ESF Pollinators's Boletim

Greetings ESF community! Spring is upon us yet again. Despite a fickle winter, it seems like plants have decided to commit during this latest spell of warm weather, and we're starting to see green shoots - and even the first flowers. Some willows are already putting out catkins, and with them we can expect one of the first bees of the season, Andrena frigida. Hence the name, this willow specialist is active in the cold early spring, and when flowers are absent the males (which emerge first) can even be found drinking from sugar maple sap runs!

Already some plants in our Bee Campus installations are breaking dormancy, and within a few weeks spring ephemerals in our Northern Hardwood Forest Demonstration Area will be blooming. So we're getting the word out now - keep your eyes peeled for pollinators!

This year we are ramping up our efforts to survey wild bees on the ESF campus, both informally (here on iNat) and formally (collection of specimens). We're relying on students to snap photos of anything and everything, and to let us know what plants are being visited the most. Again, we also want to know what's visiting our native installations - and this year there are several more to choose from!

We now have an interactive map on the ESF Bee Campus webpage where you can view all of our plantings to date:

Whenever you can, please use the "Interaction: Visited flower of ->" field, or at least note the flower in the post. We have been hard at work adding signage to our major plantings, so more flowers should be easily identifiable. With this basic information, you can also make your sightings twice as valuable by adding them to the regional Pollinator Interactions on Plants (PIP) of the NE US project.

We are going to try and provide more frequent updates this spring as the season progresses, to let you know what's active on campus, our species targets, and what your fellow students have found. Thanks to all who have contributed to this project so far, and we hope to see some new faces this year as well!

Great news! We'd like to announce that Bee Campus, in partnership with ESF's Entomology Club, will be hosting an on-campus bee ID workshop on Tuesday, April 9th, from 11am-12pm in Illick 5.

ESF pollinator ecologist Molly Jacobson will be introducing the ~20 common bee genera in the northeast, and will teach you how to distinguish them primarily using features visible to the naked eye or in photos. Not everyone has a microscope, and most of the time you're encountering bees, it's alive and in the wild! We'll also be showing you how to most effectively collect data for our iNat project and our campus bee inventory - the best angles to get, which genera should be captured vs photographed, and how to catch bees for us. Lastly, there will be a pinning tutorial in our campus bee lab, and the chance to see some bee specimens - this part will also be repeated at Entomology Club's weekly meeting the next day, at 6-7pm, for those who couldn't make it.

This is a great opportunity to start learning bee ID, which is a coveted career skill for anyone interested in pursuing entomology, pollinator habitat management, or a related discipline. Many bee ID courses cost hundreds of dollars, and while this will certainly be a speedrun and be a primarily visual (photo-based) presentation, you'll still be getting a lot of knowledge from an experienced bee researcher - for free!

No prior experience with bees is necessary - we'll introduce the bare minimum anatomical terms relevant to ID and avoid too many microscopic features. A notebook is recommended. The pdf of the presentation will be made available here, on this project, afterwards for you to look back at as a resource.

Please see the event page on Engage to RSVP: https://engage.esf.edu/event/10053602

We hope to see you there!