USFWS - Big Rivers Network Native Bee Survey

Bee conservation, broadly speaking, has four main objectives: 1 to conserve the individual species of native bees, 2 to conserve the ecological services pollination of native plants provided by native bees, 3 to bring more native bee species into agricultural service, and 4 to maintain the health and viability of honey bees for agricultural purposes. Three of these objectives relate directly to native habitats, and in order to begin to address them it is necessary to identify which bee species are present within a particular geography, and to gain a basic understanding of the span of their ecological tolerances and abundance. Native habitats and communities offer the best starting point for this effort because they are reservoirs of biodiversity compared to disturbed areas, urban parks, habitat reconstructions, etc. The project summarized in these following pages, initiated in 2012 and enabled by staff and volunteers and the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is a first step towards identifying and documenting the bee species present on selected refuges in the Midwest, and also provides limited data on their ecological amplitude and abundance. Collecting effort in 2013 varied from refuge to refuge, as did the number of sampling sites and the intent or design of the survey at each refuge. Some refuges were interested in comparing remnants to reconstructions, others compared different native habitat types, others were simply interested in an overall survey of the refuge. The value of the data to each refuge is largely proportional to the effort expended, but even limited collecting effort provided some valuable data.