Pennsylvania Bee Monitoring Program

Resources for Participants:

**The bee collection methods on this page should only be used by trained participants in our program. We are not encouraging members of the general public to collect bees, only those involved in established science programs.**

Bees are the most important pollinators of flowering plants in natural, agricultural, and urban habitats. The decline of bee populations worldwide has called attention to the need to better understand the diversity, distribution, and abundance of wild bee pollinators.

A recent study^1,2 from the López-Uribe lab updated the number of species reported in Pennsylvania to 437, providing the first step to our understanding of the regional bee diversity across the state. However, the status of wild bee populations in Pennsylvania (whether they are stable, declining, or increasing) is currently unknown. Most counties in the state of Pennsylvania have fewer than 50 bees recorded.

The number of bees recorded in each Pennsylvania county. Many counties have few bees on record, not because there are few species living there, but rather, because they have been poorly sampled. Figure from Kilpatrick et al 2020.

We are currently developing an educational program for Master Gardeners to leverage their knowledge and interest in pollinator natural history and create the first long-term bee monitoring program for the state of Pennsylvania. The goals of the program are to:

Collect bees around the state which are properly processed and deposited in natural history collections
Digitize and share all our collections data and other existing collections data to publicly-available databases
Use data to update state and county species lists
Use data to better our understanding of the natural history of Pennsylvania’s bees including: distributions, phenology, host plants, community biodiversity, and spread of non-natives
Wild bee education and outreach

The program will offer advanced training to Master Gardeners via a series of webinars and hands-on field and lab days before project participants lead field collections independently (see information below).

In the last two years we’ve collected over 6000 bees across 30 counties. This map shows their collection locations and the number of bees collected in each county.

In 2023 we won the David Gibby Search for Excellence Awards at the International Master Gardener Conference. We made this video for the awards ceromony and it is an introduction and overiew of the program.

Introduction to Bee Monitoring

In the United States, there are growing interests in establishing long-term bee monitoring programs in an effort to track bee populations at a coordinated national scale². Effective monitoring is necessary to provide robust data to detect species declines, changes in distribution, and the spread of invasive species.

But, why work on bee monitoring? In this first webinar, you will learn about the ecological roles pollinators play, the evidence for pollinator declines, and the need for bee monitoring programs.

This webinar will be available to project participants via Penn State Extension.

Bee Collection Methods: Bee Bowls and Blue Vane Traps

The most commonly used methods used for specimen collections for bee monitoring programs are bee bowls and blue vane traps. In the following videos, you will learn how to use both of these techniques to sample bees.

How to set up bee bowls to monitor bees

How to set up blue vane traps to monitor bees

How to use nets to monitor bees

Bee Curation Methods: Sorting, Washing, Pinning, and Labeling

Both bee bowls and blue vane traps use soapy water, so the samples you collect from these traps will be wet. This results in bees with matted hairs making them difficult to identify. To get bees looking good again and ready to be identified by experts, it is necessary to carefully wash and dry them. Here, we explain this step-by-step process.

Sorting Bees From Insect Samples

Also includes an overview of all 46 genera of bees that are found in Pennsylvania

How to wash and dry bees

Below are two different methods for washing and drying bees. The first is a simplified version that actually does not involve washing, just drying straight out of alcohol. This is now a primary approach as washing and drying with soapy water doesn’t seem to be necessary.

Once you have bees that are clean and fluffy they need to be properly pinned and labeled, here we provide a tutorial on these methods.

How to pin bees

Using Microscopes

For sorting bees from batches of specimens, or identifying bees you will often have to use a scope to look at morphological characters that are not visible to the bare eye. Here is a video explaining the basics of how to use an insect scope for the taxonomic identification of specimens.

What do we know about bee biodiversity in Pennsylvania?

To learn more about bee diversity in Pennsylvania, check out this website and the webinar below from Penn State Extension.

Educational Resources

General Bee Information
Bee Talks and Videos
Bee Monitoring Info
- The Very Handy Manual: How to Catch and Identify Bees and Manage a Collection
- Insect Collectors’ Code
Bee Identification

References

Kilpatrick SK, Gibbs J, Mikulas MM, Spichiger S, Ostiguy N, Biddinger DJ, López-Uribe MM. (2020) An updated checklist of the bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila) of Pennsylvania, United States of America. Journal of Hymenoptera Research 77:1
Kilpatrick SK, Gibbs J, Mikulas MM, Spichiger S, Ostiguy N, Biddinger DJ, López-Uribe MM. (2021) Corrigenda: An updated checklist of the bees (Hymenoptera, Apoidea, Anthophila) of Pennsylvania, United States of America. Journal of Hymenoptera Research. Journal of Hymenoptera Research. 77: 1–86
Woodard SH, Federman S, James RR, Danforth BN, Griswold TL, Inouye D, McFrederick QS, Morandin L, Paul DL, Sellers E, Strange JP, Vaughan M, Williams NM, Branstetter MG, Burns C, Cane J, Cariveau AB, Cariveau DP, Childers A, Childers C, Cox-Foster DL, Evans EC, Graham KK, Hackett K, Huntzinger KT, Irwin RE, Jha S, Lawson SP, Liang C, López-Uribe MM, Melathopoulos A, Moylett HMC, Otto C, Ponisio LC, Richardson LL, Rose R, Singh R, Wehling W (2020) Toward a U.S. national program for monitoring native bees. Biological Conservation 252: 1088