It’s heating up in western Minnesota! Temperatures and humidity were high today. In the morning, much of Team Echinacea performed the pollinator observations we learned about yesterday with Dr. Ison. These involved recording the pollinator with a camcorder, describing its activities, and attempting to ID to morphospecies level.
Lots of echinacea in bloom at Torgeson north.
In the afternoon, emergence trapping crews had a great session of deployments and retrievals, while others worked on phenology in the common garden plots, and others gathered nectar. It’s exciting to see new species starting to bloom: two major species of prairie clover are just getting started, as is the wild bergamont and wild licorice.
Daleapurpurea, or purple prairie clover, in bloom at Hulzbos CRP north.
Once everyone was back from the field, we enjoyed some ice cold watermelon and headed home. Another great day in the field!
A smooth start to the first emergence trapping deployment! Today we placed 23 traps at three sites, making good use of our new color-coded flagging system. So cool to see our work from the last few weeks starting to pay off!
Some emergence trapping sites are a lot smaller than others! It will be interesting to see whether size is associated with catch rate. Do bees prefer to nest in big sites? REU student Zach deploys a trap at our first site of the day. This site was burned earlier in the spring, can you see how short the vegetation is?
These traps will be out for four days, then emptied and sent back out to new sites on Monday. Fingers crossed we’ll see some bees!
NOTE: Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
I Graduated University of Minnesota Class in 2022 with a B.S. in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, and a B.A. in Classics (aka. Latin). Currently I am a graduate student at Northwestern University/Chicago Botanic Garden, pursuing a M.S. in Plant Biology and Conservation.
Pronouns: He/Him/His
Research Interests
I am interested in restoration ecology, in particular for grassland ecosystems like prairies. Bees have always had a special place in my heart, especially the ground-nesters! Much of my the data for my master’s thesis will be coming from Echinacea Project’s ENTRF study on bees and fire in prairies.
Statement
I grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and remained in the area until I moved to Chicago to start my M.S. When not in the field, I like to run, climb, get on the water in any capacity, make my own kombucha, read, and hang out with my pet python!
As part of my recent independent study with Stuart and Northwestern undergrad Lena Parnassa this spring, I took an initial pass at analyzing the data from our 2023 emergence traps. These data are an important contribution to the broader ENRTF project, which is geared at understanding how ground-nesting bees respond to prescribed fire in prairies. This independent study enabled me to learn a great deal about database organization, coding, and collaboration between data scientists. Before we could run any of our analyses, we had to wade through quite a bit of data cleaning to ensure all our joins were functioning properly. This meant that we had to prioritize the bee analysis rather than the bycatch in our traps (millipedes, grasshoppers, and so forth), so stay tuned for more in that department! We were also working with abundance data rather than species data, as identifications of all the bees we caught in 2023 are still forthcoming. This means that some of the data points in our analysis are most likely incidental, but nevertheless, here’s a visual of what we found!
Figure 1: Mean bee catch rate by site type. Catch rate refers to the proportion of traps which had bees.
Figure 2: Bee catch rate by site. Catch rate refers to the proportion of traps which had bees.
Mean bee catch rate by burn history. Only three sites were 3 years post-burn in 2023, other burn treatments had 7-8 sites.
It looks like remnant prairies had more bees than restorations, but there’s a ton of variation across sites of the same land use type. It’ll be interesting to see what other factors may be associated with this variation, if any. Once we get those species ID’s and confer with our taxonomist, we’d like to tweak our protocol slightly going into this summer to maximize our chances of catching the bees at a given site. We’re considering stocking our traps with propylene glycol to better preserve specimens, trimming the vegetation around traps to make sure bees can find the entrance, and deploying later in the day to give foraging bees time to find their way back to their nests. Looking forward to kicking of the 2024 trapping season!
NOTE: Funding for this project was provided by the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR).
