Treasure Valley Bee Experts Partner with Students on Epic Bee Survey
Story by Lex Nelson / Photos Courtesy of Bitner Vineyards
When Batu Olana was growing up in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa she didn’t learn much about bees in school. In fact, she rarely caught a glimpse of one.
“I’m a city kid. There were times I would be connected to bees. I’d see them flying in every now and then, but just a handful of times throughout the year,” she recalled.
Since moving to Idaho in January 2021, Olana has not only seen but touched more bees than she encountered in the first 19 years of her life. She spent her first spring and summer tromping through fields of turnip, carrot, and onion seed to set traps for Treasure Valley bee species. After a two-day wait, she returned to each field and carried her trove of captured pollinators back to College of Idaho’s Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History. There, she spent hours in a dedicated room sorting, washing, drying, pinning and labeling each insect.
Olana is one of several C of I students participating in the Native Bee Survey of the Treasure Valley — a United States Department of Agriculture Specialty Crop Block Grant-funded partnership between C of I, Oregon State University and entomologists Dr. Ron Bitner and Amy Dolan. The survey’s mission is to collect, identify, and spread the word about the native and managed bee species pollinating crops in the Treasure Valley. The bees Olana and the team’s other members catalog and analyze are stored at the Orma J. Smith Museum for public viewing.
Collecting the bees is quite a task. Bitner and Dolan began “unofficial sampling” at Bitner Vineyard and Peaceful Belly Farm in the summer of 2020 and received their USDA grant in September that year. Then, during the spring and summer of 2021, Olana worked with Dolan, on her own, and with volunteers to capture bees alive or set traps for them at 15 sites in Canyon County. The sites ranged from uncultivated hills to seed crop fields and pollinator gardens.
“For the part where we’re catching them alive we take nets with us and catch them with the nets or we take vials with us and slowly put [the vials] next to the bees, and let them slowly walk into [the vial] or fly into it and catch them likewise,” Olana said.
The team used two types of deadly traps: shallow, colorful plastic bowls filled with water and soap solution called pan traps, and hanging blue vane traps that use a bright blue plastic funnel to direct bees into an attached jar of soapy water. Regardless of how they were captured, the bees ultimately end up in the same place: pinned or pointed in the Orma J. Smith Museum. (Pointing is a method reserved for smaller insects. Instead of driving a pin through the bee, Olana uses glue to attach it to a paper label.)
The survey project is the continuation of Ron Bitner’s 40-plus years of work as a world-renowned entomologist. He started studying Idaho’s Alfalfa Leafcutter bees in the mid-1970s and still researches, teaches about, and advocates for pollinators today. Bitner currently sits on the board of the Pollinator Partnership, the world’s largest nonprofit dedicated to the protection of pollinators, and occasionally teaches pollinator classes at Bitner Vineyards — his Low Input Viticulture and Enology (LIVE)- and Bee-Friendly Farming-certified vineyard in Caldwell.
Bitner hopes the survey will “educate farmers and the general public that these bees are out there by the hundreds.”
“Idaho has at least 700 bees identified. Most people don’t realize that. There are 4,000 in the US, but most of them nest in the ground,” he said. Right now, Idaho’s ground nesting bees are at risk because of the state’s booming population. Developers regularly exterminate entire fields of overwintering bee grubs while digging foundations for new construction.
“What shocked me the most last summer is that we were out sampling fields of echinacea seed, carrot seed, onion seed, and almost by every one of those [fields] there was a subdivision going in. Their landscapers were moving dirt that deep” — he said, measuring a six-inch span between his hands — “and they’re literally scooping up thousands of bees around here.” Bitner hopes the survey will help raise awareness about this dangerous side effect of urbanization.
Of course, the survey team itself is responsible for bee deaths. It may seem counterintuitive that in order to learn about (and ultimately protect) these vital pollinators, scientists choose to kill them. But Bitner said it’s a sad fact of the job.
By the end of this summer as many as 6,000-7,000 bees will have perished for science as part of the Native Bee Survey of the Treasure Valley. Each will be carefully tended by the survey team: first washed in a mesh-enclosed mason jar, then dried with a hairdryer. Bitner is working with Skylar Burrows of Bee Identification Solutions in Logan, Utah to identify the bees the survey has sampled, and with Oregon State University’s Oregon Bee Atlas to plan the 2022 field season and train future bee biologists through a new Master Melittologist program.
“We’ve got this project extended through the end of next spring, but we’ll do a lot more sampling this summer. But then [our plan is to] start educating people that they have to start caring for bees,” Bitner explained. The survey team has already hosted pollinator events at Peaceful Belly Farm and invited students from Heritage Community Charter School to sort and process bee samples. “We know the valley is developing so fast, and there's a lot that gardeners can do. And farmers have access to a lot of free bees that they don’t even realize they have.”
Bitner recommends visiting Pollinator.org for a crash course in bee-friendly farming and gardening. To learn more about the Native Bee Survey of the Treasure Valley and see the sampled bees up close, visit the Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History on the College of Idaho Campus. It’s open 12:15-3pm. Monday-Friday.
