Jessie Lanterman

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In addition to honey bees, Ohio boasts a rich diversity of native bees. These important wild pollinators include some you already know (like bumble bees, carpenter bees, and sweat bees) and some you may not (like leaf cutter bees, mason bees, spring miners, and long-horned bees). Although we have >100 species of wild bees, many of them “fly under our radar” because they do not live in huge familial colonies or store large quantities of nectar as honey. However, all bees collect pollen to feed their young and, therefore, can serve as important pollinators of both crops and wildflowers. Researchers around the globe are tackling the problem of how to conserve wild pollinators that may be impacted by habitat loss that results from human activities like urbanization, logging, farming, and mining.  Understanding which food plants and nesting resources they rely on and where those occur is key to preserving wild pollinators.

The landscape in Southeastern Ohio has been forever changed by coal mining. Although initially  destructive, after coal mine land has been reclaimed it may provide habitat for pollinators, birds, and other wildlife. Former mine lands reclaimed to a grassland state do not readily revert to forest, but create pockets of long-standing meadow habitat that may provide forage for wild bees at times of the summer when forests have few flowers.

I am currently working on my PhD with Dr. Karen Goodell (OSU, Dept. of Evolution Ecology & Organismal Biology). My research projects include:

Do reclaimed coal mine lands provide high-quality habitat for wild bees? 

To test this question, I placed 24 commercially-reared bumble bee colonies on 12       reclaimed mine lands and monitored colony growth, reproduction, and the pollen bees used. Bumble bees relied on pollen collected from the reclamation meadows in early to mid-summer and from adjacent edge and forest habitats primarily in the spring. Wildflower diversity was greater on older reclamations, but that did not directly translate into larger colony sizes or greater production of new queens and males. Some of the species specifically planted during the reclamation process (including clovers and bird’s foot trefoil) where highly attractive to bumble bees, whose long tongues (relative to some other native bees) allow them to effectively manipulate that kind of flower.

How quickly do bee communities ‘bounce back’ on reclamation lands?

In the short term…

To learn which bees quickly colonize newly-created meadow habitat, I surveyed pollinators immediately before and after reclamation of a strip mine complex near Jackson, Ohio. Sites were visited once per month for five summers.

In the long-term…

For the past two summers I surveyed bees on 12 former mine lands aged 2 – 30 years post-reclamation. I expect bee and wildflower diversity to increase over time on these former mine lands as grasslands mature into higher-quality meadow habitat. I will compare bee and plant communities on reclamations to those occurring at three similar meadows in the Columbus MetroParks.