The Oregon Bee Atlas provides comprehensive data about the state’s native bees and the plants they need to thrive. With the help of volunteers, researchers have gathered information of about 800 different bee species in the state. Andony Melathopoulos is an associate professor in the Department of Horticulture at Oregon State University. Lincoln Best is a taxonomist for the Oregon Bee Atlas. They join us with more on the project and the role volunteers have played in uncovering more about Oregon’s bees.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. About 800 and counting – that’s the number of bee species that have been identified in Oregon alone as part of the Oregon Bee Atlas. Researchers are also collecting information about where these bees can be found and the plants that they’re attracted to. No other state in the country has amassed such granular data about their native pollinators.
Lincoln Best is the taxonomist for the Oregon Bee Atlas. Andony Melathopoulos is on the steering committee of the overarching Oregon Bee Project. He is an associate professor in the Department of Horticulture at OSU. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Andony Melathopoulos: Thanks, Dave.
Lincoln Best: Thank you.
Miller: Andony, welcome back. Can you remind us – it’s been a little while since we’ve talked – what prompted the state to start the Oregon Bee Project back in 2017?
Melathopoulos: The Oregon Bee Project came out of the Oregon Legislature. And many of your listeners may remember this pesticide poisoning of bumblebees that took place in Portland and Eugene. Out of that, the legislature wanted educational programs for Oregonians to protect bees and that led to the Oregon Bee Project. It really dawned on us that we had a whole range of educational programs and we didn’t have a great way to assess their impact on native bees.
So I started to think about this problem of how we would assess native bees and discovered we didn’t even have a list of the species that lived in the state. That prompted us to start this, maybe foolishly but ambitiously, the Oregon Bee Atlas.
Miller: Lincoln, what’s the big idea behind the Bee Atlas?
Best: The Oregon Bee Atlas is a statewide survey of our bee fauna and probably most importantly, the interactions of all of those hundreds of wild bees with our thousands of wild flowering plant species in the state. The Atlas initiative itself is really conducted by Oregonians. So we have a program here at Oregon State called the Master Melittologist Program.
We train the public and then they are able to take part in the fieldwork supporting the Oregon Bee Atlas. And so really it’s Oregonians who are hiking all over the state to every nook and cranny, documenting all of these hundreds of species and their interactions with thousands of different flowering plants.
Miller: I imagine that some of these species might look very similar to one another, even if they are distinct. I mean, what kind of training do your volunteers need to get, in order to do this right?
Best: That’s a great question. So many of our bees do look very similar. But for our participants, the Master Melittologist Program provides almost a limitless amount of training. The basic training allows people to be educated on the basics of bee biology, ecology and taxonomy, which is what the bees do, where they live and what types of bees there are – really the basics.
Then from there, you can really take the deep dive into learning all about those different species and also how to conduct this field work. We’ve developed all sorts of infrastructure and frameworks to make this data collection, which happens all over the state, all across the season, really streamlined and easy for people to take part in. It allows them to be really, really productive and constantly make new discoveries.
Miller: Constantly, meaning has there been one recently?
Best: Honestly, so this is an ongoing joke at this point, what is the bee of the day? [Laughter] The bee fauna in Oregon is so incredibly rich that we’re actually finding new bees that our members have gone out and collected, often from somewhere in the mountains, in the Cascades, from coastal sand dunes, out in the high desert, or down in the Siskiyous. And as myself and August Jackson, our other taxonomist, work through all of these many tens of thousands of bee specimens, we are coming across new bees for Oregon all the time.
Some of them are new records of bees for Oregon, so things previously known may be from Central California. And yesterday, Monday’s bee, is a bee previously known from California, now newly known from the Siskiyou region of Oregon. It’s a bee called Andrena monogonoparia, and it’s a specialist on ceanothus and arctostaphylos, so two spring blooming woody shrubs. That’s the bee of the day.
Miller: [Laughter] We should talk tomorrow and see what tomorrow’s one is. Andony, OPB had an article about the early stages of your work in 2018, and it had this line: “Experts believe around 500 species might live in the state, but no one knows for sure.” That was only seven years ago. Five hundred was, I guess, one of the best guesses then. And now we’re at 800. Has just that raw number alone surprised you?
Melathopoulos: Absolutely, isn’t it amazing that something like bees, that have been the center of attention in the news media, are poorly known. There’s hundreds of species that could be added to a state’s list with a little bit of digging. I am surprised and amazed. And I’m also surprised and amazed at the people who got involved with this project because some of them are retired accountants, having no entomology experience. But they’ve really made this the center of what they do. They drive all over the state looking for bees. And that’s maybe even the biggest surprise for me, not just the species that have been added, but the people in Oregon who are out looking for them.
Miller: Lincoln, do you have any current favorites among these 800?
Best: Honestly, I always answer that by saying it’s the bee of the day. So whichever bee either I learned of most recently or whichever bee we discovered for Oregon most recently. I’ll just stick with this: Manzanita, the Spring Manzanita Mining bee that I just mentioned.
Miller: Why is it called a mining bee?
Best: That’s a good question. When people think of bees, they don’t think of 800 species, and they mostly think of bees that live in hives or big colonies because that’s what we’re used to. But most of our bees in Oregon are solitary. So they don’t live in a hive. And most of those solitary species mostly live in the ground. So they just dig a tunnel into the ground that may have a few branches. Then they go out and collect pollen and nectar, and provision that little underground nest for their offspring. It’s a very simple lifestyle.
Miller: Andony, as we heard from Lincoln, he was talking about the Siskiyous, or bees in the sand near the coast or in the high desert, which gives us a sense, a reminder of the ecological variety of Oregon. And that probably goes a long way to explain this profusion of different bee species. But I’m wondering if this is the kind of thing where if people in plenty of other states took the time and trained the retired accountants to do this search, if they would find something similar? I mean, if everywhere there are tons of pollinators, if you just take the time to look?
Melathopoulos: I do think the first part that you led with, Oregon does have a diverse set of landscapes. So if you were to do this in New Hampshire, I don’t think you would quite get anywhere close to what we’re seeing here. But certainly throughout the West, you can. What’s been a real success is that the bare bones of this program has been adopted in Washington state. There’s an atlas in British Columbia, Canada, Idaho and New Mexico, and we’re all collecting data in the same way. So this project that started in Oregon is expanding outward.
Miller: Back in November of 2023, so almost two years ago, the state launched the pollinator paradise license plate, with proceeds going to OSU bee research. How successful has that been in terms of funding the work you do?
Melathopoulos: It’s been super successful. So $24 of that plate goes to putting names on these weird and awesome bees of the state. There’s been 16,000 plates, last I looked, that have been sold. So Oregonians have been really supportive of this initiative. And I have to say, our volunteers, every time we pass one of those license plates on the road, we just get super motivated and we wanna explore even deeper into the state. So it’s been a success in raising the profile of bees in the state, but also as bringing revenue and to make this program run. We’re really dependent on the plate.
Miller: My quick math there says that’s in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But we’ve been hearing in recent months about drops in the billions of dollars in terms of a federal nationwide investment in science. Have you been affected by that drop?
Melathopoulos: We certainly have. Federal funding is really critical for all sorts of biodiversity research, a range of things that Oregonians may not even think about. And I know at OSU, of a few 1,000 projects, about 50 of them have been given termination orders. A lot of them, like some of the ones that we’re waiting on, are on pause. We’re still applying for grants and federal funding is key to this kind of work, but it has had an impact.
Miller: Lincoln, I love learning that there’s a Manzanita Mining bee in Oregon, but I’m wondering what follows from that when you amass all this information. Has this Atlas already led to policy decisions or has it informed conservation work?
Best: It is, and we collaborate with many agencies, nonprofits and many other academics in order to help improve decision making. Maybe our largest investment at this point has been in a new website available through the OSU website. This is a tool that we have developed called The Melittoflora. The Melittoflora, which literally means bee flora, allows the public and researchers to explore the hundreds of thousands of records we’ve made about these native bees in Oregon and their relationships.
The ultimate goal will be to enable the public and other researchers to, for example, zoom in on your own property, then export a list of bee species you might expect there, but also, a list of plants that will identify the most optimal choices of which flowering plants to grow so that you can maximize biodiversity on your property, in your yard, in a municipal park or on a conservation property. So the giant database that we are producing through all of this field work and laboratory work is going to be extremely valuable to anyone who manages land throughout the state.
Miller: Lincoln Best and Andony Melathopoulos, thanks very much.
Best: Thank you.
Melathopoulos: Thank you.
Miller: Lincoln Best is a taxonomist for the Oregon Bee Atlas. Andony Melathopoulos is an associate professor in the Department of Horticulture at OSU.
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