When most people say “save the bees,” they are talking about honeybees. Professional beekeepers breed them to pollinate a lot of the agriculture that feeds America and the world.
However, honeybees aren’t the only ones who need saving. Native bees are also essential to keeping crops alive and preserving local ecosystems, says UC Irvine bee researcher Tobin J. Hammer.
“Here in California, [honeybees] are not part of our native biodiversity. And all of those other bees are also really critical parts of the ecosystem. … A lot of pollination services from these solitary bees … [are] coming into farms and pollinating crops. So they’re really critical for plant reproduction and also our food supply,” says Hammer.
California is a biodiversity hotspot, where more than 1000 of these native bee species thrive. Most of them don’t make honey, and far less research exists about them. That’s part of what Hammer and his colleagues are trying to change.
“Honeybees, as it turns out, are very weird,” explains Hammer. “They live in these really dense, numerous hives, they’re social … they make honey. These are traits that often folks think are universal to bees, but actually… most bees are solitary.”
Hammer’s lab studies both solitary bees and bumblebees. He says around a quarter of all bumblebee species in North America are threatened, and to research why, he and his team are looking at their guts.
“Bees have both pathogens that live in their gut and also beneficial bacteria, and that may have a role in bee health,” he says. “There's evidence that gut parasites are one of the contributors of the declines in recent years, and we're looking at interactions between parasites and beneficial bacteria in the bee to understand what's going on there.”
How do you analyze a bee’s tiny guts? Hammer and his team swab for bee vomit and take samples from pinned bees.
“We’re doing experiments right now to test whether we can use fecal samples – bee poop – to characterize the bacteria and parasites in their gut,” explains Hammer. “I’m hoping that … we figure out how microbes play a role in bee declines and how they might be used to help protect wild bees.”
And Hammer has one particularly innovative pet project that’s still in the works: he aims to design a tiny bee diaper to capture their fecal matter.
He says that while he expects people will remember him for the bee diapers, he hopes the real implications of this work will be much bigger. He eventually wants to create bee probiotics, which could help preserve all of the bees that need saving.