To Learn Bees’ Secrets, Count Them One by One
The New York Times
The decline of bee populations is a looming crisis, but there is a dearth of scientific data. Hyperlocal researchers, with nets and notebooks, could be key.
All through late summer and early fall, Max McCarthy, a graduate student at Rutgers University, walked around wetlands in northern New Jersey with a mesh net catching bees, which he marked with tiny colored pens. Three dots, each a different color, on the bees’ minuscule thoraxes before releasing them again. He wrote this information in his notebooks, counting up the insects one by one.
These are not just any bees. Mr. McCarthy is hunting a rare bee called Andrena parnassiae. The species is only found near a flowering plant called grass of Parnassus, which, in the Northeast United States, only grows in alkaline wetlands, or fens.
By tagging the bees, Mr. McCarthy, along with his adviser Rachael Winfree, an ecologist at Rutgers, is trying to see how easily these insects can move between habitat patches, and how far. As their ecosystem is disrupted by climate change, development and invasive species, how well will the insects adapt?
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