honey bee research
The University of Idaho Extension is working to build a program to train volunteers to collect and identify honey bees, with the goal of establishing an atlas cataloging the rich variety of honey bee species across the state.
Oregon State University Extension created the Master Meritologist Program in 2018 to train citizen scientists to collect and manage specimens for the broader goal of documenting bees in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). Brad Stokes, a Canyon County UI Extension educator specializing in horticulture and entomology, is working with Andony Melathopoulos, an OSU Extension associate professor and pollinator health specialist, to expand the program to the Gem State. I’m doing it.
Stokes is seeking funding to start and maintain the program and has already begun building a base of volunteers.
Meritology is a branch of entomology related to the study of honey bees. 10 volunteers and 4 instructors – Stokes. Melasopoulos. Armando Falcon-Brindis, entomology expert at the Research and Extension Center of the University of Parma. Ron Bittner, an Idaho winemaker and honey bee biologist who manages vineyards for pollinators, will attend a Sept. 12 event at Deer Flat National Wildlife Refuge in Nampa. Attended an introductory training session.
Although largely overlooked, native honey bees are now being recognized for their role in maintaining healthy ecosystems and pollinating crops. For example, floricultural experts believe that native blue orchard bees will be more important than domesticated honeybees for pollinating orchards in the future.
“We’re finding that these native bees are better pollinators than the Western honey bee, which is almost certainly the European honey bee,” Stokes said. “Idaho has a huge variety of crops, especially here in the Caldwell area, where we grow 140 different crops and many seed crops, and we also have a diversity of native honey bees that have never been documented. We don’t even know what we have, and that’s a really important scientific question, because it’s hard to protect something if you don’t know what species you have. Because I can’t.”
The Master Meritologist program trains volunteers to become naturalists who explore the landscape and collect bees, take photos when they find plants that support bees, and place bees related to common plants in the same jar. Masu. Volunteers who reach the apprenticeship level of the program will be able to collect bees, prepare museum-quality specimen mounts, and collect data in a scientifically robust manner. Volunteers who pass a rigorous test and reach Journey level are qualified to identify bees to genus level. Their research has been verified by taxonomists. In both Idaho and Oregon, the program registration fee is $300.
OSU’s program has already generated more than 200,000 samples of native bees associated with associated plants, one of the largest datasets of its kind in the world. The program has identified 600 species of honeybees, including dozens of species previously undocumented in Oregon. Melasopoulos expects some of them will eventually be identified as previously unknown bee species and given names. OSU has also developed a tool that leverages a database of bee species, associated plants, and locations where they are found to provide site-specific guidance for landscape greening efforts.
The Washington State Department of Agriculture launched its own bee survey in 2023, also utilizing volunteer Master Meritologists. Since then, the Washington Bee Atlas has grown rapidly.
In 2020, Bittner and the University of Idaho received an $87,000 Specialty Crop Block Grant provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and awarded through the Idaho Department of Agriculture. This was to hire a former Idaho farm to evaluate native bees on specialty crop farms in the Treasure Valley. Middle school teacher Amy Dolan will assist with the project. OSU then hired Dolan to train a small group of Idaho volunteers to begin cataloging specimens for the Idaho Bee Atlas. Dolan has since left the state, and partnering with UI Extension will strengthen Idaho’s contribution to cataloging PNW bees.
“We’re in the perfect geographic location to find all of these species, and there are probably some that are still undocumented,” Stokes said. “They may be closely related to very rare flowers and plants, so the ecological impact could be very important.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funded the identification of honey bee species collected within the National Wildlife Refuge in Idaho. Bee specimens representing new species in Idaho counties or throughout the state will be added to the collections of the Orma J. Smith Museum of Natural History and the USDA Pollinating Insect Research Laboratory in Logan, Utah.
“The Great Basin has the highest honey bee diversity in the world, and Idaho is located at the crossroads of three major honey bee faunas,” Merasopoulos said. “All the cool bees are in Idaho.”
For more information about the Idaho Master Meritologist program, contact Stokes at bstokes@uidaho.edu or 208-459-6003. Please visit https://extension.oregonstate.edu/master-melittologist to register directly.
