Last summer, a gaggle of Oregon State University students mingled with bee-loving locals as they attended classes at a “mini bee school” in the Dufferin Park Wetlands of Kamloops, British Columbia.
Under the tutelage of expert melittologists (bee entomologists) like Boonie Zand, the students took a two-day workshop on catching, observing, and cataloging bees.
In the end, the students walked away as trained contributors for a new “bee atlas” for the Native Bee Society of B.C. — the first bee record of its kind in the Canadian province.
Modelled after the Oregon Bee Atlas, the record was designed to aid conservation efforts by training locals to identify bee species — and help classify new ones.
“The interior has the highest diversity in the province of British Columbia, which is the most diverse for bees in all of Canada,” Zand told Kamloops News last September.
“There's somewhere probably between 300 and 400 bees in the central and interior area here,” she explained. “Bees really like it kind of hot and dry, and we get a lot of interesting stuff that kind of sneaks up here from further south.”
Months later, the growing bee atlas has proved very fruitful.
So far, B.C. Bee Atlas volunteers have collected over 2,400 specimens in the province and recorded 110 different species.
They even discovered several new specimens of Perdita, or “fairy bees” — solitary little bees that are less than two millimeters long.
And Zand thinks the new bees present an exciting mystery.
“In 2018 a species checklist was published for British Columbia, and it has two species of Perdita on it,” Zand explained.
“We collected a few specimens of a Perdita that does not occur on that list, and so it's not one of the two species that we know occur here, so I'm still trying to figure out exactly what species it is.”
For Zand, and her fellow bee lovers at the Native Bee Society of B.C, the bee atlas is long overdue.
“There's stuff we don't know that it's here in B.C., and even for the species that we know occur here we often don't know exactly where they all occur,” Zand said.
“This is the stuff we're going to keep finding, new records and kind of range expansions where we find things in places we didn't realize they occurred.”
Zand said Kamloops is a “hotbed” of bee diversity because bees love the region’s hot, dry climate.
“You're going to have a lot more species that you might find there than in other places, like on the coast or further up in the north,” she said, in reference to the atlas’ growing catalog.
“So it's a great spot to find new records, [which] help us learn more about the bee diversity of British Columbia.”
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Header image via Jade Lyf / Native Bee Society of BC
