Page 6C
OUTSIDE
East Oregonian
Saturday, October 20, 2018
The search is on for every bee species in Oregon
By AARON SCOTT
Oregon Public Broadcasting
DUNDEE — No one
knows just what bee species
live in Oregon, which means
we can’t even begin to track
if they’re declining. Oregon
Public Broadcasting reports
a statewide project wants to
change that.
The European honey bee
might suck up all the atten-
tion, but a true bee connois-
seur will point you to the
native species. From fuzzy
bumble bees to glistening
sweat bees and stately long
horns, native bees are wild
critters of almost endless
variety.
They possess the kind of
charm that attracts amateur
insect lovers like wasps to a
picnic — or in the case of a
cool summer day, volunteers
to the gardens of the Win-
ter’s Hill Estate winery near
Dundee.
“Let’s get out there and
collect as many bees as pos-
sible, on as many plants as
possible,” said master gar-
dener Michael O’Loughlin
to a dozen other volunteers
before the group fanned out
to the many flowering plants,
nets swishing in search of
buzzing targets.
These weren’t just any
bee-ophytes: they’re on a
statewide mission to survey
every bee species in Oregon
for the very first time.
“Our effort is to go around
and to sample all the bees we
can and figure out what spe-
cies are in Yamhill County,
and there’s other groups
throughout the state that’re
Staff photo by E.J. Harris
Honey bees gather at the entrance to a Warré hive at
beekeeper Jan Lohman’s residence on Wednesday,
Nov. 9, 2016, outside of Hermiston.
doing the other counties,”
O’Loughlin said.
Experts believe around
500 species might live in the
state, but no one knows for
sure. Which is a problem,
because we could be losing
bee species at an alarming
rate.
In 2013, a massive bee-
kill in a Wilsonville shopping
center made national news.
An estimated 50,000 bum-
ble bees died from exposure
to an over-the-counter insec-
ticide called Safari, littering
the parking lot in what many
called the biggest die-off in
modern history.
But why was the die off
such a big deal?
Because, alongside honey
bees, bumblebees and other
native bees are essential to
the pollination of many of
the crops that make up Ore-
gon’s $6 billion agricultural
industry. In response to the
die-off and one that followed
shortly after, the Oregon Leg-
islature passed a bill in 2014
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,” said
Sarah Kincaid, an entomolo-
gist with the Oregon Depart-
ment of Agriculture’s Insect
Pest Prevention and Manage-
ment Program.
To fulfill that mandate,
Kincaid’s department teamed
up with the Oregon State
University Extension Service
and the Oregon Department
of Forestry in 2017 to cre-
ate the Oregon Bee Project.
Their mission is to expand
our understanding of local
bees, to increase their habitat
through working with farm-
ers and gardeners (beginning
with a Flagship Farm pro-
gram), and to protect them
from pesticide exposure and
disease, in part by training
pesticide applicators.
“Our long-term goal is
really to assess whether or not
bee species here in Oregon are
declining or whether or not
they’re stable,” Kincaid said.
To do that, first they need
to figure out exactly what spe-
cies call Oregon home —
something the state has never
had the resources to do. So the
Bee Project turned to volun-
teers. Now anyone can sign
up with a local team as part of
what organizers are calling the
Oregon Bee Atlas.
Which brings us back to
the team in Yamhill County.
“Here comes a longhorn
bee,” O’Loughlin said, as he
took aim and swung his net,
detonating a small explosion
of pollen.
The volunteers spent an
hour netting bees, recording
the plants they were found
on, and preserving just one
of each in boxes, just as other
teams are doing across the
state.
The diversity of bees from
just this one winery was
mind-boggling. There were
glistening-green
metallic
sweat bees, bright-red clepto-
parasitic nomad bees, small
black lasioglossum bees that
look like flying ants, and a
spectrum of fuzzy bumble
bees.
“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,”
O’Loughlin said. “Which just
makes you wonder, what have
I been missing?”
But collecting the bees
is only the first step. Next,
they have to figure out what
species they’ve found. That
might seem easy when you’re
trying to tell a honey bee from
a bumblebee, but try tell-
ing one of the dozen species
of bumblebee from another,
to say nothing of the hun-
dreds of other bee species and
creatures like flies and bee-
tles that have evolved to look
like bees, and chances are you
need an expert.
And bee experts are some-
thing of an endangered spe-
cies themselves.
So the Bee Atlas decided
to train their own. In July,
O’Loughlin and other bud-
ding bee lovers gathered at
Oregon State University for
the very first Oregon Bee
School, a weeklong course
on identifying native bees, at
least to the genus level, taught
by bee taxonomist Lincoln
Best.
The mornings were made
up of lectures, breaking bees
down by the major groups.
Then afternoons were spent
squinting at specimens under
microscopes, and then try-
ing to work their way through
binder-sized
identification
keys that read like a Choose-
your-own-bee-adventure
book. Granted, one that’s
written with scientific jargon
that may as well be a foreign
language.
For instance, little more
than a half hour passed on the
first day before O’Loughlin’s
tablemate, Toni Stephan, got
stuck. “‘Equal to half or less
than half of the distance sepa-
rating the lateral oscellus from
the inner margin of the eye,’”
she read, moving her eyes
from her key to the mystery
bumblebee beneath her scope.
“Wow,” is all O’Loughlin
had to say, his eyes reflecting
back her exasperation.
“It hasn’t taken us any-
where yet: my god,” con-
cluded Stephan, as her head
fell into her hands.
Even though it’s painstak-
ing work, O’Loughlin said the
endless diversity and discov-
ery are a reward in themselves.
“Looking at them through
a microscope opens up a
whole different world. You
may think that you’re look-
ing at, say, a small black bee,
but get it under a microscope,
and you’re seeing all sorts of
colors: shiny colors, differ-
ent hair colors, golden hairs,
stuff that you would never see
with the naked eye. Especially
when you’re 56 years old, you
definitely would not see that.”
The idea is that, if the Ore-
gon Bee Atlas can chart where
various bee species live and
what plants they pollinate, we
can better protect and even
cultivate them.
Although, as O’Lough-
lin joked, they’re all secretly
hoping to be the one who dis-
covers 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.
CRITTERS CONGREGATE
IN PILOT ROCK
Christian Murdock/The Gazette via AP
A snowboarder cuts a fresh line under the Treasure
Stoke chairlift Saturday, Oct. 13, on the first day
of the 2018-19 ski season at Wolf Creek Ski Area in
Colorado. Wolf Creek was the first ski area in North
America to open after 30 inches of fresh snow, and
will operate on Saturdays and Sunday for now.
Colorado ski industry
virtually protected
from drought
By JASON BLEVINS
The Colorado Sun
DENVER — Reservoirs
have turned to dust. Farmers
have fallow fields.
But don’t expect the skiing
to languish.
Ski resorts have spent
many decades amassing
water rights and water storage
and continuously upgrading
snowmaking systems to make
the state’s vibrant, multibil-
lion-dollar resort industry vir-
tually immune to drought —
so long as this winter, farmers
and ranchers have repeatedly
said over the summer, is wet-
ter than last winter and those
critical reservoirs are filled to
brimming come spring.
“I think everybody is fine
right now. I think everyone is
going into the season in good
shape,” said Glenn Porzak,
the preeminent water lawyer
who has worked with resorts
for more than 30 years to cor-
ral water rights and develop
storage.
It was the devastating sea-
sons of 1976-77 and 1980-81
that spurred the state’s resorts
to do more than pray for
snow. Those were the seasons
when Breckenridge trucked
in chunks of ice chiseled from
St. Mary’s Glacier and when
Steamboat deployed locals to
shovel snow onto bald runs.
In the aftermath of those
lean seasons, resorts started
investing in water rights and
storage to feed more aggres-
sive snowmaking.
They developed more than
just on-the-hill storage ponds.
Clinton Gulch Reservoir, a
former mining impound south
of Copper Mountain that sold
to ski areas and municipal-
ities in 1992, holds 4,500
acre feet. The 3,300-acre-foot
Eagle Park Reservoir, built
in the 1960s to hold tailings
from the Climax molybde-
num mine, was cleaned up for
water storage in 1998.
Both reservoirs, which
hold resort-owned water for
snowmaking, are near full
as the snowmaking season
begins.
“Resorts have ample stor-
age,” said Porzak, speaking
of the Eagle, Summit and
Grand county ski areas that
use Clinton Gulch and Eagle
Park water to replenish any
upstream water diverted for
snowmaking.
And that storage shifts
from reservoir to ski slopes
in the coming months. That’s
the thing about snowmaking:
80 to 90 percent of the water
that makes snow returns to
rivers and streams after it has
served skiers.
“I’m not too worried about
snowmaking because the
water is used to make snow
— that becomes our natural
water-storage system,” said
Liza Mitchell, who compiles
weekly river and snowpack
reports for the Roaring Fork
Conservancy, which protects
the watershed below five ski
areas in the Roaring Fork Val-
ley. “A lot of that water infil-
trating the ground recharges
groundwater supplies or runs
off into the river. As a river-fo-
cused organization, we see
snowmaking as not necessar-
ily a bad use of water.”
A
nimals, including deer, squirrels, chip-
munks, porcupines and woodpeckers,
make their homes around McKay Creek
near Pilot Rock.
Photos contributed by Mike and Barbara Morehead