{"id":47755,"date":"2017-11-08T16:33:53","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T21:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=47755"},"modified":"2017-11-08T16:33:58","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T21:33:58","slug":"restored-land-makes-bees-feel-welcome-but-more-habitats-needed-says-brock-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2017\/11\/restored-land-makes-bees-feel-welcome-but-more-habitats-needed-says-brock-research\/","title":{"rendered":"Bees facing fight of their lives: Brock research"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Restore it and they will come. But they won\u2019t stay for long if conditions are not right.<\/p>\n<p>This is what Brock University bee expert Miriam Richards and her research team found in their recently published study of bee populations living in a landfill-turned-nature park in St. Catharines.<\/p>\n<p>In 2003, when a former landfill located near the University reopened to the public as the Glenridge Quarry Naturalization site, the professor of biology and her team set up 30 bee traps for their study.<\/p>\n<p>Between 2003 and 2013, the research team collected and recorded the number of bees and number of species they got from the traps, and compared that to traps they set in three sites at Brock that had not been restored.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9pl2BA1N4wY\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>The team found that the numbers of individual bees and bee species in the Glenridge Quarry Naturalization site went up, at first.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur results suggest that \u2018If you restore it, they will come\u2019: restored foraging and nesting sites were re-occupied by bees as soon as they became available, then bee numbers continued to grow for three to four years,\u201d says the study, \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/onlinelibrary.wiley.com\/doi\/10.1111\/icad.12261\/full\">Rapid initial recovery and long-term persistence of a bee community in a former landfill<\/a>\u201d published recently in the journal <em>Insect Conservation and Diversity<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>But after initial growth, bee populations and species at the restored site declined from 2007 onward. Meanwhile, bee populations at the unrestored land sites continued to decline from 2003 onward.<\/p>\n<p>Richards\u2019 study, funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, puts the spotlight on a trend that has scientists and environmentalists worried: the worldwide drop in bee populations.<\/p>\n<p>Richards says the biggest reason for the population decline is the destruction of bee habitat.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMost bees live in the ground. The problem is that humans have a tendency to cover the ground with concrete, buildings and monoculture crops that require plows, so we\u2019ve removed huge amounts of places for bees to live,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n<p>Another threat to bees\u2019 survival are human-made chemicals, specifically a group of agricultural pesticides called neonicotinoids, which were the focus of a series of studies recently linking their use to the declining bee population.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNeonicotinoids interfere with bees\u2019 brain chemistry and neurons, and with their learning and survival,\u201d says Richards.<\/p>\n<p>Fewer plants that bees use as their pollen and nectar sources and the impacts of climate change also threaten bees\u2019 survival.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cA lot of bees, like many other animal and plant populations, are showing the effects of being hit with a huge number of environmental stressors. Bees end up going into precipitous declines,\u201d Richards says. \u201cThis is very, very frightening. I try not to think about it. It gives me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bees are central to the world\u2019s food supply and the stability of the ecosystem. Classified as pollinators, bees fertilize plants by transferring pollen and seeds from one flower to another. Without this transfer, many crops and other plants would die off.<\/p>\n<p>Wild bees perform much of this pollination function. Richards\u2019 research, headquartered in the <a href=\"https:\/\/brockbeelab.wordpress.com\/\">Brock Bee Lab<\/a>, focuses on the ecology and behaviour of wild bees, particularly carpenter bees and sweat bees.<\/p>\n<p>Richards has advice for people who want to increase bee numbers: \u201cPlant a lot of flowers, shrubs and flowering trees; don\u2019t mulch everything in your garden because they can\u2019t nest on the ground if there\u2019s too much mulch; create nooks and crannies for nesting by leaving dead, hollowed-out stems. A little bit of wildness is beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>She advises against placing beehives in yards, saying that competition from a large number of honey bees in the small space of a yard will crowd out wild bees\u2019 food sources, causing a decline in the wild bee population.<\/p>\n<p>Honey bees, introduced to North America centuries ago, are considered \u201cdomesticated\u201d because they produce a food product, says Richards.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Restore it and they will come. But they won\u2019t stay for long if conditions are not right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":47756,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3319,41,1,4,5],"tags":[5962,4268,5961],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47755"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47755"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47767,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47755\/revisions\/47767"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}