So, Karen, so happy to have you with us today to teach us about our bumblebees of the Eastern North America.
Thank you very much. Everybody, I hope, can hear me and thank you Denise for inviting me to be here today.
I'm really excited to talk to a equally i'm looking at the participants.
We have over a 1,000 people, which is by far my biggest audience.
Ever and hopefully I can. I can deliver a talk that is exciting, and also one that you can learn something.
I'm sorry that some people are having trouble getting to the pre-test it's not super important.
It was mainly for my own knowledge to see. you know.
How much is it possible to teach a group of people about Bumblebee?
I Id a species in about an hour so definitely I've never tried this before, and certainly never done it over over zoom.
But we are gonna give it a try and i'm also floored to see so many people from so many different places.
This is really great. Everybody from Alaska to Maine, to Georgia, to Texas, and even some people from my own home, County, Berkshire County, Massachusetts.
So welcome everybody. i'm gonna share my screen now, and hopefully, this will work and start my presentation.
Okay, great. So this is the identification of bumblebees of the Eastern U.S.A.
We have about 33 bumblebee species in the Eastern U. S.
I won't be able to go over all of them some of them are quite rare, and I have left them off my talk.
But i'm gonna give you some resources and denise is also provided links to resources where you can look at learn all, all, 33 species.
So just to go over the goals of this hour that we have together.
I'd like you to learn to distinguish bumblebees from from other similar similar looking insects.
So that's the very first challenge. learn the morphological traits that are used to identify bumblebees to species usually without a microscope.
There are some microscopic traits that it's nice for people who don't have microscopes to be able to make some headway on species.
Ids to learn to identify the most common Eastern bumblebees on the wing, learn characters used to identify some of the more uncommon species, usually from photos.
And then, if we have time at the end i'd like to present some of the results from a bumblebee survey that my lab did a couple of years ago in Ohio, so we can take some lessons from that just
to start out. Bumblebee Identification tools are growing in number, and I think probably the most comprehensive book for the Eastern or for all of North America would be Paul Williams Robin Thor Blake Richardson
and Sheila Cola have this really wonderful bumblebees of North America.
So that's not a free book but it's definitely a really wonderful book and kind of similar to that. But just for the East coast is a free sort of small pamphlet that you can get and we have a link to
that on the website that Denise provided That's Fumble base of the East, and that's spearheaded by Sheila, Koa Lake Richardson, and Paul Williams and i'll be drying on some of the images
from this book. In my talk today, lot of states and and websites have little keys to bumblebees that are more regional.
So this is one that you can find on be Spotter Org for some of the Midwest States as Missouri through Ohio.
And this is a little nice little pictorial key That's kind of fun to work through.
Here's one from minnesota bumblebees again.
It's not really a key, but at pictorial guide to bumblebees, and that ones is free as well.
Discover. life is always a wonderful resource for all different kinds of bee species focusing.
I think right now more on the eastern bees, but growing in its possibility for identifying Western bees.
And there's a bumblebee identification link on this when you go to Id nature guides right up here right?
So just to kind of by a way of introduction, and to continue along the lines of things that were discussed by Jamie Strange and Tam Smith in previous sessions.
You know. Why do we care so much about bumblebees?
And these are some of the things that I note about bumblebees that make them really unique and special and and really useful to humans.
So, in addition to being sort of the teddy bears of the insect world, there are these large body organisms that can fly long distances, often in cooler and windier weather, which makes them able to pollinate plants under those
conditions where other bees can't they're active from you know quite a long season.
So in the East, usually from april through october and that's also unique among native bees.
We don't have that many native bees that are active for that long. They have these special abilities to do buzz pollination that Jamie Strange talked about by vibrating the anthers of plants and letting the
pollen out, and you can see and hear this video online.
But this is one that I took I don't know if the sound is really coming through, or the visual.
But that was a bumblebee buzz pollinating the selenium flower.
They have some they're social so they can learn from their nest, mates.
They have the ability to learn complicated flowers and that's been demonstrated by experiments in labs, and they're especially good at pollinating some of our crop plants that have these anthors that open in little pores
like blueberries, cranberries, tomatoes, and peppers.
So bumblebees are super important organisms for us to conserve, and they're very unique occupy a very unique niche in our natural environments.
Oops. One of my first goals was to make sure that when you're out in the field you can distinguish what a bumblebee is from other insects.
And is it a bumblebee, or is it something mimicking a bumblebee?
Is the question. bumblebees are very hairy so they're large.
They have hairs all over their body, including on their abdomen, and the females of non-parasitic species, will have these flattened corbiculi or pollen baskets.
And so those are some of the very unique traits of bumblebees.
Now there's lots of different there's a couple of different kinds of mimicry where batesian mimicry, where harmless species will mimic harmful species like ones that can sting so you'll see
mimic bumblebee mimics among hoverflies, beetles, and moths, for example, mimicking those stinging insects, and another form of mimicry that has evolved
malaria and mimicry. in which the groups of harmful species, all evolved to look similar to each other, which helps their predators learn more quickly that they're all harmful.
And so the wasps are good example of ones that might be confused for a bumblebee.
So just to go over some of these if you're out in the field, and you see things like this these are flies in the family facility.
The the robber flies their predatory flies are really hard to distinguish.
I've actually caught some of these robber flies thinking there were bumblebees, but their behavior is quite different.
You'll also note that they only have 2 wings instead of 4, and they have very tiny antenna. This moth.
A clearing moth can look a little bit like a bump.
Bumblebee visiting flowers, but they typically have a much longer provosis, and they have little scales on their wings, which, if you look up close fumble Bees do not have those this is a
bomb a lead fly, actually a b parasite can be quite fuzzy, like a bumblebee. but it will have only 2 wings instead of 4, and there's another silid fly very large eyes very small
intenny, and just 2 wings instead of 4 so that's different from a bumblebee, and here's our bumblebee here, and you can see that this bumblebee has 4 wings
1, 2, 3, 4, it's got hair all the way down on its abdomen.
And then non bumblebees bees that are not bumblebees is what I mean by that.
That might be sort of part of a Mulearian mimicry.
Complex might include things like this. Andrina. So this ground be these Osmia species.
I would say that Osmia becephal is really a dead ringer for a bumblebee when you see it just out of the corner of your eye, You want to note that it's got a very very wide head almost
as wide, or at least as wide as it's thorax and you'll see that bumblebees lack that feature.
They also won't have any corbicular hairs There are a couple of species of solitary bee in the Anthophra, and that's tillithrick spona formes that are also very similar to
bumblebees, tilith ricks nests in the ground as well as Anthra.
They have hairy hind legs, They don't have corbiculi or pollen baskets and tilithrics is almost always associated with swamps and hibiscus flowers because it's a
floral specialist, then finally, the Xilo cope of Virginica, the Eastern carpenter.
Be the this one is probably the most commonly confused for a bumblebee.
It has very large eyes, very hairy. The females have very hairy hind legs, so no corvicular hairs, and a kind of a much more shiny abdomen.
Unlike your bumblebees, which again have these very hairy abdomens and these flattened pollen baskets.
So hopefully. Those are some characteristics that you can look for out in the field.
I hope you see all of these bees while you're out in the field.
They're all wonderful, but they do not bumblebees, bumblebees.
Come into 2 sexes, like most insects females, which include the queens and the workers and males and the taxonomy, or the traits are a little bit different between females, and males.
So it's useful if you're going to try to Id one to know whether it's female or male.
If you see a bee out there with pollen baskets or a sting, and it would have both that's a female.
Females also tend to have broader abdomens.
Males, on the other hand, have relatively narrower and longer abdomens.
They actually have a couple extra abdominal segments.
They tend to have longer and tenny larger eyes and the east One of the traits that I often use to kind of check to see if it's a male as if it has yellow hairs on its face.
Now that won't work, for every single species the but many especially the most common species in the East, often will have yellow males will have yellow hairs on their face, and that's a very uncommon trait for most of the
common females in the East Queens and workers can differ in their characteristics as well within a species.
So it's useful to know if you have a queen or a worker.
Also you don't want to want to kill a queen because she's the foundation for a whole colony whereas workers are a little bit more expendable.
If you do need to euthanize one. Queens tend to be larger.
And so there are really 2 things you want to look for with queens.
How big they are. So here we've got 17 to 21
This is a very general for for bombers and patients. anyway. the common Eastern bubble be whereas workers are much smaller.
They're like 10 to 16 You can get queen size workers and occasionally you can get a smallish queen.
So these are not always super clear. The other thing is there's a period of time, and we happen to be just entering that time period during the season where queens are really the only bubble beats that you will see So this
is the time for queens. it's a really good time to go out in the field and get a feel her what queens really look like.
So around bay or depending on the species june you will start to see workers and males coming in, so that will give you a nice contrast.
There's a lot of morphology, and bees that are is very useful for telling species apart, but not all of that is very visible without magnification.
So going to start here on this right-hand picture some of the things that you'll be looking at.
Are, first of all, a color of the hairs on the abdomen.
All movies have these very distinctive colour patterns.
And usually when we the this segmented abdomen has 5 or 6 or 7, depending on the gender, or the sex of the species, will have a turgil segments, and we usually we call these turgia they're the abdominal segments
and we abbreviate that with a T.
So t one would be the most anterior abdominal segment.
T 2 would be the second most anterior, and so forth.
So you want to be able to get a good look at the abdominal segments.
The thorax here this middle section of the bee the back of the thorax.
Here we've got the sutum and in behind that posteriorly the Sq.
Tell them Those are nice places to get a look we've got the the side of the thorax, called the Plura.
There's characters on the head, especially the very top of the head called the vertex oops.
Sorry about that. you'll be looking for the corbiculum or corbiculi plural that's on the hind leg.
Only then Sometimes wings are useful to see if they're darkened or very light that can correlate with species.
Now there's plenty of characters on the face of bees like how long their face is, or how wide their face is.
How long the tongue is. this little mailer space, or this area between the eye and the mandible can be long or short.
However, those are going to be very difficult to see without magnification. so I'm going to show you a series of slides like this one in which I've pulled some of the diagrams.
I think these were made by lane evans. and you can find them on bumblebee watch. So I've shamelessly copied them from Bumblebee.
Watch, and I thank you, Lane Evans, for providing such clear figures.
And these you know, our bumblebee caricatures, so they do show the most.
Some of the most common color patterns but you need to be aware that there's quite a lot of variation in some species, and i'll point you toward the coala at all booklet.
The for providing a little bit more detail about some of the colored variations.
I'm going to start with bombers afanus or the rusty, patched bumblebee, because this is our federally indangered species.
If you do see this one while you're out and about definitely report it.
Get a picture up there. This is a really important species at least for some areas. we haven't seen this in a very very long time, and I happen to live in one of those States where we haven't seen it for many years.
I know some of you are in areas that have a little bit more of the rusty patch bumblebee.
So i'll go through these characters. starting with the head then, the thorax and abdomen, So the rusty patch bumblebee. The first thing you want to notice looking at these diagrams are that the head has black
hairs on it, and if you look at some of these specimens, you can see that there is there really aren't yellow hairs up there on that top of the head sort of behind the eyes, the vertex, the thorax, of the
right patch bumblebee is black or is yellow i'm sorry, but it tends to have a little black spot, or sometimes a little tax-shaped spot.
So we've got the Queen here on the left and a worker here shown on the right.
The plura, or the sides of the thorax of the rusty patch are yellow, mostly yellow hairs, and then we get to the abdomen, which is where the famous rusty patch is So the
abdominal segments on the workers yellow, and the second Ogdonald segment.
The T. 2 has that often has a rusty central band here that can look nice and bright like this.
But if you get an old specimen, it might be a little bit more faded.
So be aware that the bright orange doesn't necessarily stay throughout an individual's whole life, so where it says W.
Only I mean workers only then. the hind sections of posterior sections of the abdomen are all black on the rusty patch bubblely.
Now notice that the Queen unfortunately, does not have that rusty patch so she's going to be a little bit harder to distinguish from some of our other species. If you do see a queen that's got 2 full
abdominal segments. t one and t 2 of yellow.
You want to really pay special attention. These tend to be out very early in the season, so I imagine they're getting ready to emerge, if not already emerged.
Now, now, i'm going to move to probably our most common bumblebee species in the East.
This is extremely common, and it is increasing, and in its relative abundance.
Anyway, Mrs. Bonus and Patience, the and Eastern Bumblebee.
This is a very distinctive fee and I think the probably the most distinctive thing is it's it's one of the few species that has just one segment of the abdomen, yet yellow and that's the
t one segment, the all the other segments are typically black.
It does have a little bit of yellow on its vertex, and it will sometimes have some mixed black in yellow hairs on the on its door x on the top of its starx, there a little black spot
It's the Queens come out very early and the workers are around very late in the season, and to get extremely common.
There's a lot of variation in size you can find a bumblebee worker that is almost as big as a common Eastern bubble.
Be queen, and you can find tiny little workers that are smaller than honey bees.
So it's an extremely variable in size really depends on how much these individuals are fed.
Another extremely common B. in the east is the brown belled bumblebee, and I probably should have juxtaposed this one right up against the rusty patch Bomb will be because this one also features a little
rust colored band. But you can probably already tell that that little rust color band is different because it's surrounded on the on the posterior side with black hairs rather than yellow hairs.
So the rusty pet bumblebee would be yellow on on t 2.
The brown belted bun bumblebee is black and rust colored on t 2, so you pretty get can get pretty excited about seeing that rusty patch on the brown belted bumblebee But you want to
look down beyond that to see what what comes after that and if it's black.
Then you've got a brown belted if it's yellow.
Then you can still remain really excited they've also got a completely black head, so no yellow hairs on their vertex.
They've got yellow on their plura or on the size of their thorax. they tend to have a black spot on their thorax, and sometimes these sort of dark, dusky wings.
The the queens and and and newly American workers have this trade of being very short, even hairs, and you can kind of see it on some of these slightly blurry pictures here on this mail.
They they're very clean, and neat looking and this is a feature that's kind of interesting about the the brown belted bumblebee that when you when you see a bee that's just very clean and
well groomed looking that that has a rusty patch that's very likely to be the brown-salted bumblebee.
Sometimes the brown belt doesn't show up very well especially in queens, and you can see that that would be replaced with just sort of a yellow area here, and i'm going to talk now about the the third probably most common
bumblebee species in the East, which is Bombus by Maculatus, and of course by the East I'm.
Heavily influenced by my work in Ohio. so I recognize that in some areas, maybe up further north of New England or down South, you might not have the same relative abundance of being the Thomas Imaculatus is sometimes
hard to tell from from Bahamas bruis Nicolas the brown belt.
It's second abdominal segment has these 2 yellow spots on it that almost look like a little W.
But that can be blurred sometime, if you notice this queen.
She looks a little dusky, and it almost looks like a little half moon.
This worker. Also it's hard to tell that that's really 2 spots.
It almost looks like a will have moon but they don't tend to have any any sort of rust colored pile on them.
Their thorax is yellow. they tend to have this black spot in the middle of their thorax.
Their third through fifth abdominal segments are little.
Are all black for workers, anyway, and males are extremely variable.
So if you look up here at this mail, it seems to have yellow hairs sort of all over its body, so it can have little yellow stripes down on t 4, sometimes or on t 3, and sometimes on the underside.
Of its body. they tend to be a highly variable the workers are much more consistent in their coloration.
Let's see another thing That's interesting about Bombus immaculators is they're very early species. So actually we found our first bombus by Maculatus in Columbus in the Columbus area just
this week, and I haven't seen any other mumblebee queens yet myself, by august you're pretty much seeing the very end of bombus by imaculators. they don't really continue into
August very much, and by September, October they they will really not be around at all.
Maybe a few males here and there, but cycle is has shifted a little bit earlier.
Hopefully. i'm not going too fast, but I do have a break in here for questions, and can go back to anything that anybody has a question on
The golden northern bumblebee. This is another pretty distinctive bee. V. on this fervidis.
This b is very very yellow, it has a black head it's. It's got a thorax that is mostly yellow, but it has this distinct black band, and so rather than a spot it's sort of a straight band going
across. This is at least true, for the the queens and workers Sometimes I've seen males that have more of a spot of fun yellow in the thorax.
But what's really distinctive about the golden northern bumblebee is, It has 4 completes abdominal segments, one through 4.
They're all yellow. So the fifth and in males the sixth abdominal segments are gonna be black.
So here we've got a queen a worker and a male, and you can see that they're pretty consistently.
All yellow all the way up. They also tend to have dark wings, and if you do get a look at their face of their tongue, they've got a very long face and a very long tongue, and they tend to visit flowers that
some of the shorter tongue bumblebee species can't access very well, like crimson clover big red clover flowers.
You'll see them visiting those and sometimes some of the other bumblebees with shorter tongues can't get get their tongues all the way down to the nectar in those flowers so this the species
some there have been some publications that suggest that we have fewer of them now than than we used to, and that's a source of concern, and for right now they're not listed as in danger.
But it's certainly a species to watch and a species of interest.
We want to kind of keep track of where and and how many golden Northern.
You're seeing I am going to delve into some of the bumblebee species that are technically the Eastern North America, and get into the Eastern U. S.
That have either a pretty northern or a pretty southern distribution, and for those I've provided little maps that I downloaded yesterday from just showing you where people are finding these Bombas borealis the northern
amber bumblebee i've actually never seen this in the wild myself.
So, so maybe not super qualified to talk about it. However, we did find it in our Ohio Bumblebee survey.
We had one specimen of around Lake Erie, so certainly you want to look out for this bumblebee.
This is one that defies my my rule of thumb that females don't tend to have yellow hairs on their faces.
So if you see something that looks like this you don't want to just grab it, thinking it's a male, because the females can have yellow hairs on their faces like the golden northern bumblebee they tend
to have a black band between their wings on their thorax and
If you look right here, you can see the side of the thorax is all black, giving it a very dark look.
The abdominal segments t one through 4 are all yellow, and sometimes t 5 is also yellow, so they they have a very yellow abdomen.
They're very long tongue and again they have this very northern distribution here, so you might be wondering how in the world am I ever going to tell this from a bombus ferbitus.
The golden northern bumblebee. So I provided this little trick here.
Golden northern bumblebees do not have yellow hairs on their face, not the females, anyway.
And if you look here at the side of their thorax, they have yellow hairs.
Right. So this one has black hairs, right here, so the plura is yellow in the golden northern and black, and the northern amber bumblebee, but also some of the pictures that I've seen of them.
Anyway, they look the yellow. The quality of the yellow color is a little different.
A little sort of richer, almost more orangey yellow, whereas these tend to be a much lighter sort of baby yellow color, the black and gold bumblebee.
One of my favorite bumblebee species that's quite common in Ohio at certain times of the year.
Anyway, is a very interesting species. it's extremely large it has a little bit of yellow always has a little bit of yellow on it on its vertex, maybe not very much, but a little bit, and that's gonna be an important trait
to remember. It has a thorax that is, has quite a lot of black on it in the middle.
Here, so it's not a black band it's really quite a lot of black all the way down sort of into the skeletal area behind the wing basis.
It's plura are all black so it's quite dark on the sides of its thorax.
It has dark wings, giving it also a very sort of dark appearance.
Typically the the abdomen of these black and gold bumblebees are also.
They have. The first abdominal segment is often quite black.
It will sometimes have some yellow on it. but other times not so that's a variable t 2 and 3 are almost always entirely yellow, so that gives it much more strike to appearance.
The posterior segments. The 4 and 5 tend to be black.
On this species, so it's sort of got a very sort of striped sort of banded appearance.
I have never seen a small worker of bombus or a comas.
They are always almost always Queen sized to the ones that i've collected, and that i've seen this may not be true throughout its range.
But I think of this as a quite a large species, both with queens and the workers.
And the other interesting thing is that they are really getting started quite late.
So mid to late summer. the Queens are coming out in may and June.
You don't tend to get a lot of workers until july I often see them in association with Minarda, although I haven't really been able to demonstrate this quantitatively from our surveys it's kind of a hard thing to
pull out. But if you have a big patch of this be bomb here, you're quite likely to find these if you're in there range, and a very, very similar species is the American bumblebee.
So these 2 species we often have a hard time training people to identify in the field, one from the other.
This is also a large sort of later season bumblebee mid to late summer.
It's head and face are all black and i've underlined that to remind me to tell you that you will not see any yellow on the vertex of an American bumblebee So up here on the top of its
head. sometimes the the previous bumblebee, the black and gold, will look like it has little eyebrows like little yellow eyebrows.
Almost little yellow lines can be very subtle you won't find that on the American bumblebee and that's one of the traits that I use in the field to distinguish these but like the this species like the previous
one can be a little bit variable, in its in its color patterns. So here I've got the thorax tends to be all black posteriorly, whereas the previous one had a little bit of yellow on the back of the
storeax. the plura are all black, just like the black and gold bumblebee.
Its wings also very dark and it's abdomen again t one can be either yellow or black, and sometimes a mix of the 2 T, 2 and 3 are almost always yellow, and the back part of its thorax tends to be
all black and males are similar. But you can see this mail here has yellow on the posterior part of its thorax, a little bit of yellow on its face.
So again I wouldn't feel bad if you can't tell these 2 species apart.
The the differences are quite subtle they're both quite large species.
They? they're in similar habitats I can talk a little bit more about sort of some of the differences we found in their distribution relative to a Ohio.
They both tend to prefer to be in grasslands and you know, are really not.
You don't tend to see a lot of workers in Ohio anyway, until sort of midsummer.
This is also a species that is, appears to be in decline.
It has been extremely widespread in common in the United States, but there's evidence that it is lost distribution over a big part of its range.
So. we see this quite frequently. but I know that it is appears to be disappearing from much of its from parts of its range. And this is problematic.
It's been petitioned for the to be federally endangered, and it's under review.
Now, right? So this is my break for questions and i'd be happy to answer any questions right now, and I while you're thinking of your questions.
I'll just point out these bees you gotta common Eastern bumblebee, and this is actually also a common Eastern bubble bee, which reminds me to tell you that sometimes you can get very unusual color
patterns, and it seems to be not that hard for a bubble be like a common Eastern to develop with a little bit of orange from hairs on its abdomen.
And I don't know a whole lot about the science behind this, but I know I know that these color patterns have to do with hox genes and sort of these bter body patterning genes.
So maybe small mutations and and a gene can give you a very dramatically different looking color pattern.
But we've often or not often but fairly regularly find a couple of these common Eastern bumblebees with orange hair on their abdomen.
But, nope. The only yellow hair you have here is on the first abdominal segment.
Thanks, Karen. So Why, you have that that worker up there?
There were a couple questions in the Q. and a box about the size of workers, and kind of what causes that, or what influences that, and how that may change through the season.
So maybe you could address that the size of workers. Okay, So am I.
Okay. Am I not supposed to read the questions myself? so? Oh, sorry I can.
I can feel them for you if you want to field some, too, either way. Yeah.
So that's a really interesting question. so in many of these species. The size of the worker is going to depend on how much food they get as a larvae that can be environmentally determined, or it might have to do with the
ontogeny the onto genetic stage of the colony.
As I mentioned the common Eastern bumblebee.
I have seen them everywhere. from these tiny little bees they're about the size of a large andrina, or a you know, a little smaller than a honeybee, all the way up to almost the size of a queen
bumblebee So it's a huge range and I know there are some ecologists and evolutionary biologists and be biologists working on sort of the significance of body workers think that's a really fascinating
line of research. But I think we're just beginning to understand you know how this, you know, is this an adaptive thing?
Or is it something that just is sort of a result of food shortages, you know.
Would they all be big if they could? And then you get species like the the black and gold bumblebee bomb, bomb, Sauracomus and the American bubble bee Miss pennsylvania where I really have never seen a small
worker, so there may be something about just how those bumblebees are living.
Maybe the time of year during the midsummer where it's not advantageous to make a worker, and unless you can make it large.
And I really don't know why we don't speak anything very small.
I've seen very tiny golden northern bumblebees, and I've seen large large ones, too, so those tend to have a very big range in size.
The the brown belt, and the 2 spot bowl will be also tend to vary quite a bit in the in the size.
So I wish I had a better answer for you I don't know how many questions you want to take.
Do you want to take one about ways to photograph to get those characteristics in?
I would love to wait until the end, for that because I actually have a whole little section on photographs.
That's a very tiny section on photography and then there are a couple Queen questions, and i'll bet you might want to wait for those 2.
Possibly i'm not sure how much i'm going to go into Queens
I see somebody talking about Batesian versus mueller and mimicry, which I threw in, because I think it's a very interesting subject, and I teach byology a lot, but doesn't have much to do with
identification, and I think what you're getting at here is whether Margo Hicks, whether they're harmful or harmless.
It's it's. really how harmful they are to their potential predators that that determines whether it's Baitian or or malarian. so things that are able to staying are venomous
there's an there might be an advantage. for on something that is not venomous to be able to mimic. something is venomous to, you know.
Trick their predators, then and just maybe to clarify I
There was a question about how many abdominal segments the females have with 6 versus males with the 7.
I think you, miss, spoken one of them so i'm that's quite possible.
And I apologize. Yeah, no problem. Okay, is There any other burning questions.
There are a lot of range I don't want to take you too far astray.
It's climate change having the impact on phenology between bumblebees and flowers. they require to survive One of the neat things about bumblebees is they're highly generalized in their foraging which
makes sense because they have a very long life cycle.
Most of the research that I have read on sort of matches and mismatches between bees and their floral resources.
Having to do with climate warming they suggest that they're we we aren't finding very big shifts and and sort of the flower resources and the bees that use them and i'm not sure how much that's it would
be really a problem for bumblebees, anyway, because they are so highly generalized in their foraging.
How much be bomb is enough to get for the black and gold bumblebee?
That's a great question, you know a big patch of it might attract them.
But it, you know there are other things that bumblebees need.
You in order to survive and one of the things about the black and gold bumblebee that I've noticed, and you'll see from the results of our research is it they tend to be associated with open fields and I think
they're nesting out in these open fields and grasslands, so they would also need sort of access to good nesting habitat in order to, you know, take advantage of any patch of bebone sally
Adam says she once saw Bumblebee, with a bright blue spot on the rear of its head.
What might that be? that might be pollen, that you might.
It might have been visiting a plant that has blue pollen.
Or you might be looking at a bee that a researcher has been painting.
So they can identify it. Okay, So I think maybe I should move on to make sure I have time for everything and try to get back to some of those questions, and if they're kind of groups of questions and I can answer at the
end. that would probably be good. Do I have control the needs?
There we go. Okay, So i'm gonna i'm gonna move on to some species are kind of starting to get into some of the harder species here, and the name of this species suggests that it's going to be a hard
one the confusing bumblebee, longest perplexus.
This is a B that you not super uncommon but it's not really one of our most common ones.
These tend to have a little bit of yellow on their head.
Males will have a face that's yellow so you can See these pictures of males, and and the thorax of the the confusing bumblebee tends to be all a yellow. here.
So you don't tend to get a lot of black hair it's got yellow on the sides of its thorax.
Things get a little dicey in the in the app, so t one and 2 are almost always yellow.
T. 3 can be black or yellow, or a combination of black and yellow.
You do tend to get t 5, being mostly black one of the sort of gestalt features of this B is that it tends to look a little scruffy.
It's Not a real clean yellow look it tends to have sort of uneven looking hairs like it just got out of bed in the morning.
It's a very highly variable species and you can see whoops. i'm gonna flip to that in a second. You'll see from the next slide that there are a lot of different color morph the males tend to have a little bit
more yellow on their abdomen than the females most more frequently So here are some pictures.
This is from the Cola Richardson and Williams pamphlet, and you can see that here.
We've let the queens mostly team one and t 2 are are yellow sometimes that extends into t 3.
Here we've got a queen that's got a little bit of white hair on t 5.
The the workers also can be a little bit variable, and how much yellow they have.
But again that thorax tends to be all yellow, and then the males are a little bit all over the place, so they can be almost all yellow with a yellow face, or they could be yellow with a little bit of black
intermixed at on their tails, or they can have a black tail.
If you do get up close and personal with a bomb as perplexus.
One thing you might notice is sort of round sort of almost square off face that's very common of this being, and could help you distinguish it from other similar, please.
But yeah, this is a very confusing bumblebee.
Be that you might confuse it. very would be vomice vegans.
The half black fumble beef and I think this half black name refers to the fact that the abdomen has 2 segments of completely of yellow, and the rest are black, and that's a fairly consistent
characteristics of this be it tends if you're on the face to have a slightly longer face.
But it's got a little bit of yellow on its vertex.
You can see on this specimen up here the little yellow hairs sticking out right there.
I think if this is a pretty small bumblebee, even the queens are relatively small, and it is associated with forest, so it tends to do well and slightly more forested landscapes, although it will certainly forage,
out in the open in comparison to Vomas perplexus, which also tends to be associated with forested landscapes.
It has a longer. So the this half black bumblebee has a longer face.
I would say it's often smaller and notice that it's thorax has a nice black spot right there, which you probably would not see in the confusing bumblebee, so i'm doing a bunch of species here.
That have the first and second abdominal segments yellow, so you can compare them one against the other.
Bomba Sandersunae the Sanderson Bumblebee.
If you find this one, I would really like to know. This is a particularly uncommon species.
We don't know a whole lot about it and they're very hard to identify.
So again I I always say if you find bubble bees with 2 abdominal segments yellow, you you know you've already got something pretty interesting.
You don't have one of the most common species so this one has a a black face, or yellow face.
It has a short tongue, and it's thorax, can be yellow or yellow, with a little black spot between the wing basis t one and 2 almost always yellow, T, 3 and 4 are black, but T.
5 can sometimes have a yellow or white band. and so you really want to look out at the tails of your bumblebees to see if they have any evidence of yellow hairs down there that most certainly will lead you to a somewhat interesting
bumblebee so you can see it's pretty subtle on this image.
Here. It's not always that easy to see but really worth trying to get a good look at the tail.
They tend to be small-bodied and late emerging they emerge in May and again very uncommon.
So for comparison, we found a single individual of this species in our Ohio bumblebee Survey.
I don't think they're very common in ohio at all, or don't tend to show up in many home movie surveys.
And this is this next fee also is an uncommon bumblebee in becoming less common, depending on where you live.
This is the yellow banded bumblebee bombers to Rickola.
So this B has a black vertex so it's its head is all black.
It's thorax has yellow andterly and black posteriorly. this first abdominal segment tends to be black, and then it's got 2 yellow abdominal segments, t 2 and 3, and then
we'll often have a yellow yellow on its tail, so t 5, with a little bit of yellow or white pile right here can see that here, and that is true for queens workers, and and often males as well, so this is a
really nice species. I have seen these in the wild before, but I happen to be in Vermont when I saw them.
Some of the studies that have come out recently suggests that they're moving more northward or up into higher elevations.
They seem to be responding to climate Warming perhaps the there have been some sightings of these in Ohio, near Lake Erie. So if you live up in northern Ohio, you want to keep people Look out for these so we're especially
interested in the in the yellow banded bumblebee.
This one was petitioned for the endangered species list.
But ultimately they decided that it was still common enough that it didn't warrant Federal listing.
But I would consider this rare and probably declining species, and I think if you do find one or a putative yellow banded bumblebee people will be very interested to know that bombers fraternis, the southern
plains bumblebee so here i've provided a math, because this one doesn't occur much in what I would consider to be the sort of central midwest area it has a more southern distribution and out into the the
great plain States, so it gets up North more in the in the prairie States. there.
I have never seen this species in the wild the southern flames bumblebee.
So because I haven't collected in many of these areas. this species has a has a black head, can be a fairly large species.
It has a thorax again with that nice black band between the wing bases, but otherwise yellow.
It's plura, so the sides of its thorax are yellow.
Got 2 yellow segments on its abdomen and then the rest of its abdomen is black, so that's a common feature that we've seen. but this one tends to have these dark wings a very round sort
of short face, and this is another one like the black, the brown, belted bumblebee that is, it has a very neat looking appearance.
If you look at some of these photos here, you can see how well groomed it looks like it's just been to the barber, and that's a characteristic of this bumblebee species that comes from having very
short, even pile or hairs it's sort of neat and tidy bee again, with those very dark wings, and to me it has sort of the the look of a black and gold bumblebee, or an American bumblebee not the same color pattern but sort
of a large size, and those dark wings and so it's sturdy looking v.
Mama's Turnarius the tri-colored bumblebee, and here's one I'm providing a map for you can see this definitely has a more northern distribution in the United States So if
you're lucky enough to live in these areas this might be a very common bumblebee in your area, and to me it's an extremely beautiful species with its very striking color pattern it's.
Got a black hairs on its on its head, but sometimes the vertex can be yellow, so you may have got a few yellow hairs up there in the vertex short tongue, relatively short tongue for a
bumblebee. It has a very interesting thorax pattern, so mostly yellow on the thorax.
But notice it has this sort of wedge shape, pointing backwards almost like a big thumb tech.
It has a fun abdomen here with the T.
One is yellow t, 2 and 3. This is an orange bright orange color.
T 4 is yellow, and then t 5 is black So this is a very sort of apple somatic coloration sort of warning coloration that is quite striking, and I've seen these in the field.
And they really do look as beautiful as these pictures they're just gorgeous little bumblebees.
The hair is short, it's, very neat and tidy again, and they can be quite variable in size, so I've seen very, very small ones, and slightly larger ones examples.
Of this species, so that would be the tri-colored bumblebee. Here we've got orange that is sandwiched in between yellow kind of like the rusty patch bumblebee but it's
a much bigger orange patch. so, and that tax-shaped, thumbtack-shaped black spot would be more a little bit bigger and a little bit different than the rusty patch bumblebee a fourth
species with red pile would be the rebelted bumblebee.
Here's another of our more northern distributions. and again.
This one is cross-continental. so you get all the West Coast all the way to the East Coast.
I have never seen this one in the field. It would be very unusual to get this down as far as Ohio, although they may occasionally get down here.
The red belted bumblebee has. The females have an abdomen, where in t 2 they have a little bit of sort of bright red, more bright orangey red hairs.
And t 2 cannot, and some of them can also have a crescent of yellow hairs, so they're kind of a red morph and a black morph.
Both of those can can occur, so these might be a little bit confusing to identify you.
Get a black more if you can expect to have t 3 is sort of black, and then you start up with the yellow again on t 4.
If you get the red morph t 3 would be more reddish, and then t 4 would be yellow.
Is another fairly short haired bumblebee species with a very round face, and again, with these different color morphs it's quite highly variable.
So I would refer you to the Paul Williams book, or the Schewe Cola bumblebees of Eastern North America, to see some of the different color variations of this species.
This one alert emerges later in the season in in May, and it has this more northerly distribution, different from the tricolored bubble bee.
Right. So the tricolor Bumblebee, remember, has that sort of tax-shaped, wedge-shaped black spot in the middle of its thorax, and this one would have more of a round little spot much more so black spot
of hair on its thorax. Corp Here, great, so bomb is Sutrinus is the lemon cuckoo bumblebee.
This is the only parasitic social parasite.
Be that I decided to include in this presentation many of these species are quite rare, but the lemon cuckoo B is fairly common through much of the East and midwest. again.
It's a social parasite which means that the the female queens.
They will invade the nest of another bumblebee species.
Suppress the Queen lay their own eggs, so they will lay female and male eggs that they will get their host colony to take care of
All of the female lemon cuckoo b eggs will grow up to be new queens that we'll get to the and go and parasitize other one will be nests, and the males will get fed and then they'll
go off and make with other lemon cuckoo bees so in that way they they don't really need corbiculi, and they don't have corbiculi because they don't collect any pollen they
make their host colony do all the pollen collection.
So this is a quite a color variable species. I struggled a little bit, trying to find pictures to show all these color variants.
They have no worker cast so they're all about the same size.
They have a little bit of yellow on their head. they have a yellow thorax. The ones that I personally have seen in the field tend to be like this, left-hand.
Be so. they have a yellow thorax they've got a mostly black abdomen, but T.
3 has a usually a yellow a little bit of yellow banding on it.
You can get more yellow forms. that some of the males are often a little bit more yellow, and those will look a little bit like this.
I think this males here showing t one and t 2. Those is an intermixed yellow and black hairs.
So again, a fairly highly variable species. You want to look for females with a wide abdomen that lack Paul, and carrying structures. and that might suggest that you have a social parasite mobile be the other thing about the
bomb is to tryinus is they're almost a little bit like a carpenter be in the fact that their abdomen tends to be a little bit less fairy, and a little bit more shiny.
So that's something else that you can look for in the lemon poop of be okay?
So those are the bee species that I chose to include in this presentation.
Probably I figured that probably including anymore, would lead to serious amounts of confusion It's hard to remember even probably the ones that I have presented.
If this is your first time really going through them in detail.
When you're out in the field you often get a chance to kind of observe a bee while it's sitting on a flower, and this slide is my guide to where you want to look first.
You do get a few seconds while it's on that flower you want to first look at the abdomen and really note the color pattern.
You want to note whether it has pollen baskets Sometimes they'll be very obvious, like this one where they have pollen in them, or they could be like this one.
Where there's no pollen in them but you just see that sort of shiny, flattened area where it sort of excavated the with the hairs forming the basket around it.
So that will tell you you've got a female and it's a non-parasitic species other things.
You want to know whether you know what's the form of a black spot or no.
Black spot on the thorax. What color is the top of the head?
Here the vertex, and if you get a really good look at it.
What? what the plura or the you know under the wing bases.
What color of hair does it have there and those are some of the things that you really want to just automatically get used to noticeing when you're looking at a bumblebee because that will help you get through some of the
guides and keys that are available to you to use to identify it.
For photo photography is a really wonderful way to share bumblebee information and crowdsourcing your identifications is a nice way to learn your bumblebees.
And I can recommend a couple of different places to do that, and I may be speaking to people who already are are doing.
These photo based web-based identifications in in these naturalist communities.
I, naturalist is one of my favorites, and you can make an account that I, naturalist org if possible, if if you don't mind the slight lack of privacy, allowing people to see the locality where you take your
photos makes them more useful from a scientific point of view.
Because we can pinpoint locations if you don't provide let the locality be known.
It's nice to see. you Know a bumblebee but it's not quite as useful because we don't know where it was, so it might not be used in a scientific study.
If you do join, I naturalist there are very projects on bees that you can join the ones that i've been involved with.
They'll Ohio be atlas and the Ohio bumblebee atlas, and you can actually join these projects, and your observations will get automatically logged into their databases.
So that individuals that are following those projects can jump in and start identifying the bees.
There are quite a lot of B specialists that spend a fair amount of time identifying bees on on I, Naturalist and Bumblebee watch is also a wonderful database, and that is mostly being monitored by a group of
scientists. So a little bit unlike, I, naturalist, where anybody can post an identification.
Bumble. We watch, you know, that your bees are being identified by experts. and so in that way it is. and you can really be about as sure as you can that the Id is correct.
And those are also been important databases for scientific scientific studies on bumblebee populations.
And then bug guide net is a slightly different kind of community.
But they also things and experts will identify them there for you.
So those are some options for crowdsourcing your identifications.
This picture. Here is the Ohio B. Atlas, and this is the Bumblebee.
Watch the website. When you go to photograph your bees, you want to try to get as many of the characters that are important for identification in your photographs, and many of these sites will allow you to upload multiple photographs of the
same individual. But yeah, you can see from my examples here. this one on the left would not be a very good photo for identifying the bee.
Why not? Well, really can't see what's going on in the abdomen?
You know you might want to say that this is a bombus and patience.
The common Eastern bumblebee but it could be a brown belted, or it could be a two-spot bumblebee, because you can't really see the back of the abdomen.
You can't see the top of the thorax and it's a little hard to see.
The the vertex as well. So you're missing some of the really key characteristics.
If you go over here to the left or sorry to the right, you can see this bumblebee.
This is a really nicely photographed bumblebee.
You can. You can see the 2 spots right here so that's your 2 spot Bumblebee. You can see the total.
The whole abdomen. Get a really good look at the thorax, and the vertex it's a little hard to see if it has pollen baskets, so it might be hard to know if you've got a
male or a female. but in this case, because we know this species, males look a little bit different.
This is probably a female. B. Okay. You want to try not to cast shadows.
Get them in focus, of course, and there are different ways that you can do this.
You don't necessarily need the most fancy camera. famous. photographer once said The best camera to use is the one that you have right, and that's often our cell phones.
And that's what you have with you all the time to document things, and that's really going to be your best camera.
You can photograph bees and nets, you can catch them in little vials or in Mason jars.
Some people do even use plastic zip lock bags to catch things in and photograph them.
If you chill them down a little bit. If you have that capability, there may move slower, and you can get maybe, a better picture.
But one idea is if you've got a b that's pretty mad doesn't like being in the jar, and it's buzzing away very active you could take a short video of that bee and then later, go back and choose
a frame where you have the characteristics that are useful in focus, or choose a couple of frames that have different characteristics in focus.
So I like. I like that video idea. It could ensure that you You could make the difference between an identifiable specimen.
And then, when it's not identifiable so those are Mondays, I have a couple more slides
I see we're almost getting to the end and i'll just kind of run through these to show you some of the results that we found from our bumblebee survey that we completed in Ohio in 2,017
and 2,018, and then i'll answer as many of the questions as I can.
This bumblebee survey was funded by the Ohio Department of Transportation.
In response to the the rusty patch bumblebee being federally listed, they needed to know whether we had it, and if we did where we at what its habitat was I set out with Randy
Mitchell who you'll I think later in this series There's Randy and Jesse Nevada, who is a postdoc on this project.
Here's Denise She was part of it? as Well, and page rear. Who was Randy's graduate student? We were asking what bumblebee is live in Ohio?
Whether we have the rusty patch bumblebee, and wanted to know what the geographic and habitat distributions of Ohio be species.
Were you really want to learn at the species level? How are bees distributed across Ohio? which means that we needed to make a lot of humble be observations, because we have a lot of different species but not all of them, are very
common, and to get a chance of having enough observations of some of these rare species to really be able to say anything, we had to observe a lot of bumblebees, and I think by the end of 2 years we had 24
1,000 observations, and even then we felt like we were sort of borderline with having enough data to say anything about some of these individual species that were quite rare.
This is just sort of a a summary of what we found.
So going from common to very uncommon. We have sort of these first 3 here that were quite common.
The common Eastern bumblebee the brown belt, and the two-spot Bumblebee.
We've got the golden northern bumblebee so so sort of in the next sort of echelon of commonness.
We've got the golden northern bumblebee the half black bumblebee, the black and gold bumblebee, and the American bumblebee, as well as the confusing bumblebee pretty
rare. What was the social parasite, the the lemon cuckoo?
Be, and we did not find any sadly any rusty patch.
Bumblebees. but there are a couple of other species that that we didn't find.
We, we actually did find one Bombus borealis, and one bomb is Sanderson I.
But all of these other species are ones that might have been here.
But we didn't actually get to see since we have done this survey.
Somebody has found Bombus turricula, the the yellow banded bumblebee in Ohio.
So how common are these species? I said. We have sort of what I called the big 3.
Impatience. grizziacolis and v immaculators.
So It's common Eastern brown belted and 2 spot, and this is sort of our overall distribution. Half of our 24,000 bes were the common Eastern bumblebee and 30% were The brown belt 14
percent. were the 2 spot and tiny percentages we're made up by all of the other species.
So most of you know, if you're looking for bumblebees in this area mostly.
What you're going to see is probably these 3 when you see something different.
Be assured that you're seeing something rather unusual these relative abundances change over the season. So if you're looking in June, you're much more likely to see a two-spot bumblebee then in
July, and if you're looking in august you're not going to see a 2 spot bumblebee.
Probably you might see a male but they're very uncommon by the time you get to August.
And in fact, by the time you get to August, and in my part of the world, and in Ohio it was almost all common Eastern bumblebee.
So the time of season makes a really big difference. June and July are really peak seasons in this area for seeing the greatest diversity of bumblebees.
We also have found that where you look is very important so this is a map of Allio, showing for 4 of our different species.
We've got the golden northern bumblebee and you can see this one sort of distributed throughout Ohio in terms of the North South Gradient. but you're it's really missing from Western Ohio up in
the agricultural areas of Western northwestern Ohio, as is the confusing bumblebee.
In fact, the confusing bum will be is really centered around northeastern Ohio.
We didn't get very many of these in western Ohio at all, and they're some down here in the forest, but very few.
We're looking at all these blue spots the half black bumblebee also tends to be somewhat associated with these more forested or green areas of Ohio.
We don't tend to see a lot of it out in northeastern Ohio and these agricultural planes.
You can contrast that with the this graph shows both the golden. sorry the black and gold bumblebee and the American bumblebee, and you can see they're a little bit more broadly distributed in the in the sort
of flatter agricultural planes, areas, and a little bit less.
In the southern forests of Ohio, so we were able to get a little bit better.
Idea of how these are using the landscapes of Ohio we're interested for both queens and workers, and what kind of habitat they use.
So this is a result of a one-year mess searching queen survey.
We were looking for queens that were cruising along the ground, searching for nests starting in April and May And I have a few of the videos from that from that study that Denise uploaded to the website.
So you can see what queens look like when they're nest searching It's a very characteristic behavior of flying load of the ground, stopping, digging in some leaf litter, getting back out flying again.
So we looked at 2 things. We looked at. What habitat were they in when we saw them?
Whether it was sort of a maintained grasses, woodland edges in the middle of a forest, in fields and wetlands, and you could see there were.
We found a fair number across all of these habitats, a little slightly more sort of in the edges and maintained areas than we did in some fields and wetlands, and many of these queens were The common Eastern
bumblebee which makes sense they don't tendon as quite as much, I think, in fields as they do in sort of forest edges.
The other thing we are interested in is sort of the locations where we saw them stop gating.
What sorts of habitat features were right in there, and we call that the micro habitat, that sort of little area right?
Investigating a possible nest, and we found that things like leaf litter and wood and sort of herbaceous layers were pretty important, but other things like grass clumps, pawns, bare ground and rock piles were not very
important and although these were similar across the 3 species that we had enough data to assess, so these are the the Big 3, the common Eastern, the Brown belt, and the 2 spot.
There were some slight differences. so, for instance, the brown belted bumblebee was more likely to be associated, or looking for a nest in a grass clump.
You. We do tend to sometimes see them nesting above ground in things like sedge tusks or bunch of grasses. we looked at habitat preferences of the workers.
So this is a graph showing the where workers reach their maximum of abundance for all of our different species.
So here on the left, I have our more slightly more common species, and one of the takeaways of this is, that although each of the species has a slightly different sort of habitat, preference, or seems to do best in different habitats these planted
habitats tended to be the places where we saw most of them.
So road size, planted urban areas and planted hay fields.
We're very common compared to roadsides shrubby areas and just natural fields on the right.
We have some of the rarer species. So this was the Golden Northern, the confusing the American bumblebee, and the black and gold bumblebee.
And what I also take away from this is that for many of these these plantsed habitats were quite important.
But we have a little bit more variation, right? So each of these seems to be kind of coming to its highest abundance in different types of habitats, and I think these can be very useful as we look into habitat
conservation, and then the last slide i'll show you is
The results of a landscape analysis. we did so here we're looking at sort of a broader landscape perspective.
So it's a 2 meter radius from the sites, where we found these bumblebees, and we're just looking here at the probability of occurrence.
Of some of our rare species, and these are sorry that I put all the Latin names in here. This is from a publication that I can translate them. so where we see as a proportion of forests in the landscape increases
we see that the Bahamas Vegans, our half black bumblebee, is is a lot more likely to be found in these more forested landscapes.
As is to some degree the golden northern bumblebee and the confusing bumblebee.
But the the black and gold, and especially the American bumblebee, are not associated with forests.
In fact, the American bumblebee tends to be negatively associated with Boris. So the result of looking at 24,000 specimens is that we can actually get a little bit better idea at the species level of How these bees
are using habitat and landscapes, and hopefully it can help us to think about some areas.
You sort of going forward what we need for conservation.
So thank you so much for your attention. I think I have a few minutes to answer questions. Great Karen.
Thank you so much, folks. I put the link to the post test in the chat box so you can click on that if you want to go ahead and give it a try for the pro test.
Karen. if on the Q. and a box, if you click on your little box, you can either say most recent or most up votes.
So if you want to click on that that'll be the best way to see questions.
If you want to look through there and see which ones you want to feel.
Okay, I quit most up votes and i'm scrolling to the top. there's so many questions here, right? Yeah.
So the top one is how many queens might come from a typical nest per year, and I know you and Jesse did some awesome research about that. Yes, so my my graduate student and former Postoc Jessie Nevada and
Jesse Lanterman actually counted the reproductive success of bumblebee colonies that she had placed out on reclaim mines, and she got anywhere from queens to over 200 so there's a lot of variation
so, and I don't think this is very unusual for bumblebees that we we can see some of them do very, very well, and some of them just really tank let's see you kind of answer the one that looked at different
habitat for bumbles do you so we'll ask if there's a wall charter poster for bumblebees.
Yes, there is, and I don't have the link handy right now, but I can certainly send it to to Denise.
And can one species of bumbles mate with others and produce hybrids?
I don't know of examples of that but at least from the ones that i'm talking about.
I'm not familiar with that hybridization. in animals is is a little rarer than in plants.
I know, and maybe someone like the other people on in this course would correct me on that.
If i'm wrong. but I don't know if any examples of that. What's the best habitat to look for the rusty patch?
Well, i'm gonna be doing that this summer would start by going to the fish and wildlife service website, and looking at the distributions of maps where it has been found.
I'll be looking in Virginia and west Virginia up in the mountains, and apparently areas where there's a lot of landscape heterogeneity, sort of aspect, and slope differences and little
patches of open areas in forest I think that's where i'm going to focus my my attention. I don't know if i'll be successful.
I know that if you're in minnesota you might find them flying around in open fields or near forest edges,
Where there are flowers, and I get I would say June and July is probably a good time to look for them, because you You won't be in danger of damaging any queens.
By then, probably, and you'll be getting the point where the workers are really building up over this, you know, if you get a colony that will have more workers.
You'll be more likely to see them i've seen some bumblebees flying around low to the ground, and even hovering in certain spots.
Is that queen behavior. Yes, that is queen behavior so they're looking for a nest.
Collecting vumblebee. So I mentioned collecting bumblebees. Do you catch and release?
How careful does one have to be? You can catch and release fumble bees.
You can put them in a jar and photograph them and let them go.
I think that as long as you're not so clipping off their legs in the edge of the jar, or leaving them in there too long.
I think that's probably all right karen does that change if if you're in the like with the rusty patch bumblebee I was thinking tan last we talked about that you're not allowed to to
gather molest right that that would definitely the rusty patch bomb will be you.
Probably you do not want to pick that up. Do you know, Photograph it, please, or document it.
Let someone know you see it. But, yeah, do not catch that one.
If you catch it in aadvertently, I would let it go as if possible, without damaging it.
Because that that you can get into some trouble for doing that
With a federally endangered species you know that said unless you're really in an area where they're common.
You It probably won't be a species you would be likely to collect. I'll put the post test link back in There's down to the bottom Rose and got 10 out of 10 way to go Roseanne right That's the
name I recognize since maybe been to a few of the workshops is climate outside, I think I answer, the climate change impact one.
So. What best materials landscape arrangements helps offer the most option. prevent mess.
Great question there's a lot of information on the web about putting out like so flower pots or little boxes or things you But I think bumblebees tend to nest in rodent boroughs
and maybe even be attracted to mouse poop and the sort of stuff that you would find in a mouse nest.
So i've actually thought of trying to make some little boxes, or even sort of flour pot, clay flour, plot things, and putting mouse stuff in there like from my nest, and see if I can get the bees attracted
to it now, where you have good rodent populations, you might have good bubble Bee Popular? Well, awesome.
Thank you, Karen, for this wonderful overview of some of our Eastern species of bumblebees in North America.
Folks. A lot of you have put a thank you into the chat box.
Thank you for doing that. If you haven't done the post test go ahead and do that to see how your knowledge has increase, and if you're coming back for the Western Id you're welcome to stay on line you don't have to log
back in It's the same link to login So you can just come back at the top of the hour.
Karen, are you okay for a few minutes? Do you have a few minutes to spend them with us? So, guys, if you, Karen, do you think you could go through the quiz and just you know just take 5 min Max, Maybe and
just walk through the questions and tell people how they might know to identify all those those bees in the quiz.
Yeah, let me let me pull that up great super so hang on if you want to go through the quiz come back.
If you're gonna stick with us for lincoln best session on Western Bumble, Id if you're heading off.
Thanks everybody for joining us hope to see you next week with Randy Mitchell for bumblebee botany, which will be wonderful, and that's open the one that hasn't been so should I just share my
screen again. Sure, we hadn't really planned on doing that Karen.
But somebody said, Yeah, Well, that's a great idea let's? do you had the time working on my tiny laptop here, so can I?
Can you guys? i'll see this yep Okay, Okay, what B.
Is this this so this you see I didn't put bumblebee, and that's a hint if you look at the head of this bee super wide, right almost as wide as it thorax this is a
lotus corniculus flower I believe it's a kind of small plant, so it's a relatively smallish B.
But this is an Osmia Mason B. So if you go down here this would be not a bumblebee.
Other kind of v so that's your osmia bucephala, the buffalo headed mason be I, you know they really look like the movies.
But They're not here's a bumblebee you'll notice this one has a single abdominal segment of yellow.
It's not the greatest picture for identification because you can't see what's going on up here.
You but should be pretty clear common eastern has one abdominal segment of yellow, so that's the correct answer.
Lemon Cuckoo B would probably have yellow elsewhere on the abdomen, or be a little bit shinier on the abdomen.
The brown belted would have something going on in the second abdominal segment, like a rusty brown patch, and the half black would have 2 abdominal segments that were yellow.
And this one only has one. So the best answer here is common Eastern.
Here we got a really fed. I love this picture. You can see that little half moon of brown pile here and beyond that is black.
So you might get excited that this is a rusty patch bumblebee.
But no, it's it's just the brown belted bumblebee, so that would be belted. The rusty patch would have yellow below it, and it's not the tri-colored although it does have 3
colors because tri-colored would have 2 bright orange segments, and then another yellow segment.
Here we've got our bombus fervidus the yellow bumblebee, and I could have made this harder by giving you some choices that had other bumblebees with a lot of yellow like the
bombus borealis but I didn't make it that hard.
So you can see those 4 yellow segments are very typical of the bombus ferventus and that black bar between the wing bases and is visiting crimson clover which has deep flowers.
And it's got a long tongue another gorgeous picture of a bumblebee with showing the 2 spots.
This is your bombus binaculators or 2 spot bumblebee, not
It's really the only species that's got that distinctive pattern, and it's and you can see it's got pollen baskets, so you know it's a b so it's not a be
mimic right, this one. Well, hopefully, you can recognize this one.
This is your rusty patch bumblebee corbiculi full of pollen.
There's the rusty patch with yellow below it, and yellow above it, so that's the rusty patch bumblebee.
The tri-colored would have 2 full orange segments, and then yellow below.
Red belted would also have yellow below, but it would have the rusty patch would be down on on t 3, not on t 2.
This one's kind of hard this you might think maybe is Obama's perplexus.
But you see this big black spot, so that black bombers perplexus tends not to have that big black spot.
So this is the half black bumblebee with the 2 yellow abdominal segments.
And I Yeah. So I did ask if it was bombs perplexus.
But that's how you would distinguish it from that and I think it's pretty obviously not a rusty patch, and it's pretty obviously not the common eastern.
Oh, this one's a really hard one so if you if you if you guessed either American bumblebee or golden Northern, you did really I mean sorry American bubble bee or black and gold, mumblebee
you did very well. You can see tiny little yellow ibrows right there.
That's really the main indication that what you're looking at is the golden Northern bumblebee, and not the American bumblebee.
So that was a very hard one. and here's our beautiful beautiful. Let's see what the choices are here.
Yeah. So not the rusty patch, because too much orange in the wrong place.
A and the the red belted bumblebee.
Would have us a smaller bit of red here, just one segment of bread.
Typically this one here, this one should be, might have gotten these mixed up.
This one, I think, is Bombus or a comas.
This one has a little bit of yellow up here, so actually I may have made a mistake in mind here, because this one is pretty clearly bombers or comas.
It's got the the yellow down here on the thorax and the yellow up here.
So i'm gonna call that black and gold Bumblebee and i'm gonna go back up here and correct mine, because now that I've seen it, I think this is my copy of the American bubble Bee and
maybe that what i'm looking at there that I thought was the little bit of yellow pile is just a reflection.
Told you those were really hard. I often get out my hand Lens, and look at these in the field to just look at their faces to make sure i'm really looking at it in the right way.
Okay, So I guess I got 9 out of 10 well it's helpful for those of us who don't do this all the time to just to see how hard it is for those of you who are experts in it I mean
they're really challenging, especially on the fly in the field on the flower really, really challenging.
Yeah, there's no there's a yeah using experts if you see something that you think is really interesting.
You mean I use? I send it to colleagues to to make sure I'm really doing it right, and we do a little bit of collection destructive collection so that we can get vouchers and really look at
them in a microscope. But yeah, bumbly be identification is really tough.
On the other hand, a lot of these species are pretty rare.
So hopefully the common things. You've gotten a good idea about great and thanks again, Karen.