- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
So there we were, checking out the bumble bee mimics (Anthophora bomboides stanfordiana) on May 9 at Bodega Head, Sonoma County, and along buzzes a pollen-packing Habropoda miserabilis, the bee that UC Davis doctoral alumnus Leslie Saul-Gershenz studies.
The female bee was literally making a "bee-line" for the mustard and wild radish. Bee research scientist John Ascher identified it.
We remember when Saul-Gershenz lent her expertise to the "long lost" silver digger bees found in March of 2019 in the newly restored sand dunes at the San Francisco Presidio. The Presidio, a former military post, is now owned and operated by the National Park Service.
An authority on digger bees, Saul-Gershenz confirmed to the National Park Service officials that they are H. miserabilis and were probably common in the sandy dunes of that area as late as the 1920s. When non-native ivy, eucalyptus and ice plants took over their habitat, the bees disappeared.
“The discovery of a thriving native bee colony on the western side of the Presidio is the latest example of how the removal of invasive plants and the restoration of dunes and grasses at the former military base have helped bring back coastal habitat that thrived in San Francisco for tens of thousands of years before the city was built,” said Saul-Gershenz, formerly a research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Research Service.
“I am very happy to see this nest site at the Presidio,” she told us at the time. She's worked on the biology, chemical ecology and parasite interactions of this group of bees in the genus Habropoda for many years--on research trips that have taken her to the Oregon coast and the Mojave desert, among others.
She and several colleagues are completing a paper on H. miserabilis on its distribution and host plant use in western United States: "Habropoda miserabilis Cresson (Hymenoptera: Apidae): Floral Habits, Distribution, and Nesting Biology."
“This nest parasite M. franciscanus was originally described from the dunes in San Francisco near Lake Merced by Van Dyke in 1928,” Saul-Gershenz related. “It is presumed to be locally extirpated in San Francisco due to habitat alteration. However, its host bee, H. miserabilis, appears to have finally found a suitable nest location in a sand dune area being restored by the Presidio Trust in the Presidio National Park. The resiliency of nature provides hope for the future.”
In a news story published in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 29, 2019, science reporter Peter Fimrite quoted the UC Davis-trained entomologist as saying that the silver digger bees were “all but gone” by the mid-20th century. However, Saul-Gershenz has kept looking for them. In fact, she collected one near Baker Beach in 1998.
With restoration, comes hope for the return of native plants and insects.
"Biologists have reported a more than tenfold increase in the number of native plants in the Presidio, including at least four that are federally listed endangered or threatened, among them the Presidio clarkia," wrote Fimrite. "The Franciscan manzanita, which was believed to be extinct in the wild, was discovered in the Presidio in 2009. It was the first of its kind seen in its native San Francisco since the old Laurel Hill Cemetery was bulldozed in 1947 and paved over for homes."
Gershenz and collaborator Jocelyn Millar of UC Riverside and others deciphered the sex attraction of Habropoda miserabilis and the deceptive mimicking blend used by its nest parasite Meloe franciscanus working with a population on the coast of Oregon (Saul-Gershenz et al. 2018). They documented a new parasite-host location system while conducting research on related species in the same genus Habropoda pallida found in the Mojave and Sonoran Desert (Saul-Gershenz and Millar 2006).
The comeback of silver digger bees is not limited to San Francisco. Fimrite related that several other areas in California are witnessing comebacks, including Bodega Marine Reserve in Bodega Bay and Lanphere Dunes in the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge.
Yes, they are.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Remember those "long lost" silver digger bees found last week at the San Francisco Presidio? They hadn't been seen in large aggregations for nearly a century.
And yet there they were in the newly restored sand dunes at the Presidio, a former military post now owned and operated by the National Park Service.
UC Davis entomologist Leslie Saul-Gershenz lent her expertise when a volunteer discovered the thriving colonies of bees. An authority on digger bees, she confirmed that they are Habropoda miserabilis and were probably common in the sandy dunes of that area as late as the 1920s. When non-native ivy, eucalyptus and ice plants took over their habitat, the bees disappeared.
“The discovery of a thriving native bee colony on the western side of the Presidio is the latest example of how the removal of invasive plants and the restoration of dunes and grasses at the former military base have helped bring back coastal habitat that thrived in San Francisco for tens of thousands of years before the city was built,” said Saul-Gershenz, who received her doctorate in entomology from UC Davis and is now associate director of research for the Wild Energy Initiative, John Muir Institute of the Environment, on campus.
“I am very happy to see this nest site at the Presidio,” she said. She's worked on the biology, chemical ecology and parasite interactions of this group of bees in the genus Habropoda for many years--on research trips that have taken her to the Oregon coast and the Mojave desert, among others.
“This nest parasite M. franciscanus was originally described from the dunes in San Francisco near Lake Merced by Van Dyke in 1928,” Saul-Gershenz said. “It is presumed to be locally extirpated in San Francisco due to habitat alteration. However its host bee, H. miserabilis appears to have finally found a suitable nest location in a sand dune area being restored by the Presidio Trust in the Presidio National Park. The resiliency of nature provides hope for the future.”
In a news story published in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 29, science reporter Peter Fimrite quoted the UC Davis entomologist as saying that the silver digger bees were “all but gone” by the mid-20th century. However, Saul-Gershenz has kept looking for them. In fact, she collected one near Baker Beach in 1998.
With restoration, comes hope for the return of native plants and insects.
"Biologists have reported a more than tenfold increase in the number of native plants in the Presidio, including at least four that are federally listed endangered or threatened, among them the Presidio clarkia," wrote Fimrite. "The Franciscan manzanita, which was believed to be extinct in the wild, was discovered in the Presidio in 2009. It was the first of its kind seen in its native San Francisco since the old Laurel Hill Cemetery was bulldozed in 1947 and paved over for homes."
Brian Hildebidle, stewardship coordinator for the Presidio Trust, discovered the colonies while surveying a dune restoration project. Jonathan Young, wildlife ecologist for the Presidio Trust, was also included in the news story.
Gershenz and collaborator Jocelyn Millar of UC Riverside and others deciphered the sex attraction of Habropoda miserabilis and the deceptive mimicking blend used by its nest parasite Meloe franciscanus working with a population on the coast of Oregon (Saul-Gershenz et al. 2018). They documented a new parasite-host location system while conducting research on related species in the same genus Habropoda pallida found in the Mojave and Sonoran Desert (Saul-Gershenz and Millar 2006).
The comeback of silver digger bees is not limited to San Francisco. Fimrite related that several other areas in California are are witnessing comebacks, including Bodega Marine Reserve in Bodega Bay and Lanphere Dunes in the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge.
We remember seeing volunteers at Dillon's Beach, Bodega Bay, last summer removing ice plants by the bird sanctuary, and in the process, giving native plants, native insects and related wildlife a chance to thrive. We remember beachcombers asking "Why? Why are they doing that? Those ice plants are so PRETTY."
The discovery at the Presidio is why.
As Saul-Gershenz points out, there are 1600 native bee species in California, but scientists know little about many of them.
They are all pollinators. And all life is connected. As naturalist/environmental philosopher John Muir (1838-1914) wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."
So it is with the silver digger bees. That's why they're gold.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Bees and blister beetles, yes.
We remember writing about her work in April of 2013 when she addressed the Nor Cal Entomology Society (now folded) about her research on how blister beetle nest parasites cooperate to mimic the sex pheromone of a digger bee. She had just returned from the Mojave National Preserve, tracking the solitary bee Habropoda pallida and its nest parasite, a blister beetle, Meloe franciscanus.
Fascinating research! Saul-Gershenz, who grew up in New York, studies the chemical ecology and parasite-host interactions of solitary native bees and their nest parasites across the western U. S., including the coastal sand dunes of Oregon and the Mojave Desert in south-central California.
"The solitary bee is the first native bee to emerge in the spring on the Kelso Dunes in the Mojave National Preserve," she told us. “The adult beetles emerge on the dunes in the winter months at Kelso Dunes and feed exclusively on the leaves of Astragalus lentiginosus which leafs out in January."
The bee's emergence is generally synchronized with the onset of blooms of the Borrego milkvetch, which is the sole host plant of adults of the blister beetle at Kelso Dunes.
Basically, the larvae of the parasitic blister beetle produce a chemical signal or allomone, similar to that of a female bee's pheromone to lure males to the larval aggregation. The larvae attach to the male bee on contact and then transfer to the female during mating. The end result: the larvae wind up in the nest of a female bee, where they eat the nest provisions and likely the host egg.
Leslie is now Dr. Saul-Gershenz. She received her doctorate in entomology in May 2017. And on Wednesday, Oct. 18, she will share her research at her exit seminar, "Host Range Evolution of the Bee Parasite Meloe franciscanus," set from 4:10 to 5 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall, Kleiber Hall Drive.
"We report that different populations of M. franciscanus exhibit local adaptations that mimic both the behaviors and the chemical composition of the sex pheromones of locally available bee host species," she writes in her abstract. "We compared a population of M. franciscanus larvae, known as triungulins, parasitizing nests of Habropoda miserabilis (Hymenoptera: Apidae) from the coastal sand dunes of Oregon with a population parasitizing the congener H. pallida in the Mojave Desert in south-central California. We determined that M. franciscanus populations are the same species using molecular analyses.
Working in collaboration with the Neal Williams bee lab and the Steve Nadler molecular lab in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, she and chemical ecologist Jocelyn Millar at UC Riverside found that multiple populations of the blister beetle Meloe franciscanus are locally adapted to different bee hosts in different allopatric populations. (Professor Williams is a pollination ecologist, and Nadler is a nematologist and chair of the department.)
The UC Davis evolutionary ecologist also explored which functional traits of hosts are useful for predicting parasite host range. In another study, she brought together a dream team of bee biologists and received funding from the Bureau of Land Management to study the impact of utility-scale solar development on desert bees. This study documented that these landscapes are biologically rich, even in drought years, and contain a minimum of 114 species of bees including six undescribed species of bee.
The significance of her work?
"Our research has added to the understanding of the communication signals of bees in the genus Habropoda," she related. "We now know that they use long-chain hydrocarbons for the female sex attractant and vary the position of the double bounds in different components and vary proportions of these components to avoid cross attraction among closely related species. Parasites co-opt this communication channel to deceive male bees in the Meloe-Habropoda system.
"In our host functional trait research we show that annual host abundance and host abundance from year to year, as well as local temporal overlap are highly predictive of host range."
Results on the impact of utility-scale solar development on desert bees showed high bee species diversity in the Mojave and western Sonoran region. "This suggests the importance of careful regional planning and additional research to protect this area of significant floral and fauna biodiversity," she said.
Future plans? To continue her research.
Leslie Saul-Gershenz, recipient of numerous grants and author of a number of publications ranging from peer-reviewed papers to books, is the co-founder of the Bay Area-based SaveNature.Org and director of Research and Conservation (1988 to present). The international conservation consortium works with partners to protect ecosystems around the world.
She is also a 2004 graduate of The Bee Course, an intensive 10-day workshop sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History at the Southwestern Research Station, Portal, Ariz. One of the instructors is Robbin Thorp, distinguished emeritus professor of entomology at UC Davis, also one of her many collaborators.
Among her other current collaborators: scientists Lynn Kimsey, Neal Williams, Tom Zavortink, Rebecca Hernandez, all of UC Davis; Terry Griswold, USDA-ARS, Bee Biology Lab; Monica Geber, Cornell University; and John Ascher, National University of Singapore.
Her next presentations of her research will be at the Entomological Society of America's annual conference, "Ignite, Inspire, Innovate," scheduled Nov. 5-8 in Denver,Colo., and the California Native Plant Society Conservation Conference, scheduled Feb. 1-3, 2018 in Los Angeles.