Bee Ecology & Conservation
On Friday, October 27th 2017, from 12–1pm, the Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology department put on seminar as a part of their Conservation Science Seminar Series. For this week’s talk, Dan Cariveau presented on wild bee ecology and conservation. Cariveau is an assistant professor in Bee Research Lab in the department of entomology, here at the University of Minnesota. The seminar was held in 335 Borlaug Hall, with forty or more people in attendance.
Cariveau talked first about bees in a broad sense: their role as pollinators, how different species behave, and a little about their history. He explained that if you randomly selected a bee species, you’d be most likely to choose a ground-nesting solitary bee, which is quite different from the common perception of what bees are like (typically, he explained, people think of the extremely social hive-dwelling honey bee). Cariveau then went on to discuss some of his own research, revolving around the question “how does biodiversity loss impact delivery of ecosystem services?”.
Cariveau discussed three assumptions utilized in small sample size studies of bee species distributions that may not necessarily be true. The assumptions that he contested were that the number of each species were manipulated to assume even communities, the assumption that biodiversity loss is random, and that spacial distribution is constant. He discussed why these assumptions are not true in larger samples or the population, due to factors that may not apply or be taken into consideration in smaller sample tests.
Next, Cariveau went on to discuss the meaning of rarity as it applied to the abundance of a certain species. He asserted rarity depended on a trifold definition including geographical range size, local abundance and habitat specialization. Using data of local abundances, Cariveau showed that “it is common to be rare, and rare to be common”, which is an important idea to keep in mind when considering biodiversity and conservation. He explained that many bee species are highly specialized to pollinate perhaps only a certain order of flora.
Finally, Cariveau showed data comparing bee species abundance in control areas against restoration areas’ datasets. This showed that restoration of different plant habitats was helping increase rare species abundance, although due to certain flora not being planted in restitution areas, certain bee species could actually be less abundant in restoration areas.
Overall, the event was very educational about bee species, different factors that affect their abundance, and the challenges and benefits of bee conservation. Cariveau was a very organized and clear speaker who made the topic interesting and relatively easy to follow. Following the talk, he had a short Q & A, which was helpful for clarifying questions and questions about other types of research being done on bee conservation.
I think it was important to hear about specific methods of conservation as they applied to a specific group of species, rather than just wildlife conservation as a blanket idea. Many people believe in wildlife conservation or restoration as an idea, but know little about its effects or how it may be applied. Because so many plants, and therefore animals, depend on bees as pollinators, I think that this is a very important global topic, and one people should be more informed about.
