Don’t overlook native bee species
Okanagan region has the most diverse population of potential pollinators in the entire province.
By Scott Trudeau A
pollinator programmer at the Environmental Youth Alliance is currently studying what can
be done in urban spaces to create a better habitat for native bee species, including those in the Okanagan. Erin Udall has spent the past five
years working with bees, examining what species can be found in the City of Vancouver and what can be done to improve their habitat and to determine what types of benefits it could offer native bees. “One thing we do in conservation is protect any sort of species,” she said. “A problem that any species has when it starts to disappear is fragmentation of its natural landscape. “Urbanization is a huge problem that contributes to that because we build houses in between our parks and between our natural pieces of land.” Udall said one way of repairing the natural landscape it to create “green space” corridors containing all an organism requires in order to survive. “With bees you would plant pollinator-appropriate flowers for food,” said Udall. Government research has been conducted in the Okanagan area regarding certain bee species such as the bumblebee, which has been experiencing a decline in its native population. Udall said the Okanagan area has among the highest native bee populations in the entire province, primarily because native bees thrive in desert-like landscapes. “Seventy percent of native bees are ground-nesting bees, so they actually live right under our feet,” she said. “Desert places are better for them because there’s just more natural places for them to nest.” The Okanagan contains dozens of species of native bees—the highest
Blue Orchard Mason Bee
diversity of native bees in B.C., said Udall. She noted that native bees already habituating on some smaller farms have been overlooked in terms of their service of pollination and what they do for a farm. Some Okanagan farmers keep another native bee, called the Blue Orchard Mason Bee on their land. “They’re really important in the Okanagan particularly because they are a native bee,” she said. “They are a lot smaller but they are 10 times more efficient as pollinators of orchard crops than the honeybee.” Udall noted the Blue Orchard
Mason Bee can fly in slightly cooler temperatures – about 10C – compared to the honeybee, which flies at about 12C. “That might not seem like very
much, but if you’re a farmer and you only have three weeks of a bloom or two weeks of a bloom and you have a cold snap, sometimes that temperature makes all the difference,” said Udall. In addition native bees provide
better support for the micro- ecosystem around a property compared to honeybees farmers bring in for pollination purposes. The use of pesticides has been
shown to reduce honeybee populations although further
British Columbia FRUIT GROWER • Spring 2014 23
evidence is needed to correlate that something similar is happening with regards to native bees, however Udall said there is a train of thought to suggest this could be the case. She suggested some precautionary measures growers can take to preserve native bees on their property: leaving natural land intact; trying to avoid tilling the soil as native bees live below the surface; planting native species growth around a property, reducing or eliminating (ideally) the use of pesticides in orchards and gardens; installing a natural mason bee home and leaving tall grasses intact to allow bees to habituate there.
More information on native bee conservation can be found at
www.xerces.org
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