"More than beautiful, monarch butterflies contribute to the health of our planet. While feeding on nectar, they pollinate many types of wildflowers.--National Park Service.

Have you ever seen pollen on a monarch butterfly?

This morning a male migrating monarch, probably on its way to coastal California to an overwintering site, stopped at a Vacaville garden to sip some nectar on a Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifola). 

If you look closely, you can see the gold pollen.

Monarchs are not just iconic species facing a population decline, they're pollinators. 

"Pollinator species, such as bees, other insects, birds and bats play a critical role in producing more than 100 crops grown in the United States," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "Honey bee pollination alone adds more than $18 billion in value to agricultural crops annually."

"The use of synthetic chemical pesticides is central to current agricultural practices worldwide. But what is the cost to wildlife via non-target exposures? This talk will summarize when there's risk to bees, when there isn't, and what types of research are most likely to influence farmers, regulatory agencies, and policy makers."

So says Scott McArt, an assistant professor in the Cornell University's Department of Entomology, who will speak on "Pesticide Risk to Pollinators: What We Know and What We Need to Know Better" at the Wednesday, May 4 virtual seminar hosted by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology. 

The seminar begins at 4:10 p.m. The Zoom link: 
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/99515291076

McArt, who joined the Cornell faculty in 2017, focuses his research on pollinator health and ecology. His areas of expertise include disease ecology, ecotoxicology, community ecology, chemical ecology, and plant-pollinator interactions. He  maintains his lab research site at https://blogs.cornell.edu/mcartlab/. 

"Research in our lab focuses on the impact of pesticides, pathogens, and habitat on honey bees and wild bees," he writes on his website. "We are particularly interested in scientific research that can inform management decisions by beekeepers, growers and the public. Current research projects include: 1) Understanding pesticide exposure and risk to bees in multiple land management contexts, 2) Combining empirical data with network modeling to understand pathogen transmission in complex plant-pollinator networks, and 3) Understanding how habitat enhancements (e.g., flowers at solar power sites) impact pollinator populations and the services they provide to agriculture."

McArt's duties at Cornell also include director of the Cornell Chemical Ecology Core Facility, and associate curator of the Cornell University Insect Collection.

He writes a monthly column, Notes from the Lab, in American Bee Journal; each month he summarizes scientific publications for a non-scientific audience. "The goal is to make the emerging pollinator health science more approachable and relevant to beekeepers," he says.

He is also a member of the New York State (NYS) Beekeeper Tech Team, which works directly with NYS beekeepers to improve honey bee health, reduce colony losses, and increase profitability of the state's beekeeping industry: https://pollinator.cals.cornell.edu/nys-beekeeper-tech-team/

In addition, McArt coordinates such beekeeping workshops as "Introduction to Honey Bee Queen Rearing" and "Honey Bee Biology and Disease Management for Veterinarians" and engages with growers regarding pesticide risk to bees and creating pollinator-friendly habitat. His extension materials are onsite.  

When asked "What gets you out of bed in the morning?" during a new faculty interview, he responded "Most of the factors contributing to declines in bee health (pesticide exposure, lack of floral resources, disease, inadequate management practices) are preventable. With targeted research efforts and educated stakeholders, regulatory agencies and public, we can make a difference."

McArt holds a bachelor of arts degree in environmental and evolutionary biology (2001) from Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., and a master's degree in biological sciences (2006) from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. He received his doctorate in entomology in 2012 from Cornell University. He served as a USDA-NIFA (National Institute of Food and Agriculture) postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amhurst, in 2014, and then as a research scientist at Cornell from 2014 to 2017, before joining the Cornell faculty. 

Nematologist Shahid Siddique, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, is coordinating the spring seminars. For Zoom technical issues, contact him at ssiddique@ucdavis.edu.

(See complete list of spring seminars.)

Ready to learn about mammoth wasps, medflies, nematodes and pesticide risks to polilnators, or delve into such topics as "Mystery of the Missing Microbes: Why Do Bees Keep Losing Their Symbionts?” 

Coordinator Shahid Siddique, assistant professor of nematology, UC Davis Dpartment of Entomology and Nematology, has announced the list of spring quarter seminars.

The seminars will take place at 4:10 p.m., Pacific Time, on Wednesdays, beginning March 30 and will continue through June 1. The in-person seminars will be in 122 Briggs Hall. All also will be broadcast on Zoom. The link:
https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/99515291076.

Wednesday, March 30 (in-person and virtual)
Ziad Khouri, international graduate student
Bohart Museum of Entomology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Title: "Scoliid Wasp Evolution and Some Adventures with Posterior Predictive Simulation"
Host: Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology and UC Davis distinguished professor of entomology

Wednesday, April 6 (virtual)
Makedonka Mitreva, professor of medicine and genetics
Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis
Title: "Multi-omics Applications in Helminth Research"
Host: Shahid Siddique, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wednesday, April 13 (in-person and virtual)
Tobin Hammer, assistant professor, ecology and evolutionary biology
UC Irvine
Title: “Mystery of the Missing Microbes: Why Do Bees Keep Losing Their Symbionts?” 
Host: Rachel Vannette, associate professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wednesday, April 20 (in-person and virtual)
Jared Ali, assistant professor of entomology
Pennsylvania State University, State College
Title: "Chemical Ecology of Plant Defense and Multi-trophic Interactions: Bad Bugs, Pungent Parasites and Toxic Travelers"
Host: Richard Karban, professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wednesday, April 27 (virtual)
Heather Bruce, postdoctoral researcher
Marine Biological Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley 
Title:  "Evolution and Development of Arthropod Appendages: Novelty and Homology"
Host: Xavier Zahnle, doctoral student, Jason Bond lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wednesday, May 4 (virtual) 
Scott McArt, assistant professor of entomology
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Title: "Pesticide Risk to Pollinators: What We Know and What We Need to Know Better" 
Host: Lexie Nichole Martin, doctoral student, Rachel Vannette lab, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wednesday, May 11 (virtual)
Mostafa Zamanian, assistant professor, Department of Pathobiological Sciences
School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Title: "Combing Target and Whole-Organism Paradigms for Anthelmintic Discovery"
Host: Shahid Siddique, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wednesday, May 18 (virtual)
Corlett Wood, assistant professor of biology
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Title: "The Conflict Beneath your Feet: Indirect Effects in Plant-Symbiont Interactions"
Host: Shahid Siddique, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wednesday, May 25 (in-person and virtual)
James R. Carey, UC Davis distinguished professor 
UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology
Title: "The Conceptual Sweep of a Mathematical Discovery in Insect Demography: From Estimation of Medfly Population Age Structure to an Historical Analysis of U.S. Congress Incumbency Distributions, 1785-2000”
Host: Shahid Siddique, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

Wednesday, June 1 (in-person and virtual)
Isgouhi Kaloshian, Divisional Dean, Agricultural and Natural Resources
UC Riverside
Title: "Root-Knot Nematode Perception and Immune Signaling in Arabidopsis"
Host: Shahid Siddique, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology

For any technical issues, reach coordinator Shahid Siddique at ssiddique@ucdavis.edu.

There they were. Together.

The scene: A honeybee (Apis mellifera) and a bumblebee (Bombus vosnesenskii) nectaring on a purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) in a UC Davis bee garden.

If you've observed honeybees and wild bees foraging in your garden, you've probably wanted to compare them. Is the honey bee the most effective pollinator?

Newly published UC Davis research in the American Journal of Botany yields some surprising results.

Honeybees are effective pollinators, but when compared to other pollinators, including wild bees, they are rarely the most effective plant pollinators, according to a meta-analysis project led by doctoral candidate Maureen Page and postdoctoral researcher Charlie Casey Nicholson of the Neal Williams laboratory, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.   

Page and Nicholson are the co-leading authors of "A Meta-Analysis of Single Visit Pollination Effectiveness Comparing Honeybees and other Floral Visitors," the cover story of the current edition of the journal, published Nov. 30.  

“Although high visitation frequencies make honeybees important pollinators, they were rarely the most effective pollinators of plants and were less effective than the average bee,” said Page.  “This suggests that honeybees may be imperfect substitutes for the loss of wild pollinators and ensuring pollination will benefit from conservation of non-honeybee taxa. In the future, we hope other researchers will use the data we have collected to further investigate the factors that influence pollination effectiveness.

Page and Nicholson originated the idea for the project during a graduate seminar led by UC Davis professor and community ecologist Louie Yang in the winter of 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic shut down or postponed many other research projects, Page and Nicholson forged ahead and organized fellow graduate students and postdoctoral students to collectively read and extract single visit-effectiveness data from more than 468 papers. The two then analyzed the data from a subset of these papers (168) to ask whether honeybees and other floral visitors differed in their single visit pollination effectiveness. 

Page and Nicholson began with the premise: “Many animals provide ecosystem services in the form of pollination including honeybees, which have become globally dominant floral visitors. A rich literature documents considerable variation in single visit pollination effectiveness, but this literature has yet to be extensively synthesized to address whether honeybees are effective pollinators,”

The researchers conducted a hierarchical meta-analysis of 168 studies and extracted 1564 single visit effectiveness (SVE) measures for 240 plant species. “We paired SVE data with visitation frequency data for 69 of these studies,” they wrote. “We used these data to ask three questions: (1) Do honeybees (Apis mellifera) and other floral visitors differ in their SVE? (2) To what extent do plant and pollinator attributes predict differences in SVE between honeybees and other visitors? (3) Is there a correlation between visitation frequency and SVE?”

They compared honeybees to multiple pollinator groups, including ants, bees, beetles, birds, butterflies, flies, moths, and wasps. 

"Surprisingly, honeybees were less effective than other bees as pollinators of crop plants, suggesting that the importance of honeybees as crop pollinators derives largely from their numerical abundance rather than the quality of their floral visits," Page said. 

 “Honeybees were significantly less effective than the most effective non-honeybee pollinators but were as effective as the average pollinator," they wrote in their results section of the paper. "The type of pollinator moderated these effects. Honeybees were less effective compared to the most effective and average bird and bee pollinators but were as effective as other taxa. Visitation frequency and SVE were positively correlated, but this trend was largely driven by data from communities where honeybees were absent.”

The researchers concluded that “Although high visitation frequencies make honeybees important pollinators, they were less effective than the average bee and rarely the most effective pollinator of the plants they visit. As such, honeybees may be imperfect substitutes for the loss of wild pollinators, and safeguarding pollination will benefit from conservation of non-honeybee taxa.”

Also contributing to the project were Ross Brennan, Anna Britzman, Jessica Greer, Jeremy Hemberger, Hanna Kahl, Uta Müller, Youhong Peng, Nick Rosenberger, Clara Stuligross, Li Wang, and Professors Louie Yang and Neal Williams.

Cover Photo. The cover photo, by Kathy Keatley Garvey, communications specialist, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, shows several species of bees on a sunflower, Helianthus sp. They include a honeybee  (Apis mellifera), sunflower bee (Svastra obliqua), and two sweat bees (Halictus tripartitus and Halictus ligatus), as identified by Professor Williams, a pollinator ecologist.

"Honeybees are as effective as the average pollinator, but rarely the most effective pollinators of plants," according to the caption. "Surprisingly, honeybees are less effective than other bees as pollinators of cultivated plants, suggesting the importance of honeybees as agricultural pollinators derives largely from their numerical abundance. Their study confirms a widely held belief that honeybees are not the best pollinators of plants globally and substantiates the growing concern that honeybees may be imperfect substitutes for the loss of wild pollinators."

Charlie Nicholson. Nicholson, a researcher in the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology labs of both Professor Neal Williams, and Extension apiculturist Elina Lastro Niño,  holds a bachelor of arts degree in biology (evolution, ecology and behavior), 2010, cum laude,  from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. He received his doctorate in natural resources in 2018 from the University of Vermont, where he was a Gund Institute for Environment graduate fellow. In his dissertation, he examined how landscape and farm management affect the multiple benefits provided by wild bees. 

Nicholson joined UC Davis as a postdoctoral scholar in the spring of 2019, and receives funding support from the USDA Invasive Species and Pollinator Health Unit. He recently co-authored a paper, “Natural Hazard Threats to Pollinators and Pollination,” published in the journal Global Change Biology, that analyzed 117 published research papers on natural hazards that threaten pollinators and pollination.

Maureen Page. Page received her bachelor's degree in biology, cum laude, from Scripps College, Claremont, Calif., in 2016, and then enrolled in the UC Davis entomology graduate program, with a career goal of becoming a professor and principal investigator. In 2018, she received prestigious three-year fellowship, a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, for her research proposal, “Promoting Food Security by Optimizing Wildflower Plantings to Support Wild and Managed Bees." Long interested in bee research, Page received a 2013 Scripps Environmental Research Grant to establish a solitary bee monitoring program at the Bernard Field Station in Claremont. She created a reference collection and species list of bee diversity at the field station, gaining experience collecting, pinning and identifying bee specimens. She presented her findings at the Scripps Undergraduate Research Symposium. Page later worked on a project categorizing pollen deposition by the yellow-faced bumble bee, Bombus vosnesenkii to California figwort, Scrophularia california.