Research: Empowering Maine’s mightiest pollinators
Transcript
Frank Drummond:
Bees, in general, are important because they’re extremely efficient pollinators of both native wildflowers, but also most of the fruits and nut crops that we grow and consume throughout the world.
Brianne Du Clos:
In Maine, they pollinate wild blueberry. A wild blueberry is an incredibly pollinator-dependent crop. It has these bell-shaped flowers that need bees to land on the flower, shake the flower just right to get the pollen out, and then those bees need to fly to other flowers.
Frank Drummond:
Honeybees are particularly significant pollinators and become more and more important because they can be managed like livestock and be brought into areas that may have low populations of native bees where there’s crop production that relies on bee pollination.
I have kept bees since I was a teenager. That’s now more than 50 years, but I’ve been doing research on bees since I arrived at Maine in the late 1880s. I’m sorry, the late 1980s. [laughs]
I’m not that old. [laughs]
There’s 275 species currently that we know of in Maine. There are probably more, but I suspect that really not many more than 300 species of bees.
Brianne Du Clos:
They’re so cool. They’re different shapes, sizes and colors. They’re really fun to go out there and find.
[bird sounds]
Frank Drummond:
The research projects on campus are all related by having a common theme. The common theme is to improve the health of the bee communities in Maine.
Kaylen Bickerman-Martens:
(Let’s see if we can find bees.) What’s going on with bumblebees is that some species are going up in numbers in terms of relative abundance, and then others have been declining. Part of my research is sussing out what is going on, What is behind the declines?
Brianne Du Clos:
I study how wild bees use the landscape in a number of ways. One of the projects that I’m doing is looking at bees in power lines. It’s strange to think about power lines as bee habitat. I’m looking at them as being beneficial for bees.
We’re looking at power lines near blueberry fields, thinking about power lines serving as a source of bee habitat for wild bees after the blueberry bloom.
Garry Morneault:
I’m part of the Maine EPSCoR Program at the university. It’s an internship program for high school students. My specific project is looking at parasites in bumblebees and their relation to bumblebee populations.
We’re testing the rates of infection in bees in both natural environments and urbanized environments among different species.
Frank Drummond:
We depend a lot on the students for helping us do the research. They learn a lot about the biology and ecology of bees. But on the flip side, they actually contribute a lot and we learn a lot from their own research. It’s been wonderful.
Without the bees, not only would we not have nuts and fruits to eat, but we would really miss a lot of the wonderful, colorful wildflowers that we see.
Brianne Du Clos:
With the decline in honeybee health and the stability of honeybees being questioned, we have some pretty drastic losses of honeybees in the state. Knowing what our wild bee populations are, how we could get the most out of them for crop pollination purposes, and also for just appreciating them for what we are.
I think this product is really important in determining the pollination security for the state and particularly the wild blueberry industry.