The Ohio Native Bee Survey via Collection Kits
Field Work Spring & Summer 2020
While Ohio is home to an estimated 400-450 species of bees, there hasn’t until now been a concerted effort to sytematically document their presence, abundance and distribution in the Buckeye State. Shortly after the labs of Randy Mitchell (University of Akron) and Karen Goodell (The Ohio State University at Newark) performed a statewide study in 2017 and 2018 that focused on floral selection only by bumblebees, the Goodell lab, in a huge endeavor coordinated by MaLisa Spring, carried out a statewide suvey project with volunteer-managed sampling stations in all of Ohio’s 88 counties. The Ohio State Marion Prairie at the Larry R. Yoder Prairie Learning Lab was the sole Marion County survey site, where Associate Professors Emeriti Richard Bradley and Robert Klips served as collectors for the project. The image below shows the Prairie path along which sample bowls were placed; they are (barely) visible as 9 dots evenly spaced along the left-hand fork of the trail.
Bradley and Klips visited the Prairie twice each week–once to set out blue, yellow, and white bee bowls (2 oz souffle cups filled with soapy water) and then, 24 hours later, to retrieve them and place the captured bees in freezer bags for identification by Spring and her associates at Ohio State-Newark. The photo below shows one of the 24 bowls that were arrayed 2 meters apart.
Further information about the bee survey is avialable on its blog site (link). Note that, while the field work for the Ohio Native Bee Survey via collection kits is complete, the next phase in the project, the Targeted Ohio Specialist Bee-Flower Associations Project (link) censusing bees found only on particular plants, is still underway and the investigators are welcoming volunteers.
In the list below the bees are sorted in decreasing order of abundance. Each species name is linked to its respective map and taxon profile from Appendix B of the 2020 Ohio Bee Survey.
Bees recorded from OSU-Marion Prairie
(Map and taxon profiles from Appendix B of the 2020 Ohio Bee Survey)
Ohio Bee Field Guides
(links to pdfs)
