Posts Tagged: Bees
Urban environments are refuges for bees
Holland focused on the work of Gordon Frankie, an urban entomologist at UC Berkeley. He has been studying the foraging habits of native bees in Costa Rica to find out how much they forage in urban gardens.
Costa Rica has 800 bee species; Gordon's team has collected 112. They found that in most cases, a plant specimen located in an urban setting attracts as many bee species as does its wild counterpart. Occasionally, city specimens actually get more bees than the wild ones. As many as 80 percent of the native bees observed in wild settings were also visiting the urban gardens.
“That was higher than we expected, and it gave us hope. As more natural areas are disappearing or being impacted by humans, urban areas offer something more stable — people are looking after them," Frankie said.
Frankie is also monitoring the status of native bees in California, where there are 1,600 species, the article said. Gordon and his team have found 90 species of bees in the San Francisco Bay Area and East Bay region. Gardeners can help local bees by putting the Best Bee Plants for California around their homes.
Frankie also has a new book for sale, California Bees and Blooms: A Guide for Gardeners and Naturalists, $28 from Heyday Books.
/span>Drought has some farmers planning to sell their water instead of crops
Bruce Lindquist, UCCE specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis, told the reporter that some farmers have decided to sell their water instead of trying to grow a crop. In fact, water is at such a premium, it is impacting the sale of farmland in California.
"It used to be location, location, location when it came to sales, but now it's water, water, water," said a real estate agent interviewed for the story.
The story included an interview with Northern California rice producer Sherry Polit.
"If we keep going through this drought, it may make us quit and sell the ranch," she said. "We've been rice farmers for 31 years and growing olives for five," she said. "But we just can't take this anymore. We've got to get some rain or this could be over."
Bees Butler, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Agriculture and Resource Economics at UC Davis, said a drop-off in California rice production will likely have an effect on global markets in time. However, in the immediate future, there is rice in storage to meet world needs.
Keeping an eye out for the birds and the bees
The birds, which numbered in the millions 100 years ago, are now down to about 145,000 in all. One reason for the decline, the article said, is the agricultural harvest. Before agriculture dominated the landscape, the birds nested in the valley floor's native tules, shrubs and grasses. The birds adapted to nesting in the vast fields of wheat, oats and other crops grown to feed dairy cattle. However, when the crop is harvested, many birds are caught up in the equipment, said Robert Meese, a researcher in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis.
The USDA is working with dairy owners to protect the young birds and some dairy operators are voluntarily delaying harvest until the baby birds can fly away, the article said.
Bees.
In San Diego, the Board of Supervisors is coming to the aid of the state's ailing bee population, said an article by Mark Walker in the San Diego Union-Tribune. The board has voted to open up county land for beekeepers who are finding it hard to place bees in areas where they can forage for nectar.
The county wants to foster more beekeeping in the face of dwindling populations from the mysterious colony collapse disorder. More hives could help honey production and farmers who need bees for their crops, the article said.
Insects.
Another insect - this one a pest - is the subject of stunning photos in a recent National Geographic feature. Photographer Sam Droege of the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center captured a shot of an Asian citrus psyllid pierced by the tip of a needle that shows every tiny hair on its legs and every lens of a bulging red eye.
The article reviewed some of the research now underway to prevent the spread of huanglongbing disease of citrus, a tree killing scourge that is spread by Asian citrus psyllid. Among the possible solutions are breeding Asian citrus psyllids that can't carry the disease, genetically modifying citrus to be resident and introducing natural enemies of the pest.
One natural enemy under study at UC Riverside, Tamarixia radiata, appears in a photo that's part of the NatGeo spread. The image, by David Littschwager, shows an army of Tamarixia radiata with translucent yellow abdomens artfully back lit. The wasps were first collected in Pakistan by UC entomologist Mark Hoddle, who traveled to the Middle East to collect psyllid predators in their native range. Before being approved for biocontrol use, Tamarixia underwent a lengthy USDA evaluation intended to ensure that it wouldn't harm any native psyllids. It is now being released in ACP-infested citrus trees, where they are being carefully monitored for year-to-year survival.
To bee or not to bee depends on the crop
About 35 percent of the food we eat depends on the assistance of bees to pollinate plants and trees so they will produce fruit, nuts or vegetables. It takes 1.6 million colonies of honey bees to pollinate California's 800,000 acres of almond trees.
Our food choices would be dramatically reduced if bees weren't around to pollinate. To illustrate what the produce section of a grocery store would look like in a world without bees, Whole Foods Market removed the products that depend on pollination from one of its stores and took a photo. See the difference: http://ucanr.tumblr.com/post/84164840510/kqedscience-whole-foods-shows-customers-the. Without bees, more than half the fruits and vegetables were eliminated.
Honey bees and other pollinators are being threatened by the drought, disease, mites, loss of habitat and food sources, according to Eric Mussen, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Entomology at UC Davis and bee expert.
Beth Grafton-Cardwell, UC Cooperative Extension specialist in the Department of Entomology at UC Riverside and director of Lindcove Research and Extension Center, talks about the role of pollinators in California agriculture in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8suOt5PnzWc&feature=youtu.be.
To see photos of different kinds of pollinators and to learn more about how to help them thrive, visit our pollinator page. On May 8, help count the pollinators in your community and add them to the map at http://beascientist.ucanr.edu.
Pollinators in trouble
“I'll be holding a precious resource in my hands, one that is essential to life on earth,” says Allen-Diaz. “I'll be placing my hands in Norm's hands to raise awareness about the value of honeybees.”
While raising money for education is certainly a worthy goal, as Allen-Diaz says, the event also draws attention to the plight of our most important agricultural pollinator. In 2006, a number of beekeepers in the Western U.S. noticed their hives had lost 30 to 70 percent of their worker bees. The phenomenon, now known as colony collapse disorder (CCD), is still not fully understood, though a number of factors are believed to be involved. They include habitat loss or degradation and fragmentation, poor nutrition, certain bee management and agricultural practices, natural and chemical toxins, diseases, and parasites. Any one of these factors can affect the insects' ability to combat any of the others. Isolating a single cause, if there is one, has proved elusive.
Many of the fruits and vegetables on the tables of the world are pollinated by insects, particularly bees, and if they were to disappear, our sources of plant food would be restricted to grains and not too much else. It's no wonder CCD is such a concern (for example, see the United Nations Environmental Program 2010 report on Global Bee Colony Disorder and USDA, Honey Bees and Colony Collapse Disorder.
As human population grows and becomes more urban, and as habitats get more fragmented, it is no longer adequate to focus conservation efforts merely in non-urban, non-working landscapes.
“We need to figure out how to accommodate as many native species as possible in these kinds of places,” says Patrick Huber of the City of Davis Open Space and Habitat Commission, which has adopted pollinator habitat enhancement as a working goal. The Commission is working to compile a GIS dataset of known big patches of habitat in Davis, in order map pollinator resources around town.
Huber is a geographer in the Landscape Analysis and Systems Research lab at UC Davis, where he focuses on spatial scale in conservation planning. He is working on a tool to help match gardeners with plants that will grow well in their regions, that are locally available, and that provide a network of resources for pollinators throughout the urban landscape and on into the agricultural landscape. For the moment this project is being piloted in Davis, but the hope is to expand it to other communities, tying in resources such as CalFlora.
- Planning for succession blooming (in the Central Valley, that means late winter through fall)
- Putting plants in clumps at least 4 feet long if possible (honeybees, especially, like to specialize)
- Putting in plants that provide both nectar and pollen (nectar is fuel for adult bees, pollen is protein for the young)
- Using native plants where possible; they're drought tolerant and have what our native bees need
- Avoiding most-toxic pesticides and herbicides
- Providing a clean source of water (a slow-dripping tap on a sloped surface is ideal; bees like to drink from very shallow sources)
- Providing cavity nest holes in wood for carpenter and other bees
- Leaving some areas of gardens unmulched for ground-nesting bees
There are ways the agricultural landscape can be made more hospitable, too. Neal Williams, professor of entomology at UC Davis, has been working on a project to install 600- to 800-meter plots of flowering plants alongside large fields as resources for pollinators. This has moved out of the trial phase into test plots in coastal and foothill areas as well as in the Central Valley.
Meanwhile, we can all help count our pollinators on May 8, the Day of Science and Service to celebrate 100 years of Cooperative Extension in California. We'll be conducting our own pollinator count here outside the ANR building in Davis: join us, or let us know about yours!
Many thanks to Kathy Keatley Garvey for use of her photos.