Adventuresome trio find bee unknown in Oregon

“When I first looked at that bee under the microscope and went, Holy smokes! That’s got blue hair! That was maybe the biggest rush for me,” said Ellen Silva. Marek Stanton and Carol Yamada, the other two members of the trio, also expressed their excitement as the three recounted their adventure together.

The three students were on a field trip to a Columbia Gorge Land Trust property near Chenowith when they caught the bee, which they later identified as a new species for Oregon, Melecta edwardsii.

“The whole hillside was just covered in flowers,” Stanton commented. The trio searched for bees on a hillside covered in lupine, balsamroot, and camas, as well as the rare milkvetch, beautiful but poisonous.

“I got lost on my way down the hillside, because they have a very large area,” Stanton recounted. “I found a very small deer trail …So I was hurrying on my way back down the hillside when this bee crossed my path and I just barely netted it out of mid-air.”

Yamada and Silva also captured the bee in mid-air, not on a flower. Instead of gathering pollen and nectar for itself, Melecta was patrolling in search of another bee’s nest to parasitize. “So it was hunting other bees, and we were hunting it,” Yamada noted.

“We did a lot of walking on that site,” Silva said, “It’s pretty rough terrain.”

This Melecta, like most of its genus, is what’s called a cuckoo bee: a nest thief. “Much like a cuckoo bird, a cuckoo bee lays its eggs in another bee’s nest,” Silva explained, “and when their egg hatches out, it either eats the egg of the other bee or kills the larva of the other bee, and then enjoys the pollen that the other bee worked so very hard to fill the nest with.”

“We love finding cuckoo bees,” she added, “they’re fascinating, and they say good things about the environment.” A healthy population of cuckoo bees indicates a healthy population of host bees.

“They’re also, in my opinion, some of the prettiest bees that you can find out there, because they come in much brighter colors,” Stanton observed.

“They’re also much more athletic looking than bees, because they have to get into … ‘fist fights,’” Yamada added. “They have armor, and spikes, and all sorts of cool things on them.” On Melecta edwardsii, two black spines are just visible, below the yellow stripe across its back.

“It’s just a tough bee, with its spikes and then that blue hair,” Silva observed.

Later, the three volunteers were sitting at the same table during Bee School a week of advanced, in-person training for OBA volunteers who want to take their identification skills to the next level, when they decided to identify their find.

At first, they thought it was another local Melecta with a blue behind, until they realized, as Yamada said, “The hairs were in the wrong places!”

Nonetheless, they questioned their identification hard. “The closest known occurrence is like six hundred miles away, and so we must be wrong, let’s look at this again, it has to be Melecta pacifica, doesn’t it?” Silva asked rhetorically. “And all the instructors came over and went, ‘Yeah… not fitting what we expect.’”

“We may have been the first people to actually look at this bee and try to get the species level,” Stanton commented, “because you wouldn’t have known it was rare … most people are just like, Oh, it’s Melecta.” The project’s taxonomist, Lincoln Best, would then receive those specimens as undesignated species in the Melecta genus.

OBA volunteers have only collected at this site few times, but there may already be a scattering of unidentified Melecta in their collections. “I suspect somebody else is going to be looking in their box midwinter and saying, ‘What’s this bee?’” Silva commented.

Bee identification is incredibly complex, and not everyone has a passion for it. “It can bring you to tears, at least in my experience,” Yamada said.

Having physical specimens was essential. “We would never have believed what we were seeing if we were just looking at it in the field,” Silva said, “We needed to look at these bees under the microscope to confirm what we had.”

At Bee School, volunteers spend five days listening to lectures and peering through microscopes. “They’ll give you bees out of a box and you have to look at them until you can figure out what they are,” said Yamada. “You also bring your own bees.” Eventually, volunteers’ contributions can become part of the OSU arthropod collection.

The trio describe it as a kind of marathon of identification – exciting but challenging. “They tell you, your brain is going to be fried by three from looking through the microscope. … And you have to count how many teeth are on a spike on its leg, or does their tongue fork, or are these hairs short or long, plumose or not,” Yamada recalled, with great feeling, “and it’s all new vocabulary.”

“It’s my anti-dementia project,” Silva said philosophically.

“It’s a large language barrier, in a sense? Reading scientific papers and keys ... a lot of very specific words that only scientists or people that have been trained know, so it’s very difficult,” Stanton said. “It’s helpful to have a huge amount of specimens that you don’t normally have access to, to be able to see all the features, all the colorations they talk about.”

Silva recounts struggling with bumblebee identification on the first day of beginner Bee School. “It turns out they’re really hard because they’re so variable,” she said, “and I just thought, I can’t get this, I can’t get this, I just can’t get it. But then the next day we got dragged back in, and I forget what family we worked on then, and those – I was just clicking right through them!” She snapped her fingers triumphantly to demonstrate. “So, I think coming back in day after day is really helpful in building up your knowledge and resilience.”

With a one teacher for every two or three students, there is plenty of help available. “You raise your hand and somebody’s there,” said Yamada. “It’s almost like one-on-one training.”

Some people come from as far as Vancouver, B.C. to participate, according to Stanton, and Bee School is a great place to meet other researchers.

When asked for the longest time it had ever taken them to identify a challenging bee, Yamada doubled over laughing, along with the others.

“I would say it’s not being able to identify it,” said Stanton, who once spent a good hour trying to verify a bee an instructor had misidentified. “Some of these bees are not possible to identify, we just send in for genetic testing.”

“One day,” Yamada recounted, “Ellen and I met, and we tried to identify an Anthidium, and three hours later we just gave up.”

“But in the meantime,” said Silva philosophically, “we learned a lot about Anthidium features!”

“One of the huge challenges is that so much of this is unknown territory,” Silva explained. “There are bees in Oregon that I am sure have not been described to science yet. Now, for an early volunteer in our program to look at a bee and say, “Hey! That’s a new bee,” that would be impossible – that’s where we have to take it to Best and have him take a look.”

Diverse habitat attracts diverse bees, Yamada noted. “You have different bees in Willamette Valley than you do out in the desert, and definitely in the Gorge you have your own species of bees that no one else can collect,” she said. “We have to drive two or three hours to get to these bees, but people who live in the Gorge have access to unique flowers and unique landscapes.”

All three appreciate the community they find with the OBA. “We share so much information and really so much fun, camping out together. Laughing under the stars at night, saying ‘wow, that’s how you use your net? I use my net this way … So it’s partly training, partly fun, partly environmentalism,” Silva said.

You can learn a lot of natural history at Bee Atlas training campouts, Stanton noted, even if it’s not about bees. “We’re talking about how orcas are having these fashion trends of wearing salmon on their heads,” he said. “We go through all these topics.”

“I’m the only person under eighteen,” Stanton added, “they made some rule changes so I could stay.” The mostly retired group is diverse, he says, “from being an artist, to an engineer ... everyone has different vocabulary and knowledge.”

Some are farmers and gardeners with expertise in raising bee-friendly plants; others are good at social outreach, or experts at collecting and identification.

“There’s a role for a lot of different types of talents and skills,” Silva agreed, “You get out of it whatever you want to get out of it.”

“Even if you don’t necessarily want to join the project, you can still plant (bee-friendly) flowers,” Stanton concluded.

For Silva, who moved to the area two and a half years ago, the OBA is her way of exploring her new home. “The Bee Atlas has taken me to every corner of the state to hunt for bees. …And I am so grateful for that opportunity. …It’s like being an eight-year-old again!” she added gleefully.

Bee Atlas has taught Silva attention to detail. “Everything from … the little tiny flowers that I’ve seen, that I would have just totally walked past ... now, I see every one of them. To looking at a bee under a microscope, and, ‘Is there a little tiny tuft of red hair under its armpit?’ Or something like that.”

“I know that bee!” Yamada exclaimed, laughing.

“It’s crazy what you see on these bees,” Silva agreed.

Learning about bees can lead to a whole new way of looking at the world, Stanton noted. “Once you’re looking for bees, you’ll find them on flowers everywhere you go,” he said. “It’s like life just bursts in abundance once you know you’re looking for it.”