 Welcome everybody, I want to thank you for taking the time to join us this evening to learn all about wild bees in Vermont. My name is Julie filiburty, and I am a member of the board of the Friends of Mrs. Boy National Wildlife Refuge. And that's who's hosting this presentation for you this evening. So I know we have participants tonight from all over Vermont and maybe even beyond Vermont so some of you might not have ever visited the Friends of Mrs. Boy National Wildlife Refuge. So let me tell you a little bit about that. So the refuge is located in the northwest corner of Vermont in Swanton, and it was established in 1943 to provide a protected resting spot and feeding area for migrating waterfowl. The refuge is 7,218 acres of land and water. And in 2013 it was designated a Ramsar wetland of international importance. A majority of the refuge is composed of wetlands and floodplain forest where the Mrs. Coy River rent empties into Lake Champlain. The refuge is the most expansive intact floodplain forest in the state of Vermont. And also on the refuge we have the largest bog in the northeast, the Macquam bog which is 900 acres. In addition to these expanses of unique habitat. There's also some shrub land and the refuge maintains about 250 acres of managed grasslands. So the refuge is an essential resting and feeding stopover for migrating ducks and geese and shorebirds and other water birds. And it's a haven for 17 state threatened or endangered species including the spiny softshell turtle, the black turn and the recently listed eastern meadowlark. The lands and waters of the Mrs. Coy National Wildlife Refuge are very special places to those who make it their home. And we as the current stewards of this area recognize our responsibilities in caring for these lands and waters. They're critical resting and feeding spot for numerous migrating birds and the plant life they support provide essential habitat for deer beaver muskrats turtles insects, and other animals that make this place their year round home. We recognize that these lands and waters are also important to the abanaki nation of Mrs. Coy, the original caretakers of this land. We are grateful to them and their ancestors for caring for this land and its surrounding waters for thousands of years. Other families have been nourished by fishing and hunting in the betta bakwa, which is Lake Champlain, and the length of them mazeeps go easy bow, which is the Mrs. Coy river. For generations, their people have been sustained by hunting and gathering in the lush forest, and by growing corn and beans and squash in the fertile earth. We understand the importance of this land to the abanaki present and past. We recognize the hardships and suffering these families endured when they were pushed out of their traditional ancestral lands as European colonization took hold, and acknowledge the agony and despair of having the last remaining families forcefully removed by the United States government to create this wildlife refuge. We encourage the continual struggles that they endure in keeping their culture alive in the world of today. We the friends of Mrs. Coy National Wildlife Refuge, welcome the opportunity to assist the abanaki nation of Mrs. Coy in maintaining their close connection with their ancestral lands, and through education and partnership to help bring awareness to their culture and existence. We invite our visitors to share in honoring this vision by engaging in mindfulness while enjoying the refuge lands and waters and holding the space with care and appreciation. So for those of you who may not be familiar with the work of the friends of Mrs. Coy, I'd like to tell you a little bit about who we are and what we do and see if we can encourage your support. We are a nonprofit group that works to support the refuge in basically whatever way we can. We promote awareness of the refuge through public outreach and by organizing educational and fun events like this one here this evening. We hold monthly public bird walks to monitor the bird species on the refuge and participate in community science by recording our sight sightings in eBird. We donate funding to support education on the refuge and financially assist the refuge in acquiring grants for invasive species control. Basically we work with the refuge manager to provide any assistance that he deems helpful for the operation of the refuge when the federal funds just don't stretch far enough. So we are always looking for new members to join us and support the refuge. So please check out our website. It's friends of Mrs. Coy.org. And on that website you can give a donation. You can become a member and check out what we have there. We have a calendar and it lists all of our upcoming events. It lists our bird walks that we have every month. And a couple events we have coming up. I'd just like to tell you about. About a month from now on Thursday, April 21st, we are co-sponsoring an event with the Green Mountain Audubon Society dealing with the life and the migration of the Timberdoodle. So the Timberdoodle or the American Woodcock is that bird that has arrived on its breeding grounds here in Vermont. And it lets us know that spring is there with the beautiful, wonderful twilight aerial displays. So I don't know if you've ever gotten to see those, but that's something worth seeing. So if you want to learn about the Timberdoodle you can join us next month. And coming up in May we have an art show and a host of activities and presentations for our international migratory bird day celebrations. So all of those things you can find on our website. So please check it out. So for our presentation tonight, just a few housekeeping. If you have any questions, we ask that you put those in the chat. And we'll take some time during the presentation in a couple spots and definitely at the end to answer any questions that that might have come up. Best best viewing pleasure make sure your zoom screen is in speaker mode so you can definitely see all the great pictures of bees that Spencer is brought. So now at last I would like to introduce you to Spencer Hardy. He is a biologist with the Vermont Center for Eco Studies. He's the coordinator of the wild bees survey and he is quickly becoming a rising wild bee expert. So Spencer, thank you for sharing your time with us tonight and your knowledge and I'm going to turn it over to you to teach us about wild bees. Thank you, Julie. Thanks, you all for tuning in tonight. Yeah, I'm going to talk about work that I've been doing for the month and if you go studies across Vermont and then most recently at Mississippi wild refuge in the past summer, where things like this sheep oral mining minor have been found. All pictures will be there mine or with photo credits and from bees that are in Vermont. Brief overview of Montenegro studies were a small nonprofit located in Norwich Vermont, focusing on uniting people and science for conservation. We work on mountain top birds. So I'm going to start to talk briefly about Western honey bees because it's hard to talk about bees and not talk about honey bees. This is what most people default to when they hear the word be. Yet, it's only a very small portion of what what bees are. And there's a lot of misconceptions around it. Most of you have probably heard about the decline of bees and are concerned for the health of the populations. A lot of that is based on honey bees. And even that is not entirely accurately portrayed in that the number of honey bees in the United States is higher now than it was in the early 2000s. There's a figure from the USDA showing the number of honey bee colonies in the thousands so what in this decade there was 2.4 million colonies in the US, and now there's even more than that. What this also shows though is that the yield of honey per colony has declined from 69 pounds to 57 pounds in that same time period, which is an indication of declining colony health, which is the cause for concern for most people that are worried about the populations. A lot of this, and I'm not a honey bee expert, but I've gleaned some of it from being in this in this realm. A lot of this concern is coming from Varroa mite, this disc shaped arthropod here that was introduced into the United States has spread across the country and is causing lots of problems for honey bee colonies. It spreads disease it feeds on the larvae in the nests, asking a talking about honey bees to a wild bee biologist is sort of equivalent to talking about chickens with a bird biologist. They're domesticated animal, ostensibly in in the United States, native to parts of Europe and Asia introduced along in basically as soon as people got to this continent as soon as Europeans got to this continent. They've bothered brought over for pollination and for honey production. They're ubiquitous in almost every landscape this one in a in a bog similar to McQuam bog. And most, if not all of the bees in Vermont honey bees in Vermont are coming from someone's backyard or from a farm. There are very few wild honey bee colonies still in existence in Vermont that I'm aware of there were some and then this might came, and then it became nearly impossible for these wild colonies to survive the winter. Because they had less honey and they were in lower health overall. So that's bomb honey bees. I'm not going to talk much more about them. I'm happy to answer questions about them as and as they relate how they relate to other bees at some point for the long so feel free to put questions in the slide at any point. I'm keeping an eye on it and I'll stop when there's a good point and when I have a couple questions. So, next is what are bees. There are bees, yes, but there's also a lot more to these, and it's not a straightforward group to define in some ways. It's not like birds. It's not. They're not wizards. There's not a well known public definition, the scientific definition is these seven families. There's a family and anthophila, which is a group of the order Hymenoptera. Also in the group, the order Hymenopter you have your aunts wasps, a variety of four winged segmented insects, the bees being one group of them. The colloquial definition of bees that I've most relate to is that they are vegetarian wasps. They are in this Hymenoptera which is made up primarily of wasps, and they feed exclusively on plant parts, in this case pollen. Most wasps are carnivorous, either eating other insects carry in other sources of protein, whereas bees get all of their protein from pollen directly from the plants. And this is relevant in addition to, it's relevant in that it relates to how the bees, their morphology of the bees. If you zoomed in really closely on one of these leg hairs on this four millimeter bee, you'd see these microscopic hairs and they have these branches on them, which are unique to bees. And this is an adaptation to collect pollen grains. Added surface area, you get some static electricity buildup that can grab a hold of pollen grains and allow the bee to collect the pollen that they use to feed their offspring and to eat themselves. You can see on this bee here, both legs have a large mass of pollen grains they've sort of stuck there with a combination of nectar and pollen. So that's bees. The project that I've been working on for the past three years Vermont Wild Bee Survey has a variety of goals, the first and foremost being to generate a list of the bee species that are known from the state. When we started this project. We really did not have a list of the bees that were here you couldn't go online and find which bees have been documented Vermont. And also very little bee research have been done. So the list was far from complete in terms of documenting the species that were likely to occur here. So we're working on this list this checklist basically, and we've been doing that by gathering be records, some with a net some from museums, some with cameras some volunteers, gathering the specimens and publishing the data to the global biodiversity information facility. This is an online clearinghouse of biodiversity data. So things like e bird. Naturalist. Museum collections of mammals of birds of plants, any biodiversity data can be published to GBIV, and then it's publicly available for researchers to study. So we've been generating data, sharing it with GBIV and are now in the process of analyzing that data to figure out what we do know about bees in Vermont. So we're creating conservation statuses for all the species. These are things like threatened and endangered that are used for landowners and wildlife agencies to determine where to prioritize conservation funding. Protect where habitats, that kind of thing. So creating conservation ranks for all the species, identify habitats of regional and statewide importance. Host bees that aren't found elsewhere in the state or elsewhere in the region, and then trying to involve more Vermonters in the process of understanding the biodiversity that's around them and often in their backyard and easily overlooked. So this is just some quick slides showing the data that we've gathered so far. These are data sets published to GBIV, which I just mentioned. This is our work. This is I naturalist. So these are observations that anyone with this app can take a picture of a bug in their yard upload it not have any idea what it is. Some experts will find it, identify it and then it'll end up in GBIV. And we can download that data to help us understand the distributions and abundances throughout the state. Also in here are some data sets we've gathered from independent researchers from UVM studies. And then some this is a Mrs. Boyd Bumblebee data set that was done a few years back that we've curated and shared. All in all, we have about 50,000 records of bees from Vermont, going back to 1848 and that is forming the basis of our knowledge on Vermont bees. And I natural as you can see a steady growth in observations, very seasonal not as to be expected. But it's becoming a very large and powerful data set for collection of the distributions and occurrences. So this is a small smattering of the bees of Vermont and claw showing the diversity of natural histories, habitats, while our preferences, and then I'm going to go into each of these groups, a little more detail, give some examples. So, believe it or not, we have 353 plus or minus species of bees in Vermont. We have a number of bird species that have been recorded for Vermont. Many other states in New England have a similar number. I think the US there's something like 4000 bee species, and globally the estimate is about 20,000, but there remain many species that are on described. Even in Vermont we have a few species that are likely not formally described in the scientific literature. So it's a tremendous diversity and there's a lot of ways that these bees exist in the landscape, wide ranges of sizes, and it's a complex group that is hard to generalize. So I'm going to split it up into a couple different groups and I'll talk about each of these groups and then talk about what I found at Missuskoy. And in the end I'll talk about what landowners and the concerned public can do to help these groups because pollination is a ends up being a very important part of ecosystem services. It's no surprise to anybody that pollination is important for growing food or maintaining wildflowers, almost all plants need some kind of pollination. Insect pollination is a major contributing factor to the pollination of many vital food crops and things that make the ecosystem more vibrant and enjoyable for all. So I'm going to talk about bumblebees last. We've got roughly 20% of our native species are pollen specialists, meaning they only gather pollen from a small number of plant species or genera. Another 25% are kleptoparasitic. These are some of my favorite these are bees that take over the nests of other species. If you're familiar with brown-headed cowbirds, it's a similar strategy. They're called cuckoo bees because they get either similar to how the European cuckoos parasitize other bird nests. Last count we have about 15 non-native species, so species that were not on this continent prior to Europeans. And about 12% of the species of bees nest above ground in cavities in plants or other places. And I'll talk about those in a second. So generalists, bumblebees are a great example of generalists. These are things that will eat anything. They'll visit a variety of flowers that they're not as picky in their diet. They don't know where and or they exist for as adults for the majority of the summer, meaning that they have to visit multiple species of flowers because hardly any flowers are blooming through the entire summer. So if you want to be active as a flower eater over the course of the summer, you need to, you can't be super specialized. But in generalists, there's a lot of diversity. You've got things like this unequal cellophane bee, which is one of the first bees to emerge in the spring. And as soon as the sun comes out and it gets into the high fifties in the next couple of weeks, this bee will be out all over yards all over the state. And has a strong preference for flowering trees, red maple, willows, anything that's blooming early, particularly these shrubby things. They're gone by the end of May. They're gone, meaning the adults of the year have died and have started the next generation underground. So that's one sort of squazz I specialized generalist limited diet limited phenology. And then there's other bees like these two sweat bees on the right, that are active from mid April to into September, and they're visiting a wide variety of flowers. Some of them have habitat preferences, some of them. We don't know, unless so specialists. These are the picky eaters. These are the things that can only survive on the pollen of small number of plant species. I think what did I say there's 20% of the bees in Vermont are specialists so dozens at least. Some of them visit the only visit willows, for example, there's a half dozen species of mining bees that are specialists on willows, these are some of the first to emerge in the spring. And then they're done about the time the will blossoms have died up and in mid May, maybe sometimes even earlier. You have to be shown conclusively but it's likely that there are specialists that prefer one or two species of willow, even if we can't tell the willow species apart. It seems like some of these bees have preferences for different fellows. Future area of research. There's a bee on wild Geranium, this pink flower that you might have in your garden but also grows wild in hardwood forests and mostly in Southwestern Vermont. This bee is only found on that flower. Obviously then it has a pretty limited range in Vermont because this flower is not super widespread. Compare that to this golden rod specialist that could be found anywhere in the state where there's golden rod. And then there's squash bee, every squash bee, which is a cucurbit specialist. So this is a really cool story that dates back to what Julie was talking about with the avanaki cultivating squash throughout in Vermont and then other native tribes cultivating squash throughout North America. The genus of plant originated I think in the Southwest US maybe Central America. And this bee evolved there, but it was able to follow Native American cultivation of squash over centuries across the country. I think I think it's on both coasts up into Canada. Basically anywhere that squash is grown, you'll find this bee. Like if you put a zucchini plant in one plant in your garden and there's never been zucchini there before. There's a squash anywhere within miles of your house, it's likely this bee will show up. They're pretty remarkable in their ability to find squash blossoms. And they're only in squash blossoms. So you won't find them, rarely find them anywhere else. This is another one of my favorites. This is the ground cherry fairy bee. It's less than probably five millimeters long, maybe six millimeters. It's a ground, it's a ground cherry specialist, the genus Faisalis. So ground cherries, tomatillos, including the wild ground cherry, which is likely what it evolved on. But there's also been ground cherries cultivated here by indigenous peoples going back quite a while. What makes this bee even less common is that it also needs really fine sand to nest. It's a ground nesting species that can only dig in and loose fine sand. So there's only a few sites in Vermont where there's sufficient populations of the host plant and nesting sites. This picture was taken in the Burlington Intervale and the community garden there. This is a sandy site with a lot of ground cherries and then the ground cherry specialist show up. So it's not it's there's interactions with people there's interactions with land history land use makes it a fascinating group to study. And we're just sort of in our agency of figuring out all the interest can see is of what's going on. I see some questions. I'm going to take a second and see if I can catch up. What are the details? And what people can go in their gardens. Not all plants are insect pollinated. A lot of things white pines. A lot of things that we eat wheat corn all of the grasses are sufficiently pollinated by wind. So they would probably do fine without insects. There's people you see headlines about 90% of the foods going to disappear if the bees go extinct. 90% of the food diversity but certainly not 90% of the calories in a Western diet. I think you could, you could do our right eating only when pollinated plants or things that reproduce asexually somehow. And no the uneven cell thing be I have no idea how it got its name, the uneven part at least seem pretty symmetrical to me they have four wings. The cellophane part refers to this watery sack that they are plat sorry cellophane sack that they wrap their larva and pollen, their nest in basically so they make this, like basically a plastic bag is shove it full of pollen and they lay an egg in there. And that it's a waterproof sack that allows the larva to develop underground without being exposed to water and then molds and fungus. So the cellophane B name comes from I don't know anything about the inequality or the uneven part. Anyone can figure that out for me I'd love to know. Cavity nesting bees, I guess, in a sense, almost all bees nest in cavities. In this sense I'm talking about things that nest in above ground cavities. So 12% of the bees in Vermont roughly the rest are nesting in in the ground or in hives or hives in the case of honey bees. There's a few other more niche nest strategies. There's one that even nests in old snail shells. We haven't found it yet in Vermont but it is in northeastern North America. It's in abandoned snail shells and that is their cavity that they use to lay their offspring. But these are examples of Vermont bees nesting in above ground structures. There's this is one of our most common species it nests in rotting logs and maybe an old beetle tunnels. Cavities where the woods rotted out. The other ones like these small carbonyl bees are also super common. And these guys you can find inside of the stems of plants that have a pithy center. So if you took a golden rod and cut it in half you'd see like a little white dot in the middle that is pith. And these carbonyl bees are able to excavate that and make a home in there. Golden rod, mints, even bigger things like thistle and burdock that have this pithy stem. Strawberries or raspberries so if you leave any standing raspberry canes, especially if they've been broken or cut about a couple feet off the ground, almost certainly have small carpenter bees nesting in there. It's pretty ubiquitous genus. This resin bee, this was a piece of firewood that I drilled some tiny holes in and left it on my porch. And sure enough in a few weeks these resin bees had made a home. They packed their pollen in there and then they cover the front of the hole with tiny rocks and plant resins as a seal to keep predators out. This is an example of a predator, although this is a, this Cuckoo Weave Cutter Bee specializes in a species of Weave Cutter Bee that only visit sunflowers. The Weave Cutter Bee builds a nest in a above ground cavity like this. And then this Cuckoo Bee finds that nest and lays its egg in there. So in a sense it is also an above ground cavity nester. Ground nesting species, this is the majority of species in Vermont. They dig themselves a hole in the ground. And some are really picky and really need loose high quality sand. Others like this Stripe Sweat Bee seem to be happy in most any sand substrate as long as the ground is kind of bare. And if you have a thick thatch of, excuse me, thick thatch of lawn grass, harder for bees like this to access the soil to dig a hole. I'm trout lily miner here. I watched it for like a half an hour, use its mandibles to slowly scoop out dirt from this hole and it was just like doing circles and you can see the pile of dirt that it's accumulated around the nest. And it makes this tunnel maybe like a couple feet down into the soil where it'll make its nest. Another extreme. This is the bumblebee digger bee. This is on a bank of the Winooski River in Williston, right under the root to a bridge is a clay bank that was exposed during the construction and it's dry and protected. And this colony of bumblebee bumblebee diggers and the fora have moved in. They're not actually bumblebees they're just they're very good bumblebee mimics. So they pretending to be bumblebees, but are unrelated and have a very different nest structure. And in these colonies of, there might have been 50 or 100 of these in this colony building these like elaborate clay chimneys. And then in the base of that there's a tunnel and that's where they make their nest. And this colony, I suspect will be there for decades to come until that bridge is replaced in the colonies destroyed or something like that. A lot of these species tend to return to the same sites year after year. And another fairy bee these guys are sand obligates so only find them when you find good quality sand. It's cool for some of these you can look at a map of the distribution, and it basically tracks all the major rivers in Vermont. And that's a result of sand deposits that are left by these rivers in the last 12,000 years I guess post glaciation. As the rivers move they leave various clumps of nice sand along their former banks, and these bees have been able to find that and it shows up remarkably well on some of these distribution maps. All right, so introduce bees. These are, these are things that have come across either intentionally or accidentally from other continents. And on the right this mining bee is, I think has been here since like the 1800s and the thought is it came across in ship ballast in the soil because it's a ground nesting species, common in Europe. One of the most common bees in the summer in Vermont. It's a quasi specialist and that it prefers a lot of the introduced legumes clovers, this is on loop in. This bee is pretty common on like red clover in June, July. So, and that's probably what it was specializing in on its native range. To be on the left this sculptured resin be kind of a scary looking thing introduced from Asia in the last couple decades. I think it's been in Vermont since like 2011 is the first record. It's a big scary thing, not very common that sporadically pop up across the state these days. And then these, another small cavity nesting species as mass be most of this introduced species we have, end up being cavity nesters because that's a really easy way for them to be transported. Maybe nest in a pallet or in like a bundle of sticks that somehow ends up on a crate ship or plane and gets transported that way. Some of these, these mass bees in fact are the only native bees to Hawaii. And the thought is that they floated there on in Watson as nesting in hollow stems that floated across the Pacific and then arrived in Hawaii and diversified and there's like 50 species all native to Hawaii. Anyways, crypto parasites. This is, I could talk for a long time about various crypto parasitism and I'll try and keep it brief but there's three cool stories here that sort of exemplify the range of B diversity in Vermont. The top three are the hosts and then parasites are below this one the bank cell if they'd be clearly Banksy I is a specialist on winterberry Holly, the red berries you see in sort of woody swamps, I think it's in Mrs. Koi, but this be also needs sand. So it was a relatively rare bee was up and down the east coast is basically the only place you find it. And in Vermont it's only known from a few sites in Chittenden County. One of these sites. There's a huge colony of hundreds of these cellophane bees. And both of these two. Cuckoo be cellophane bees have been documented there and in good numbers. Dozens of them attending this colony where they're trying to find unattended nests where they can lay an egg, then leave that egg and let their offspring develop. One of these cellophane cookies are globally quite rare, like this bottom one here, the Canadian cellophane cuckoo, I think is only known from like two sites in the last 50 years, and maybe only a couple dozen sites ever. So it's thought to be a parasite of a different colleagues colleagues can Katie I, which incidentally is also the host of this least cellophane cuckoo. It was one of the hosts. And prior to this work, I don't believe anyone had ever found these two species using this colleagues as its host. So a lot of these EPA lists these cellophane cookies are host specifics they have one species that they go after. And they're closely matched in phonology and distribution and size. But in this case, the. It seems like there's what may have happened is the communities, communities can Katie I used to be in Vermont, we have at least one historical record. But as it was disappearing for unknown reasons. These two EPO was found this population of clades Banksy I and host switched. So now they're, they seem to be thriving on a alternative host, which is kind of cool and definitely needs to be further investigated. In the middle to these are tiny little bees that are remarkably common in any lawns and anywhere you've got disturbed soil and low small weeds. They really like the tiny little plants that grow close to the ground and the edges of construction sites and in lawns where there's a little bit of bare soil. It seems to be a pretty close one to one parasite relationship where this is the only, at least in Vermont this is the only host of this tiny red and white B, which is often easier to find then is the host species because this caliopsis is so small and obscure and fast and they're like eight millimeters, I guess. And then on the right here, my right over here. This is an Aster miner this is a specialist on golden rods and asters these fall blooming Aster AC. Pretty common species needs some level of sand for building its nests. Luckily for me, it decided it's been nesting in the driveway of where I'm renting. So I got to watch this colony all fall. I also noted these two parasites. This nomad banks nomada banks I is a well known parasite of this andrina pretty uncommon species but it's previously been associated with andrina and not surprising because most of the nomad cuckoo. Yeah, what's the nomad bees are parasites of other andrinas. And often it's, there's a one nomad parasitize one or two species of andrina. But then I also saw these spicotes these blood bees, tending the same nest so looking for abandoned nest where they could lay their eggs and it was pretty clear that they were going after nests of andrina asterisk. Backing up and talking to other people and it became pretty evident that the range the size and the phenology of these two species overlapped almost exactly so they're only they're only found together, mostly in Northeastern US and only found in like August and September. And it's sandy sites. So I'm pretty confident that this is the an obligate parasite of andrina asterisks, which was previously undocumented. And there's 100 or at least dozens of parasitic species in Vermont where we have no idea what their host is. So this kind of thing is not uncommon with careful observation and even in a suburban backyard. It's not impossible to find new host associations. So this is some more mind blowing parasites that I'll only talk about quickly, because they're not bees and because there's so many of them I could talk about for days. These are non bees that live off of bees, because bees are vegetarian they're, they're the base of the food chain, they eat the plants, and then everything else eats them. And there's a million different ways to eat a bee. So for example, this is probably the craziest thing you'll hear all night. But this inside this red circle is a full adult twisted wing insect. So this is an order of insects, like order being on the level of beetle or lap adopters of butterflies and moths or order grasshoppers and crickets or an order. And this is another order, probably the most obscure order that most people have never heard of. And we don't really have a good understanding of where they fit taxonomically. But that is the female and the rest of her body is inside of this male mining bee abdomen, and she'll never leave. She'll pump out eggs, or I think she gives birth to live larvae these tiny little, I think they can fly or they can at least mobile, they'll come out, land on the flower, and then crawl into unsuspecting bee. And in most cases these species appear to be host specific. So they only live in one or two species of bee host. And then so there's dozens of species of these. On the outside of the host, and the females develop like this, the males develop and then emerge and go find a female to mate with so I've never seen it but theoretically you, if you're lucky enough you can find a male that's attached to a female inside of its host bee mating. The male is probably a little bit bigger than that pale brown spot. Not super common, maybe one or 2% of specimens I find have one of these. Sometimes they'll have two females inside of them, and the bees seem to be surviving just fine. Although, I'm sure it doesn't help their overall survival long term. There's also other twisted wing insects that parasitize crickets and wasps and quite a few variety of insect hosts that all have different twisted wing insects that parasitize them. So that's one way to eat a bee from the inside out while still alive. Another example here, this is the two moon bewolf. This is a wasp that grabs and paralyzes adult bees. So, in this picture, it's grabbing a sphikotis, a blood bee, which in itself is a kleptoparasite of other bees. So it's a vegetarian, but it's stolen the pollen from another bee, and then this wasp comes in and grabs that bee, flies off with it, varies it underground, and lays an egg that will then develop eating this blood bee. And then this same wasp might come back to another flower and grab a different species of bee and put it in a different hole with another egg. And then the other, the third way that I touch on is these bee flies. This is a true fly, quarter diptera. I've seen them hovering over bee colonies, they go up to the hole of a host, and then the female sort of kicks some eggs into the hole and hopes that one of those eggs can find a bee nest and develop eating off of the bee provisions. So those are the parasites, make you glad you're not a bee. Let's take a look at the chat. Recommendations for books, looks like someone's got me covered, kleptoparasitic parasitic and that they steal nests from other bees, they kill the young of other bees. In most cases, they steal the nest but in the process of doing that they kill the larvae of the other bee. Sometimes they'll, the larvae hatch first and eat the egg. Sometimes the larvae eats the other larvae. Sometimes I think they just eat the pollen and starve the other larvae. Kind of like cowbirds and how they often end up killing the host species. Cut the stems of pithy plants. If you don't cut the stems can the bees access the pithy parts, not necessarily, especially the small carpenter bees. They tend to only be able to get into plants that have damage or that have broken off. So often they'll break off in a windstorm naturally and the bees can get in there that way. But it does seem to help. If you cut them you often find more occupied stems, although I'm sure they go way back before pruning shears. There's a difference between bees and wasps by sight. It's tricky. There's there's some that I still stumble over. Bees tend to be hairier. And, but the only way that I know to do is just to look at a lot of pictures and look at a lot of specimens and eventually you get to know the possible bees and then you can eliminate the wasps that don't look like those, I guess. All the bees live basically anywhere that they can get to bare ground. Sometimes they'll go through like a sparse lawn but often they, they much prefer an eroding riverbank or the edge of a driveway sand pits, anywhere where there's soil that they can access without having to get through too much vegetation. Climate change. I will try and touch on that at the end when I talk about threats and conservation. It's an open question that I don't have a lot of answers to, unfortunately. Bumblebees. These are the ones that you might be familiar with. They're in they're pretty ubiquitous they're pretty large and charismatic. And we know slightly more about them than we do about other bees because they're relatively easy to identify. And we've been studying them for a little bit longer. There's roughly 17 species known from Vermont. This is a really cool illustration that our AmeriCorps member did showing the various species of bumblebees likely to be found in New England. All of these exist or used to exist in Vermont. There's a few exceptions that I'll talk about a second. But basically, from this diagram and from looking at the color patterns of the abdomens of you can identify the majority of bumblebees you're likely to see pretty quickly or not quickly but relatively straightforward. So for the bird people in the audience. I like to compare bumblebee identification to something like cathois thrushes or collider sandpipers the peeps. These are things that are tricky to identify for the novice certainly and have some pitfalls. But with practice and with good views it's often possible to learn them and to to at least separate out the obvious ones. And then there's some some other good species that are a little bit harder you need a closer look and some more time with. These are three examples though you can I mean, red, yellow, black, and then red yellow black is really only one option this one doesn't have a yellow. This is the most common species it just has a single band of yellow. It's the only one with a single band of yellow. This is a another relatively distinctive species, black yellow black. We have lots of great information on identification of bumblebees on our website. I have a link at the end and I'll try and post it in the chat if I get a chance. So what was through talking about parasites check out this might. It's hitching a ride on the armpit of this yellow banded bumblebee. I had to guess I suspect it's a flower might that's harmless to bees and is just trying to trying to move around the landscape. It doesn't have its own wings, so it's hitching a ride. There are some parasitic mites that are less helpful but we don't know. Yeah, hard to tell from that picture. These basic natural history because it's a little different than a lot of our other native bees. So in the next couple weeks as soon as it gets nice out. Early April mid April, the Queens will emerge from the ground. These are the really big obvious bumblebees that you can hear from a mile away they often buzzing low through your garden looking for nest sites. When they come out they've already been. They've already made it so they're already fertile. And they find a nest site. A rodent burrow protected indentation in the ground. A variety of different sites, even in Missisco even they're known to nest in wood duck boxes, because there's the ground is so wet they've sort of they seem to have moved up into the above ground a little bit. They're less common. So, yeah, they make this nest, this queen will weigh a handful of eggs pack a ball of pollen, and then that larvae will develop into a worker. So these are the workers these are the majority of the bumblebees you see especially mid summer. In this graph the blue July and August. And these are females that whole sole purpose is to gather pollen to feed to to build more nests to make more workers and then eventually at the end of the season the Queen will start playing new Queens and male offspring so right before the colony collapses or the colony dies off for the year. And it starts to get cold, the Queen will put out new Queens which are these big females and males they'll mate. And then the, the males will die and the Queens will overwinter and do it all again next year. So queen worker male. How do I know it's a male, because I'm holding it, and it didn't sting me. Obviously there. I knew it was a male before I grabbed it. That's something that I can recommend but is definitely doable with with practice. I've, I still occasionally grab make a mistake and grab a female and pay the consequences but 99% of the time I'm right. It's a great party trick. You can hold them by their legs, and then they release totally totally fine and happy. It's a great way to you can show kids they can pet them they really fought soft and fuzzy. Males have an extra antenna segment and an extra abdominal segment. Not something you can count in the field but you can with enough practice you can see the difference in length and get a sense of it that way. They also will never they don't collect pollen they're pretty useless in that way they don't have the pollen collecting apparatus on their legs. They're just there to reproduce with next year's Queens. And I'm seeing some more chat questions and check the time. I'm going to have to hurry up. I'm going to come back to all the questions at the end in just because for sake of time, I'll spend an hour. But for my bumblebee Alice this is something that VCE started in 2012, we surveyed all of these orange dots collected a bunch of data on bumblebees, and then went to museums, and looked at all of the historical specimens that have been collected by students and professors and compare the two basically a little more complicated than that but you can see this graph that shows the difference between the 19th or 20th century records and the 21st century records. Pretty drastic changes, especially for select species. So this used to be the most the third most common bumblebee in Vermont has not been seen in Vermont since 1999. So in part because of this work it's now federally endangered. There's a few remnant populations in the Midwest, but it pretty drastic collapse in the, in the 90s we think similar declines in bombastorica, which has since come back a little bit. In fact, the number of Pennsylvania's disappeared, I think in 2000 bombastorica is a crypto parasite of bombastorica. So, as goes the host, there goes the parasite, not it was very rare to begin with. This is the relative abundance of like the percent of bumblebees collected in that time period that are that species. And almost a third of them are a common eastern bumblebee bombas and patients. And I bet if I made this figure today would be even further out the species is is doing really well. It's a super common adaptable generalist. It's in all the major cities in the east, it's used for pollination and it's sort of it's starting to spread worldwide, which may or may not be great to be determined. Yeah, so pretty drastic changes in the bumblebee community, which sort of was our impetus to look beyond bumblebees and to look at all these other native species that we had basically no data on. Now I'm going to shift gears to talk about Mrs. Goy. Just touch on some of the cool things that we found in the first year of surveying. I think we're up to 91 species for the refuge, almost a third of the species that are in Vermont are in this small refuge that pretty remarkable given that it lacks some of the habitats that other species needs so there's no there's not much sand, and there's very little upwind heart, like which northern hardwood forest maples and bring up animals. And those two communities and combined have a large portion of the beef on of the state. We found some really rare species. We were originally rare species. The only records of the pigmented minor for all of New England. I think we found four species four individuals this day, and one of them the spider had found first. It's a fairly common species in the Midwest but just barely makes it into New England, apparently. This is it at Louise landing for those of you familiar with the refuge right along with 78. Broadleaf wetlands. Good bumblebee communities in a lot of the habitats. There's a what there's a pickle weed specialist that we found abundantly. Lots of generalists including this one here and many of the generalists that we found many of the species that we found were above ground nesting species. Because it's the water table so high. They found ways to nest in in existing cavities and modern logs and other above ground situations. This is one of the rarer species that I suspect would be a great conservation focus of the refuge. And we're going to do more surveys for this coming summer. These are the loose strafe bees there's three species in this genus macropus. All of which need pollen and also oils. From this genus of native loose strife with a Machia is a yellow flower these are not the purple loose strife that we're all trying to eliminate and do species. This plant is kind of forgotten about kind of overlooked and often it's in ditch roadside ditches and wet farm fields and places that are. We're not doing a great job of preserving the these three macropus bees have apparently declined in the Northeast and in North America. It's hard to be certain because you're never going to find this be if you're not looking on this on this flower. So it's hard to know if we're not seeing them because we're not looking or because the flower and the be of this have declined, but there's a healthy population on the refuge. So, I'm optimistic that I can find the where's one of the rarest bees in the world. I didn't deem to that but it's a copter parasite of this genus. Epo ladies is the parasite of macropus. It was thought to be extinct for a while but it's subsequently been found in several New England states. And I think there's enough of a population here that we stand a good chance of finding it on the refuge. That'll be a focus for this coming summer. So, as I'm in the field, the question I get more often than not is how are the, how are the bees doing these days. And I don't have the time to give this talk to, to most people I've run into, they'd be bored out of their mind. But unfortunately, I don't have a, I don't have a good answer quite yet. We're, we're working on it. We have a paper in the works sort of documenting what we found basically this talk plus, plus more of what we've found and what species are here and how we think they're doing. But there's a lot of nuance to the data and there's a lot of things that we just don't have the information to know. For example, this is a graph of the number of native species recorded in each year going back to 1948. In Vermont. So this was just made the other day from all the data we've collected. Obviously there were more than 50 species in the 70s. And there was more than one species in 1848. But we don't, we don't know what they were we don't know how many there were we have no we have no data other than these scattered records like these are this is the UVM collection part of it. And you can see like this one was collected in very this one was collected in 1949 in Burlington. So we have we have a very, very rough smattering information about what was here in the last century. Certainly no information before the late 1800s. There's still bees here there's more than 300 species a year. That's not a very satisfying answer when someone wants to know how the bees are doing what they can do to help. So, not surprisingly there's lots of things that humans are doing that probably not beneficial to bees. I'm talking wild bees here not not honey bees. It's a whole nother set of threats and conservation issues. They're probably better at called agricultural issues. But, I mean, this picture cracks me up it's a, it's a male and a female and Rina. Fortunately for the male his genes are probably not going anywhere. The spider is going to have a nice meal. And I'm going to touch on these as quickly and then I can get to some questions. I think it's always when talking about conservation, especially in the Northeast. It's worth just thinking a second about what the historical landscape was and what we consider the past and what we're trying to conserve. Vermont, this graph here, this is New England. This is the forested area. This is New England, starting 1700 largely forested. We cut all the trees for sheep and agriculture and whole number of things and then they've slowly come back, and not so slowly. And then in the last couple of decades we've started to see a reverse of that trend where forests are being lost to other human uses, primarily development. So this is, this is something to consider when we talk about the conservation bees. The majority of bees can be thought of as sort of solar powered. They're cold blooded so they need warmth and ideally sunlight to move around, and they need flowers, most of the flowers also like sunlight so the dense hardwood forests that might have been here 300 years ago is going to have a limited diversity of bees. There's a very distinct and species. Group of bees that are found in hardwood forests before we found so when the spring of animals are blooming. There's a bee to go with each spring of emerald. But after after the canopy closes in late May. Hardwood forests have very low be diversity and abundance. And then they were conversely they were in the late 1800s when Vermont was 80% or I think deforested, there were lots more grasslands and probably lots more lots more grassland bees, probably species that are no longer here, just because the trees have come back. And we'll probably never know because we don't have specimens from then but you can only imagine what was how things have changed in this period. And somewhere in here you got to add the introduction of honey bees which had a I'm sure had huge consequences that will never fully understand. So habitat degradation, I think is is a little more concrete something that we can all rally behind is a invasive species like pragmites taking over his remote semi boreal bogs. This was in the southern greens pretty high elevation remote site. So it chokes out a lot of native plants and including plants that are important for bee species. So concrete doesn't is not a great place for most bees. There are a few like these introduced species that will nest on on concrete, they build like a pebble nest and sort of glue it to the side of a cinder block or a building even. And they also really like weedy plants so this combination of introduced weeds and concrete is good for a couple species. Not great for most of the native species that evolved here. So for the pesticides. Matt a corporate is an example of a neonicotinoid. One of many. There are also plenty of other classes of pesticides we should be concerned about. But a matter corporate in particular has gotten a lot of attention, and I believe banned in most of Europe, now regulated in Vermont, but still widely used on a variety of crops. Poisonous in general are quite potentially problematic because there's systemic insecticides so you apply them to the seed. And then the whole plant is poisonous to insects, which is great if you're trying to prevent grass lovers from eating your corn or other pests from eating your plants. But these are also plant eaters. And I'll be at the pollen, but they're still consuming 100% plant, and if the plant that they visit is laced with insecticides, probably not a great thing. Plenty of lab studies have shown decreased fitness and survival and number of problems associated with exposure to field realistic levels of a matter corporate. This is a rare bum will be visiting a pee in my garden. Luckily it was not a neonicotinoid treated seed, and the bee was probably fine but not all bees are going to be so lucky. Introduce species. I like I said there's maybe 15 introduced bees in Vermont. Plenty of other introduced wasps and plants and mammals even that are causing harm to the bee communities probably. This is one study looking at the genus Osmia. These are mason bees. Two species corner fronds and tourists have been introduced into the US for pollination. I think of. They came from Japan for cherry pollination in the Midwest and maybe mid Atlantic. They spread all over the Northeast in the last 20 years. I think this graph is like 2003 to 2017. Basically showing that as these introduced species have spread. All of the related native Osmia have declined. All of these are now in Vermont. And it'll be interesting to see if we see similar patterns. This is one of the Atlantic. But no reason to suspect that Vermont Osmia are going to be aren't going to be similarly affected by the recent arrival of these larger introduced Osmia. This is another species. This is another one that's probably in a lot of gardens. Might be harmless it really only really prefers introduced plants. Russian sage some of these other minty garden plants. But there's potentially unintended consequences that we're unaware of. This figure here is like four hours old. This is going to be the first to see it. This is going to be in our something like this will be in our upcoming paper but it's showing the proportion of introduced. Portion of observations of bees from Vermont that are introduced species. So in 1946 or whatever. They're 100% of the be records we have are from introduced species. In this case it's probably only one or two individuals. In the last few years, all the species are native. And also all the records of individuals are native. So like 20,000 records in the recent years. And there's a general increase. This decline in the last decade I'm curious about maybe an artifact of sampling intensity. Because it also shown in this figure on these red lines. These are the date of first record of each introduced species in Vermont. So, I think it was Andrea will tell us was first documented in the 30s. And each new addition through time. Quite a few species have recently been documented in Vermont. It could be because we're looking harder could be because they've recently arrived. I suspect it's a little bit of both. The number of introduced species is definitely going up. And some evidence that the number of introduced individuals or the proportion of introduced individuals is also going up, which is what you'd expect as the landscape becomes. Modified and more, more European with plants and gardens and less. As the landscape changes and becomes more human dominated. So I'm trying to say. Pathogen spillover. This is potentially the biggest factor in. Be declines. If you call it that. The loss of some of the these species in a bumblebee species. I think can be tied to pathogens spelling over from commercial bumblebee species. So if you have a virus, which you can buy to pollinate your tomatoes or blueberries. This figure shows a virus that deformed wing virus. This is done by some UVM researchers. They went out and they collected a bunch of bumblebees and honeybees from like 300 sites across Vermont. And they compared the levels of. The higher the prevalence of the virus and honeybees, the higher the prevalence in bumblebees, suggesting there's some spillover and they're going back and forth. At sites with no honeybees. There were. Was. No. Deformed wing virus found in. Bumblebees. Suggesting that the honeybees are fact the culprit. There's a lot of implications of this that are yet to be worked out, but concerning nonetheless. This picture is a honeybee hive that I found in the woods on the side of a road in Northfield. Last fall. My guess is it was a backyard honeybee that hive that escaped. They swarmed for various reasons. Started a colony in this tree. And they were able to survive. Could have any number of mites and viruses and. Harmful pathogens that are. Susceptible to spreading into wild bee communities. So what can we do to help? We're just. We've got a lot to learn still. We don't know the natural history on the majority of these species. What they need to survive what they need to nest. What the major concerns are. But we do know enough that we can, we can start to do things. And it's, it's certainly not too early to start acting to. Address threats that we, we know. So identifying important habitats. Certainly important. And preserving places like Miss discourse so that there are examples of. Relatively undisturbed habitats where. Natural processes can continue. This is a cool example. This Parnassia minor. Is an obligate specialist of Ben grass of Parnassus. Small white flower. Found in poor fens in Vermont. So it needs calcareous wetlands. And if the flower disappears, the bee disappears. In much of its range in the Northeast. So it's a pretty serious declines in the plant. Mostly from development of wetlands and. Increased nitrification. So one off from lawns and fertilizers and. Nutrients getting into the wetlands changing and changes in hydrology that are allowing fragmites and other introduced plants to outcompete the fan grass. Which spells doom for the bee. So. We need to find more examples of this plant. And protect the wetlands from these threats so that. The bee and the plant can continue. And we need to, for a lot of these other species, we don't, we don't know what the threats are. And there's. A lot to learn before we can get to this point. There's things you guys can do to help using. Apps like I naturalist take pictures of bees, other insects, other plants. And we need to be able to do that. And so. The online community. We'll help you identify them. And then that data is available for research for us. Most immediately, essentially. And just, and talking to people into. Engaging with. Planting commissions and town government and. Other people that have. Landowners and. Getting people engaged and interested in educated on the topic is. Certainly a good first step. And or state oversight of commercial bee movements would be great. Honey bees are still shipped all over the country for pollination services. They could spend this the summer in. Addison County and then hop on a tractor trailer truck. Go to California to pollinate the almonds and then up to Washington to pollinate blueberries. And then make their way back across Alberta. Meanwhile, they could be picking up all kinds of pathogens that they could use for pollination. And then they would be able to do that. And then they'd deposit in. Back in Addison County. And then there's movement of. Commercial bees for pollination. Bumblebees. Some Osmia you can buy on Amazon, I think. And there's very little regulation on that. And it's a major source of potential. Introduce species and pathogen spread. And then. We know that. Quite a few pesticides are. And yet they're not. We're slowly making progress in regulation, but that's an area we could do more. How can you as a private landowner help. And as a consumer. These are. Maybe not the top things you'd hear elsewhere about saving the bees, but. A strong advocate for maple syrup over honey. Maple trees are native to this landscape. Maple forests are maintained in the production of honey. This is a project of Vermont Audubon, these stickers. Bird friendly. Also probably be friendly. These are sugar bushes that are managed. For biological diversity and not just. Sugar production. Maple syrup production. On a related note. Our forests, especially near urban areas are being increasingly. Damaged by over browsing from. White-tailed deer in particular. Especially a number of hunters in Vermont is declining. The number of deer is. Rapidly increasing without. Other predation. There's no mountain lions. There's no wolves. So. To save the wild bees in your landscape. I would. Suggest thinking about. Hunting or encouraging. Your neighbors or allowing people to hunt on your property. If you have. The acreage. Reducing deer populations to more. Natural levels. Will help. Regeneration of forests. Increased diversity of understory, floral communities. Implications for birds and bees. And all kinds of other forest inhabitants. And then the other thing that. Is easy enough to do is to stop mowing as much. One is probably one. Second to pavement in the. The least productive be habitats we have in the state. And. By not mowing or by mowing. Annually instead of weekly. You can increase the Florida abundance of an area in. In a short, in a single season. Which will provide a lot more resources for bees. And native planters. Are likely to colonize the less you mow, the more native you likely to get. So a lot is primarily introduced grasses. You let it go for a few years mowing, maybe. Once every three years and. In four or five years, you have a nice golden. Rod Asterfield. That has a lot of golden rod and aster specialists. And they're parasites and they're parasites, parasites. And. The list goes on. I am not an expert in. Pollination gardens, but. This is a list that I sort of put together of things that. Grow wild that. I would suggest encouraging. And then. This PDF that. I think I have a link to. In a second. Is a great resource for pollinator gardens. Specifically tied to specialist bees. So. Nice aesthetic plants that. Grow well in gardens and attract specialist bees. As do most of the plants on this list. Aster's and golden rods, dogwoods. These are things that grow in. Overgrown or abandoned field. Just need to reframe how we think about these habitats a little bit. Sumac. I really like it's got a, has a specialist bee. It provides a pollen source in. Late June. That when there's not a lot of other native plants blooming. And then the nests are great. Nesting habitat for a lot of these above ground cavity nesters. Wild bergamot winter, very holly, both has. Uncommon specialists. Zucchini host the squash bee. And. Who doesn't like zucchini bread. Willows are probably the easiest thing to grow. Stick one in the ground and chances are. It's like a twig in the ground and chances are. Five years will have a full bush that has. A handful of specialist bees on it. And you don't have to touch it. Especially if it's wet. Quick, fast growing sort of a border plant. And many thanks to everyone. This is obviously not just my project. I've had a ton of help. From VC and from. The broader Vermont community. We've got funding from fish and wildlife service to do the work at the Cisco. Vermont fish and wildlife has helped with some of the other. Many supporters and enthusiasts that have. Donated a lot to us into time and resources and expertise. And. Okay. 23. Questions in the chat. I can try and touch on them. And. I will leave. Oh, yes. There's a question. I will leave this slide up. If you have any questions. If you have any questions, I will leave. Oh, yes. There's a question. I will leave this slide up. If you guys want to either screenshot it or. Make notes of some of these links. On additional resources. Friends of Mrs. Coy. VC has a monthly newsletter with some. This summer I'm going to have a field guide to the bee of the month in there. Just highlighting one. Two species of bees that. Are active that month to look for. We have this. We have this. Val. VT eco studies. Slash VT bees. And there's a whole key to be identification with species accounts. To work in progress, but. Eventually we will have a page for each. The 350 species. With a map and some natural history and some photos. And then this key to, to work your way through it without. At a not non expert, non taxonomic level. And it's worth checking out. This is so bombast. Dash key. And the, there's a table you can explore by genre on there. And then if you still don't have a calendar for the year. Daisy has. Made these calendars. She works with us and. Pollinator calendars with a pollinator each month. And a small portion of the proceeds go to support this work. So check them out. And then I'll, I can start. The top of the questions if I can find it. Climate change. I wish I had more to say on the topic. I think there's, there's lots of. Threat. A lot of the Northern species of. We don't have a lot of data on. I wish I knew more, but. We're going to need to do some more work and more modeling on that. But it's something we're working on. Yes, definitely. Violets and strawberries and. Violets and strawberries have specialist bees. And during a viola and is the violet specialist. Self feels a good for. A lot of bumblebees. I don't think it's native, but I might be wrong on that. What does Andrew's have a specialist. Although more likely it's the wild as area is not the. I don't think it's ever been found on that. Garden variety. The bumblebees love it. I don't think it's ever been found on that. I don't think it's ever been found on that. I don't think it's ever been found on that. To bumblebees store pollen nectar over the winter. I believe they store it all as fat. I think they, they stock up in the fall. And then their metabolism slows. Basically, it's a nothing. They basically more or less breeze, although they're right below the frost line, frost line, I believe. We went to climate change, though, that's interesting. And believe it or not, warmer winters are actually harder for queen survival. They're body temperature is higher for longer. And they burn through more resources because they're cold blooded. So a cold winter. With a stable ground temperature. Is ideal for bumblebee queen survival. Franklin County bum beekeepers club. It's like there's an email in there. Male bumblebee eyes are generally larger than females, not. And in some species, it's really obvious in some species that they're quite different. Do how do I feel about rent a bees mason bees and bumblebees. That's a good question. And I think. There are good economic arguments to be made for blueberries and for certain other. Crop pollinations. I think. I would want to know that the situation deserves it. I think there's some cool work coming out of the Gondon state at UVM a few years ago, showing that wild bees. Are adding a tremendous value to blueberry pollination. Above and beyond what honey bees can do. And. I wouldn't want to jeopardize existing wild bees by bringing in mason bees or bumblebees. But I think in larger operations without healthy wild bee populations, it's definitely an option. And I think it's, it's potentially a good option that. Can be negative consequences can be minimized. And the closer to the source that you get your bees better. So if you can find. Bumblebees that were reared in New England, that's ideal. The less they travel, the less likely they are to bring diseases with them. I think you can even buy. Like disease free colonies these days. So we're doing your homework on that, but it's not a hard no. But it's not a hard no. It's not a hard no. It's not a hard no. So I think that. Volunteers for bee counting. The refugee in general. I. Encourage you to go towards our naturalist and to. The photographs. We may have some. Sort of volunteer events where we get out and do. Bio blitzes. For bees and for other taxa. We're sort of stepping back from the data collection this year and doing. So. Keep an eye out for on our. On our blog or on our newsletter. There may be opportunities, but we love volunteer submissions. Through our naturalist. Photos of bees from anywhere in the state are great. We have some resources on that. VT bees guide here. On how to use a naturalist and how to. Maximize the. Enjoyment with bees and learn a little bit along the way. Backyard water source for bees. Not something I've thought about, but. Potentially a good thing to have, especially in dry areas. I think. I mean, in the West, I've seen bees. Congregate it like a week. Fountain. But I think. Most places in Vermont, I wouldn't. I'm not terribly concerned about there being enough drinking water, but during a drought. I think a bird bath would go a long ways. Yeah, it's interesting question. Similar or higher or lower diversity of bees and prairies versus forests. I. I'm going to. Gas. And I might be wrong on this that. Prairies have substantially higher diversity. Of bees. In part because they have flowers for the whole season. There are quite a few. Bees in the, in the middle. Midwest. I think some high, some of the higher diversity. But we are not the highest diversity in. North America is in the desert in the Southwest. Quite a few. Much higher species, which is there than there is elsewhere in the country. But how does this correlate to. Land change in Vermont. That's a good question. I think. I wish I had more data on. What was here and what exists in intact hardwood forests. There are definitely species that are only in the forests. Yeah, that's it. I wish I had more information on that. Neo Nick treated. Plants kill bees and other pollinators. Why are they still being allowed to be sold? It's a good question and. I wish I had an answer, but I think it. It comes down to economics and to. It makes it easier for. Farmers to make a profitable crop of corn or. So I or whatever the, the crop may be. I think the first place that I would look to, to regulate that would be for the home consumer use. You can buy a lot of, a lot of trees and nurseries, even. Around here, the nursery trees will come treated already. So that's something to be aware of when you're buying nursery plants. And you can buy a jar of Neo Nick. No, it's at home Depot and you can dump the whole thing on your garden if you wanted to. Whereas most farmer uses. More judicious and probably better regulated, a little bit regulated, if not enough. These are pretty cool. Organization working to regulate pesticides. I'm sure there is. I don't have something off the top of my head. Yeah, I think. Dear permits and Hanover, I think that's. Something we hopefully will see more of this. Some towns and remote that have really high. Dear densities. And it's really hard for a lot of the native wildflowers and shrubs to. To reach maturity. Walking the woods and you can see which plants that you're really liking with once they don't. And I think especially in areas like Hanover where there's. Suburban and. Small rural lots that. It's hard for. There's not a lot of hunters. And dear populations are going up because they're loving everyone's garden. Yeah. Great saving native seeds is a great way to go. Be wasp nests. I suspect. Most people. They're going to be. They're going to be in wasp nests. They're going to be the paper wasp nests that. Are made by a couple of different species or genre of wasps. I think the, if you. If it's really can't deal with it, I think the best thing to do is to. At night. On a cold night, ideally. Put a pretty bucket and. And knock it down and take it away. If it's cold, they won't be active. But. They're not going to be active. So. So a wrap. Coons comes in scavengers. The nest. They're going to get whatever that. Wasp spray was. More questions. Yeah. Bird bass and drowning bees is. That's something to think about is if you're doing. In your own backyard. I've seen bees. Fall into watering cans and get stuck in five gallon buckets. Of water that I've seen. And some of them have been rare species. So. Don't intentionally leave open containers of water lying around, especially colorful containers will attract bees. They think they're. I think it's a flower. So you could, you could, you could put a stick in there so they can have a way to climb out. Would help. And then, oh, I didn't mention snake worms, but yeah, that's. Right up there with deer in terms of effects on our forests. And. I think that's, that's something I'm kind of scared about. Both in a, from a gardening perspective in Vermont, but also from. Yeah. Forest health and understory communities. And I. Don't know what the solution is. There's never going to be a hunting season on them. They're everything I've heard sounds like they're. They're here to stay. And they're going to get everywhere they can. Best thing we can do at this point is to limit their spread. So there's some good webinars coming out of UVM. On snake worms. And one thing I guess it's encouraging is that. The adults, I think. They don't have a long enough growing season for. Only the larva or the eggs masses survived the winter. And. The adults need a certain number of growing days to reach maturity to lay eggs. So I saw a map that showed the state. And parts of the, the colder parts of the state. Theoretically don't have a long enough growing season for snake worms to become established. That offers any hope. And I think that's a good idea. How to prevent bees from getting into buckets of water. Keeping the buckets dry and or. A stick so that they anything that fight flies in there can climb out. And it's not just bees. That's in crickets and. Butterflies will sometimes get stuck in water and the surface tension usually keeps them on top and they can. Climb out that way. All right. I think that's a 30. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll pass it back over to Julie. Thank you so very much, Spencer. That was just a plethora. Of information on bees and. I am definitely going to go to the VCE website and. Do a little bit more digging. I naturalist season is coming up and I have lots of new flowers growing at my house this year. So thank you for sharing everything that you did tonight. So that was great. We appreciate everybody coming. There was great interest and that was really good to see. That's, that's good for the bees. I think so. So good night, everybody. Thank you. Thank you all for coming.