TORONTO, May 22, 2024 – Community science volunteers – laypeople with an interest in bees and conservation – significantly contribute to the scientific knowledge of native bumble bees across Canada and the United States, finds a new study by 91ŃÇÉ«.

It’s buzz worthy confirmation that community science programs can play an important role in monitoring the changing distributions of bumble bees and more. Community scientists have importantly also detected several at-risk or endangered species in unexpected locations, including the rusty-patched bumble bee and the gypsy cuckoo bumble bee. Trained scientists often haven’t seen some of the bees in years and these sightings can help them keep tabs on the species.

The paper, , was published today in the journal PLOS ONE.

Up to a third of North American bumble bees are in decline, but the why of it is still fuzzy. Knowledge gaps about bumble bee stressors, ranges, population dynamics and preferred plants are prevalent.

“As scientists we really value the contribution of community scientists and the breadth of data they are able to gather, including a wide range of locations and species. As scientists usually lack the resources and time to do this kind of field work over such a large geographic area, it really shines a spotlight on the importance of community science programs,” says lead and corresponding author Victoria MacPhail, who conducted the research as part of her PhD at 91ŃÇɫ’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC).

Through the growing (BBW) program, community scientists have been the eyes on the ground for bee researchers. The volunteers have taken photos of bumble bees from every province, state and territory and upload them through the BBW website along with where they were spotted and plant information if known. Bee taxon experts verify the species of bee.

“The data collected by volunteers through Bumble Bee Watch was surprisingly more plentiful, robust and valuable than anticipated and we rely on that data to add to our current knowledge and to confirm other information,” says MacPhail, who is also a former Bee Ecology, Evolution and Conservation coordinator at 91ŃÇÉ«.

MacPhail completed the study along with 91ŃÇÉ« Associate Professor of EUC and Senior Endangered Species Conservation Biologist of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in the United States. They compared BBW data collected by community scientists with the Bumble Bees of North America (BBNA), data collected through traditional scientific methods, for all years available and specifically from 2010 to 2020.

The researchers found the BBW covered as much ground geographically, as the BBNA over all years – 63 provinces, states and territories – and had information on 41 species compared to 48 in the BBNA.

“We found the BBW to be valuable as it bolsters our knowledge about habitat, species associations, distribution, and changes in population size, which helps to inform conservation management for bumble bees.”

Sheila Colla

Looking exclusively at the decade from 2010 to 2020, the BBW had data from an additional four provinces and states, and more information about 13 species than in the BBNA.

In terms of percentages, the BBW contributed 8.5 per cent of overall records, but that increased to more than 25 per cent during the specific decade being studied. Community scientists were able to confirm the prevalence of species as well as inform researchers of which species were inhabiting new locations.

They also contributed ecological information, such as species data for most of the bee species and unique plant genera. Knowing which flowers different types of bumble bees prefer is nothing to sneeze at as it can help prevent habitat loss and inform conservation management.

“While the BBW had fewer bee records than the BBNA database overall, it definitely helps to fill in data gaps and provide new information, and it complements traditional scientific methods,” says Colla. “We found the BBW to be valuable as it bolsters our knowledge about habitat, species associations, distribution, and changes in population size, which helps to inform conservation management for bumble bees.”

In addition, community science programs can bring awareness to the threats facing bumble bees and help mitigate species decline as they are already interested, engaged and documenting bees, their habitats and their locations – buzz pollinating action and ideas.

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TORONTO, April 17, 2024 – It’s not a single pesticide or virus stressing honey bees, and affecting their health, but exposure to a complex web of multiple interacting stressors encountered while at work pollinating crops, found new research out of 91ŃÇÉ«.

Scientists have been unable to explain increasing colony mortality, even after decades of research examining the role of specific pesticides, parasitic mites, viruses or genetics. This led the research team to wonder if previous studies were missing something by focussing on one stressor at a time.

“Our study is the first to apply systems level or network analyses to honey bee stressors at a massive scale. I think this represents a paradigm shift in the field because we have been so focussed on finding the one big thing, the smoking gun,” says corresponding author of the new paper 91ŃÇÉ« Faculty of Science Professor , 91ŃÇÉ« Research Chair in Genomics. “But we are finding that bees are exposed to a very complicated network of stressors that change quickly over time and space. It's a level of complexity that we haven't thought about before. To me, that's the big surprise of this study.”

The paper, , published today in Current Biology, takes a much broader look at the interplay of stressors and their effects. The study team also included researchers from the University of British Columbia, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the University of Victoria, the University of Lethbridge, the University of Manitoba, l'Université Laval, the University of Guelph, and the Ontario Beekeepers' Association.

Not all stressors are the same, however. Some stressors are more influential than others – what researchers call the social media influencers of the bee world – having an outsized impact on the architecture of a highly complex network and their co-stressors. They also found that most of these influencer stressors are viruses and pesticides that regularly show up in combination with specific other stressors, compounding the negative effects through their interactions.

“Understanding which stressors co-occur and are likely to interact is profoundly important to unravelling how they are impacting the health and mortality of honey bee colonies,” says lead author, 91ŃÇÉ« Postdoctoral Fellow Sarah French of the Faculty of Science.

“There have been a lot of studies about major pesticides, but in this research, we also saw a lot of minor pesticides that we don’t usually think about or study. We also found a lot of viruses that beekeepers don’t typically test for or manage. Seeing the influencer stressors interact with all these other stressors, whether it be mites, other pesticides or viruses, was not only interesting, but surprising.”

French says the way influencer stressors co-occur with other stressors is similar to the way humans experience co-morbidities, such as when someone is diagnosed with heart disease. They are more likely to also have diabetes or high blood pressure or both, and each one impacts the other. “That’s similar to the way we examine bee colonies. We look at everything that's going on in the colony and then compare or amalgamate all the colonies together to look at the broader patterns of what is happening and how everything is related. Two or multiple stressors can really synergize off each other leading to a much greater effect on bee health.”

From Québec to British Columbia, honey bee colonies were given the job of pollinating some of Canada’s most valuable crops – apples, canola oil and seed, highbush and lowbush blueberry, soybean, cranberry and corn. The study covered multiple time scales, providing numerous snapshots, rather than the usual single snapshot in time. The research team found that honey bees were exposed to an average of 23 stressors at once that combined to create 307 interactions.

Honey bees are a billion dollar industry. In 2021, honey bees contributed some $7 billion in economic value by pollinating orchards, vegetables, berries and oil seeds like canola, and produced 75 to 90 million pounds of honey. Figuring which stressors would provide the most benefit if managed would go a long way toward developing the right tools to tackle them, something beekeepers are often lacking.

The research is part of the project funded to the tune of $10 million by Genome Canada in 2018 to use genomic tools to develop a new health assessment and diagnosis platform powered by stressor-specific markers.

More research is needed to unravel how the stressors are interacting and impacting honey bee mortality and colony health going forward, says French. “It's really teasing apart which of these compounds might have that relationship and how can we build off this to study those specific relationships.”

It can’t come soon enough, honey bees are currently facing poor health, colony loss, parasites, pathogens and heightened stressors worldwide. Some beekeepers in this country and the United States face a loss over winter of up to 60 per cent of their colonies.

“Our study suggests some combinations are occurring very frequently,” adds Zayed, “and that is relevant because we see them again and again, but we don't know how these combinations affect bee health. It helps to prioritize which experiments we can now take back to the lab and establish how these interactions affect bees.”

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