Population ecology and conservation of wild bees.
I study how wild bees persist in human-altered environments.
Strategy 1: travel through time
1. Do bees hedge their bets through dormancy? Savvy financial planners recommend diversifying your portfolio to "hedge your bets" against the market. Some organisms do the same--they produce offspring that emerge over many years, instead of just one--and in doing so, avoid complete reproductive failure. We know plants hedge their bets by producing a bank of dormant seeds, but so far, evidence in animals is lacking. I documented that native cellophane bees, like fairy bees and mason bees, diversify the emergence times of their offspring. I use field work, lab experiments, and mathematical modeling to understand how and why bees produce dormant offspring. |
2. Do ecological traits predict bee responses to climate change?
There are over 500 species of wild bees in eastern North America. In response to warmer springs, many spring-active species are becoming active earlier in the season. However, not all species emerge in spring, and many also exhibit diverse traits that might affect their response to climate change. Past-undergraduate Max McCarthy is leading a project using museum collections to explore how changes in bee activity timing relate to three ecological traits: flight season, diet, and nesting location. |
Strategy 2: travel through space
3. Do bees hedge their bets through dispersal?
Bees can also cope with unpredictable environments by diversifying the physical location, of offspring; in other words, hedge their bets through space, instead of through time. Wild bees spread offspring across multiple nests, but we don't know how far or how often they travel to build new nests. I study dispersal patterns in cellophane bees (Colletes validus) by marking females and re-sighting them at nesting aggregations. |
4. Are sweat bee movement patterns predictable?
Female bees exhibit two discrete provisioning behaviors: offspring-provisioning, when bees forage for pollen and nectar to feed offspring, and self-provisioning, when bees forage for themselves. Undergraduate Chloé Markovits is leading a project to understand whether these two provisioning behaviors predict movement patterns of sweat bees in urban gardens (Agapostemon virescens). |