[ buzzing ]
AARON SCOTT: The European honeybee
might get all the attention, but a true bee connoisseur
will point you to the native species.
From fuzzy bumblebees to glistening sweat bees
and stately longhorns,
native bees are wild critters of almost endless variety.
Here we go.
They possess the kind of charm
that attracts amateur insect lovers
like wasps at a picnic.
- Oh, here's a good one.
But these aren't just any biophiles.
Led by master gardener Michael O'Loughlin,
they're on a statewide mission.
MICHAEL: Our effort is to go around
and to sample all the bees we can
and figure out what species are in Yamhill County.
And there are other groups throughout the state
that are doing the other counties.
You heard that right.
They are trying to survey every bee species in Oregon
for the very first time.
Experts believe around 500 species
might live in the state,
but no one actually knows for sure,
which is a problem, because we could be losing them
at an alarming rate.
REPORTER: Over the weekend, dead bumblebees
started falling from these trees, until eventually,
shoppers reported it to the various stores.
In 2013, a massive bee kill in Wilsonville, Oregon,
made national news.
Upwards of 50,000 bumblebees died from exposure
to an over-the-counter insecticide called Safari.
A novice landscaper had applied it
to the blooming linden trees,
not knowing the havoc it would wreak.
Or as one bee expert told KGW...
- I've never seen any sort of a die-off of bumblebees
on this scale.
But why was the die-off such a big deal?
Well, alongside honeybees,
bumblebees and other native bees are essential
to the pollination of many of the crops
that make up Oregon's $6 billion
agricultural industry.
So in 2014, the state legislature passed a bill
that declared a pollinator emergency.
We became the only state in the whole country
that has a funded mandate to put together
a strategic health plan for pollinators.
Sarah Kincaid is an entomologist
with the Oregon Department of Agriculture.
To fulfill the mandate, her department teamed up
with other state agencies in 2017
to create the Oregon Bee Project.
Sarah says the Bee Project's mission
is to expand our understanding of Oregon's bees
to increase their habitat and to protect them
from pesticide exposure and disease.
Our long-term goal is really to assess whether or not
a bee species here in Oregon are declining
or whether or not they're stable.
To do that, first we need to figure out
exactly what species call Oregon home,
something the state has never had the resources to do.
So the Oregon Bee Project turned to volunteers.
Now anyone can sign up with a local team
as part of what organizers are calling
the Oregon Bee Atlas.
MICHAEL: Let's get out there
and collect as many bees as possible
on as many varieties of plants as we can.
Sound like a plan?
All right. Have fun.
Today, the Yamhill County team is collecting
at the Winter's Hill Estate winery near Dundee.
Here comes a longhorn bee right there.
They spend an hour netting bees,
recording the plants they're found on,
and preserving just one of each in jars with ether.
- This is a bumblebee.
I'm not really sure which species,
but we'll take it inside in a little bit
and work on identifying him.
It's not like catching mammals, where,
you know, you're a little bit afraid --
you don't want to take them out of the population.
Insects, they breed a lot, so there's a huge population.
[ indistinct conversation ]
Next, they head inside the old winery tasting room
to start organizing their finds.
- I was thinking that, about when I caught it,
some of these were flies.
So there is your fly right there.
Okay, so those are both sweat bees there.
Yes.
This is where things get complicated.
With hundreds of varieties of bees,
not to mention all the flies and beetles
that have evolved to mimic bees,
it's very difficult to tell each species apart.
So at first glance, this bee looks like a bumblebee,
but when you look more closely at its face,
you can see that it has a clear yellow integument on the face.
- Oh! - Oh, okay!
SARAH: Yeah, clearly not a bumblebee,
and kind of hiding out in your box over there.
Oh, cool.
Even though they don't know what species
many of these specimens are, the endless diversity
is a reward in itself.
MICHAEL: If you take a look at just the variety
that we caught today,
it is absolutely mind-boggling, and you start to realize
that wow, all these years that I've been seeing bees,
I didn't know they were bees.
I thought they would be flies, and they were ants, et cetera,
which just makes you wonder, what have I been missing?
[ bird singing and insects chirping ]
While small hives of volunteers survey together
in populated counties like Yamhill and Multnomah,
out on the Zumwalt Prairie in northeastern Oregon,
Sandy DeBano is staying true to most native bee species,
which is to say she's flying solo.
SANDY: They're almost like hummingbirds, they're so large.
I've got to show you this one.
It's a Bombus nevadensis.
That's a queen.
You'll see it's super large.
Sandy is an ecologist at Oregon State University.
She's studying both the bees that buzz round the prairie
and the ones that prefer nesting in the shade
of the neighboring aspen groves.
So we're going to suspend this nest box
up on some tree trunk here with zip ties
and leave this the whole season
and see which bees come and build nests in here.
The idea is that if the Oregon Bee Atlas
can chart where various bee species live
and what plants they pollinate,
we can better protect and even cultivate them.
Native bees are super important pollinators
for both natural systems and agriculture.
And so honeybees are having some difficulties,
and so the idea is that native bees
are becoming more and more important,
not only for natural systems, but also for crop pollination.
But collecting the bees is only the first step.
[ background conversations ]
- Yeah, those are summer longhorn bees.
They're just having a siesta.
If it got hot and sunny again, they'd all take off.
Big, huge antennae.
On a cool July morning, budding bee lovers
gather at Oregon State University
for the very first Oregon Bee School.
This is three males of the same species.
There are very few experts able to identify native bees
with any real detail, so the Oregon Bee Atlas
has decided to train its own with week-long courses.
- 5A, go to 4. - 4, and then 4 is...
Navigating the identification key
is like a Choose Your Own Bee Adventure book --
granted, one that's written with scientific jargon
that may as well be a foreign language.
Equal to half or less than half of the distance separating
the lateral ocellus from the inner margin of the eye.
Wow.
It hasn't us taken us anywhere yet!
MICHAEL: Looking at them through a microscope
opens up a whole different world,
because you may think that you're looking at,
let's just say, a small black bee.
Get it under the microscope, and you're seeing
all sorts of colors -- shiny colors,
different hair colors, golden hairs and stuff --
that you would never see just with the naked eye,
especially when you're 56 years old.
You definitely would not see that.
Michael jokes that they're all hoping to be the one
who discovers a new species.
Yeah, that's great, but it's not going to be named after you,
so just don't even ask that question.
In the span of just a few years,
a deadly disaster in a shopping center parking lot
has blossomed into the dream of finding new life.
So the next time you stop to smell the flowers,
pause to see what else is there smelling them with you.
It might just move the needle of science
one bee further.