — we believe this approach can transform human relationships with select native bees.
REferences
Allen-Wardell G, Bernhardt P, Bitner R, Burquez A, Buchmann S, Cane J, Cox PA, Dalton V, Feinsinger P, Ingram M, Inouye D. The potential consequences of pollinator declines on the conservation of biodiversity and stability of food crop yields. Conservation biology. 1998 Feb 1:8-17.
Klein AM, Vaissière BE, Cane JH, Steffan-Dewenter I, Cunningham SA, Kremen C, Tscharntke T. Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops. Proceedings of the royal society B: biological sciences. 2007 Feb 7;274(1608):303-13.
Gallai N, Salles JM, Settele J, Vaissière BE. Economic valuation of the vulnerability of world agriculture confronted with pollinator decline. Ecological economics. 2009 Jan 15;68(3):810-21.
Reilly JR, Artz DR, Biddinger D, Bobiwash K, Boyle NK, Brittain C, Brokaw J, Campbell JW, Daniels J, Elle E, Ellis JD. Crop production in the USA is frequently limited by a lack of pollinators. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 2020 Jul 29;287(1931):20200922.
USDA annual strategic pollinator priorities report. 2022. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/annual-pollinator-report-2022.pdf
Russo L, Danforth B. Pollen preferences among the bee species visiting apple (Malus pumila) in New York. Apidologie. 2017 Dec;48(6):806-20.
Park MG, Raguso RA, Losey JE, Danforth BN. Per-visit pollinator performance and regional importance of wild Bombus and Andrena (Melandrena) compared to the managed honey bee in New York apple orchards. Apidologie. 2016 Mar;47:145-60.
Blitzer EJ, Gibbs J, Park MG, Danforth BN. Pollination services for apple are dependent on diverse wild bee communities. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. 2016 Apr 1;221:1-7.
Russo L, Park M, Gibbs J, Danforth B. The challenge of accurately documenting bee species richness in agroecosystems: bee diversity in eastern apple orchards. Ecology and Evolution. 2015 Sep;5(17):3531-40.
Potts SG, Biesmeijer JC, Kremen C, Neumann P, Schweiger O, Kunin WE. Global pollinator declines: trends, impacts and drivers. Trends in ecology & evolution. 2010 Jun 1;25(6):345-53.
Stout JC, Morales CL. Ecological impacts of invasive alien species on bees. Apidologie. 2009 May 1;40(3):388-409.
Maher S, Manco F, Ings TC. Using citizen science to examine the nesting ecology of ground‐nesting bees. Ecosphere. 2019 Oct;10(10):e02911.
Tsiolis K, Potts S, Garratt M, Tilston E, Burman J, Rintoul-Hynes N, Fountain M. The importance of soil and vegetation characteristics for establishing ground-nesting bee aggregations. Journal of Pollination Ecology. 2022 Nov 15;32:186-200.
Klein AM, Vaissière BE, Cane JH, Steffan-Dewenter I, Cunningham SA, Kremen C, Tscharntke T. Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops. Proceedings of the royal society B: biological sciences. 2007 Feb 7;274(1608):303-13.
Gallai N, Salles JM, Settele J, Vaissière BE. Economic valuation of the vulnerability of world agriculture confronted with pollinator decline. Ecological economics. 2009 Jan 15;68(3):810-21.
Reilly JR, Artz DR, Biddinger D, Bobiwash K, Boyle NK, Brittain C, Brokaw J, Campbell JW, Daniels J, Elle E, Ellis JD. Crop production in the USA is frequently limited by a lack of pollinators. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 2020 Jul 29;287(1931):20200922.
USDA annual strategic pollinator priorities report. 2022. https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/annual-pollinator-report-2022.pdf
Russo L, Danforth B. Pollen preferences among the bee species visiting apple (Malus pumila) in New York. Apidologie. 2017 Dec;48(6):806-20.
Park MG, Raguso RA, Losey JE, Danforth BN. Per-visit pollinator performance and regional importance of wild Bombus and Andrena (Melandrena) compared to the managed honey bee in New York apple orchards. Apidologie. 2016 Mar;47:145-60.
Blitzer EJ, Gibbs J, Park MG, Danforth BN. Pollination services for apple are dependent on diverse wild bee communities. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. 2016 Apr 1;221:1-7.
Russo L, Park M, Gibbs J, Danforth B. The challenge of accurately documenting bee species richness in agroecosystems: bee diversity in eastern apple orchards. Ecology and Evolution. 2015 Sep;5(17):3531-40.
Potts SG, Biesmeijer JC, Kremen C, Neumann P, Schweiger O, Kunin WE. Global pollinator declines: trends, impacts and drivers. Trends in ecology & evolution. 2010 Jun 1;25(6):345-53.
Stout JC, Morales CL. Ecological impacts of invasive alien species on bees. Apidologie. 2009 May 1;40(3):388-409.
Maher S, Manco F, Ings TC. Using citizen science to examine the nesting ecology of ground‐nesting bees. Ecosphere. 2019 Oct;10(10):e02911.
Tsiolis K, Potts S, Garratt M, Tilston E, Burman J, Rintoul-Hynes N, Fountain M. The importance of soil and vegetation characteristics for establishing ground-nesting bee aggregations. Journal of Pollination Ecology. 2022 Nov 15;32:186-200.