Which bumble bees are in Eau Claire?

Hello! Kinsley and Orlean here, 

We are the bumble bee surveying team here with updates about how our research went over the summer in Eau Claire, WI. 

Orlean and Kinsley surveying bumble bees in the rain!

For starters, the weather over summer was very interesting. We had many rainy days compared to other summers. However, we didn’t mind the rainy days as they were more bearable than the scorching, sunny days. The bumble bees sure liked the rainy days too as they are not fond of the 90+ degree heat, just like us. We have spent June-September surveying bumble bee populations in three different locations. We’ve been busy buzzing around Eau Claire with 177 surveys, splitting our time between Boyd Park (62 surveys), the UW–Eau Claire campus (62 surveys), and Phoenix Park (53 surveys), where we’ve gotten some exciting results!

And the bees? They’ve been everywhere. Across all surveys, we spotted over 9,000 bumble bees representing 13 different species! The real stars of the summer were Bombus impatiens (4,854 sightings) and Bombus griseocollis (2,654 sightings). Most exciting of all, the federally endangered rusty patched bumble bee (B. affinis, see the bee on the left below) made an appearance 12 times at Boyd Park!

We also have been observing flowers around Eau Claire. We have noted 1,417 flowers throughout the summer. For each flower, we tracked which bee species came to visit, helping us piece together a plant–pollinator interaction network that shows the buzzing connections shaping Eau Claire’s ecosystem.

Orlean on the lookout for bumble bees!

We’ve just completed our final surveys of the season this week, and we are gearing up to clean our data and create our poster presentation for the annual Entomological Society of America meeting this November. We are super excited to share our results at the meeting and to travel with our fellow lab members, Laura and Jensen, who are also presenting at the conference! For now, we are in the midst of classes and data analysis, and we cannot wait to continue working on our research throughout the semester whenever we can.

-Kinsley and Orlean