Researchers at the University of Rhode Island’s Bee Lab in Kingston are all abuzz over an exciting ecological discovery in some local cranberry bogs.
Two University of Rhode Island researchers, graduate student Ren Johnson and senior Abigail Gill, were looking into the life of the wild fruit plants when they discovered two bee species never before spotted in the Ocean State.
One is the Eastern Cranberry Blunt Horn Bee and the other a Nomad Bee, sometimes called a “Cuckoo Bee.” Both are important because cranberries are difficult to pollinate.
According to URI’s announcement, Gill and Johnson regularly visited the cranberry bogs last summer. It took five to six hours to process and collect the bees each time.
The pair are students at URI’s College of the Environment and Life Sciences. Johnson said they had to withstand many challenges, “Doing any research in bogs and swamps is difficult—lots of boots filled with water and trudging through waist-deep swamps. Finding a way to get to the bees was the most difficult part.”
The school said by the time the research was done the duo had collected about a thousand bees. Gill said, “There’s a world of fascinating things to discover, as long as you take the time to slow down and see them.”
URI’s Bee Lab is located on an 85-acre farm in Kingston—where the team is taking a first-ever census of the insects in the Ocean State.
What has been learned so far: bees are feeling the sting of climate change.
“For one thing, global warming is slowly shifting ranges of certain species of bees,” URI researcher Casey Johnson explained. “Bees might be moving to higher altitudes or higher latitudes as well, moving a bit farther north as our climate is warming. We’re losing species without even ever really knowing that they’ve existed in a space.”
