Bee inventory and monitoring

We’re working with the NC Wildlife Resources Commission to inventory bees of the NC mountains, piedmont, coastal plains, and sandhills. At each of four game lands, WRC personnel are taking biweekly samples from April through October, using bee bowl traps and hand netting. We want to know how current diversity compares to historical collections in the same regions, and how diversity at a given site changes during a 3-year cycle of prescribed fire.

A challenge in bee inventory and monitoring is interpreting the samples you collect. We know or suspect that most collecting methods are biased; they may work better on some kinds of bees than others, or they may work better in some habitats than others. In the end, you never know whether catching more bees in a given time and place means there really are more bees in that time and place…or whether they’re just more catchable.  This unknowing frustrates attempts to detect changes in bee abundance and diversity over time and among habitats. We are attempting to use mark-recapture methods–which are common in vertebrate ecology–to generate absolute population estimates of bees. Such estimates could then be used to ground-truth other, simpler collecting methods.