During the summer of 2024, Team Echinacea completed the second year of its ENRTF funded project to better understand how prescribed fire influences ground nesting bee habitat, food resources, and diversity. Understanding the associations between land management methods and ground nesting bees is essential for providing reccomendations to policymakers and practitioners interested in native bee conservation.
We surveyed solitary bee diversity and nesting habitat before and after prescribed fires in a subset of 30 prairie remnants and 15 prairie restorations to determine how prescribed fire affects solitary bee nesting habitat and abundance. We used emergence traps to sample the community of solitary ground nesting bees. This was complemented by detailed measures of soil and litter to characterize how prescribed burning influences the nesting habitat (read more here).
We deployed emergence traps at our random “burn and bee points”(BBPTs) in prairie remnants and restorations from early June to mid September. Our deployments spanned three rotations (4-6) of BBPTs and we put out a total of ~1,159 emergence traps. On reccomendation from Dr. Alex Harmon-Threatt, we also performed 10 minute “pollard walks” on deployment to estimate the number of foraging bees at each site. These foraging numbers will be compared to nesting incidence as part of Ian Roberts’ thesis project.
As of December 21st, specimens caught in this year’s deployments have been pinned, labeled, and transported from Chicago Botanic Garden to the University of Minnesota, where Zach Portman, a bee taxonomist, will identify them. Team Echinacea also collected lots of non-bee bycatch while processing specimens collected in the traps: including millipedes, flies, and even a prairie skink! To avoid wasting these specimens, we plan to categorize this bycatch into broad taxonomic groups (like Dipterans, Orthopterans, etc) and examine potential associations between our experimental treatments and general arthropod diversity across our study sites.
While working on pinning and processing specimens, Ian Roberts produced a poster containing analyses from the 2023 emergence trapping data to present at Entomology 2024. The poster can be viewed here. Future data analyses will feature data from both sampling years, as well as microhabitat measurments and and diversity indices.
- Start year: 2023
- Location: prairie remnants and restorations in Solem Township, MN.
- Overlaps with: random points in prairie remnants and restorations, microhabitats in prairie remnants and restorations, floral resources in prairie remnants and restorations
- Data collected: insect samples, counts of foraging bees
- Samples or specimens collected: Pinned bees are currently being identified at University of Minnesota. Bycatch is in the freezer at Chicago Botanic Garden.
- Products: poster presented at Entomology 2024 (see above for link)
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