EMCC student, Alex Sweet, proudly displays bee samples
Arella Clark, an EMCC student, runs a photoshoot for the bees
Alex Sweet examines bees under the microscope
Have you heard the buzz around campus? Estrella Mountain Community College (EMCC) students are part of a National Science Foundation-funded native bee study!
The five-year project, titled “BUZZ: Engaging Community College Students in Native Bee Biodiversity Research,” aims to collect as much data as possible on the numbers and species of native bees in Arizona and California. EMCC is one of 28 colleges in the two states participating and currently has four students on its team.
The project officially kicked off in the fall of 2023, but really got humming here at EMCC the following spring after a group of our professors visited College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, Calif., the project’s lead school. There, they received instruction on bee identification, which they brought back and passed on to their students.
“We don’t even have a baseline to know how many bees we have,” Dr. Jarod Raithel, EMCC Biology Professor and faculty mentor, said at the time. “They are crucial to our survival, yet we know so little about them.”
But that’s rapidly changing.
Since the project began, EMCC students have caught and identified, or keyed, about 100 native bees. They still have more than 200 bees to process and key, but they’ve already identified 18 different genus types.
“It’s so exciting to catch a native bee that looks different from the rest of our samples,” said Alex Sweet, an EMCC Biological Sciences major who has been on the project for a year. “And it’s thrilling when we are able to confirm that it’s something we haven’t caught before.”
The students collect their samples from the main campus and the Base and Meridian Wildlife Area in the West Valley, with plans to expand their search area to the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. While out in the field, they record the time and date the bee was caught, the exact location of the bee using GPS, the type of plant the bee was found on, and even weather conditions. Then they bring their bees back to the lab where they are photographed and viewed under microscopes before being pinned and added to EMCC’s collection. Once the students are satisfied that they have correctly keyed the bee, they upload all of the bee’s information, including photographs, to a central database where a bee expert confirms or denies their findings.
They spend around seven to eight hours per week on the project and are compensated with stipends from the National Science Foundation and the EMCC STEM Center of Excellence.
“Those stipends make all the difference in allowing students to work less at their jobs and focus on their science,” Dr. Raithel said.
The students agree that the keying process is often the most satisfying, yet tedious and difficult, part of the project.
“For bees we don’t recognize or aren’t confident about identifying, we utilize a dichotomous key, which, for some bees, can take hours to work through,” said Arella Clark, an EMCC Biological Sciences major who also joined the project last fall.
But since the project launched, the students’ identification skills have improved significantly.
“At this point in the project, for the most part, we are able to ID bees without needing the dichotomous key at all,” Arella said. “We’ve learned a lot of the key features for many of the different genera of native bees in the Valley and can often identify them with a brief examination.”
The project is a great benefit to students looking to gain practical experience in field research, but it also advances broader conservation efforts, asking each college participant to engage in habitat enrichment to stabilize native bee diversity. EMCC is accomplishing this with its Pollinator-Wildflower Research Initiative, which launched at roughly the same time as the bee project.
The overall goal of the Pollinator-Wildflower Research Initiative is to seed the campus with more pollinator attractors. Students spent last year researching which soil types wildflowers grow best in. They learned that native soil is best, but irrigation issues, including the lack of monsoon storms, hampered the project, so this year, they’re focusing more on consistent watering.
“Our primary goal is to provide plenty of wildflower pollinators to support the BUZZ Bee student researchers and the EMCC Community Garden efforts,” said Dr. Catherine Parmiter, Life Sciences Faculty Chair and mentor. “Our second goal is to start a campus pop-up seed library.”
Alex participated in the Pollinator-Wildflower Research Initiative last year and said the experience has been a huge benefit to her in her current research.
“I became familiar with several plant species, which has helped me recall certain plants that we have caught native bees on,” Alex said. “Using that past knowledge, I’ve helped my team learn about different genera of native and non-native plants that grow regularly around Arizona.”
That wildflower-bee connection was the focus of the students’ presentation on Aug. 2 at the annual BUZZ Research Symposium at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita. Using data from the 28 colleges, they’ve been able to determine which native bee genus types are most likely to decline in population as a result of urbanization, as well as which floral hosts have the potential to allow them to forage and thrive in a concrete jungle.
“Our findings at this point indicate that a few native bee genera, especially those that are specialists and only utilize select resources, are strongly associated with natural habitats compared to urban habitats, meaning that as we lose those natural locations, their populations are likely to decline,” Arella said. “We also determined that while many bees seem very capable of foraging in an urban environment, all but one genus of native bee was more often found on native plants compared to non-native plants, which emphasizes the importance of native plants in urban landscaping.”
The presentation was a collaborative effort between the four students with Alex presenting on host significance, Arella on habitat associations, Maddie Zepp on further research and collaborations, and Zalli Salaiz on specific findings in Arizona.
“I love keying out and identifying bees I have never seen before,” Zalli said. “I always see honey bees when I am out on a walk, and I never thought to look twice at the other insects flying around, so by discovering these new bees and learning about them, it’s almost like I get a sneak peek into their little world.”
The conference presentations weren’t judged, but Dr. Raithel said the students “nailed it.”
“I have been absolutely blown away by their work ethic over this past year,” he said. “It’s next-level research.”
EMCC students who would like to get involved in the BUZZ: Engaging Community College Students in Native Bee Biodiversity Research project can email Dr. Raithel at [email protected]. Students interested in the Pollinator-Wildflower Initiative can email Dr. Parmiter at [email protected]. Students interested in exploring other undergraduate research experiences can email the EMCC STEM Center of Excellence at [email protected].