How to Save Wild Bees, Using Photography And Documentation with Sam Droege, World Bee Day, 2019

On world bee day, it is great to bring you this fascinating interview with someone who is passionate and dedicated to bees. Learn more from bees expert Sam Droege. 

What is your background briefly?

My background, tuning fork, muse, and counsel is Nature.  There has never been a choice for me but not to study and interpret Natural History.  So, while I have a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Science emphasizing natural sciences and statistics, it is the experience of thousands of hours outside watching, observers, catching, counting, and identifying in the wilds that is my real source of wisdom.  It continues … and now much of that learning and field work is focused on populations of wild bees.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

More relevant than ever give that childhood now is more indoors than it ever was and we lose our ability to understand the status of the environment, first hand.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

To understand the loss of wild bees, bee decline, or how to save bees, we must know more about the thousands of poorly known species.  Wild bees are so poorly known because they nest singly (usually in the ground), almost never sting, and don’t provide honey.  Consequently, almost no one can do more than name honey bee when asked what bees they might know.  That alone tells us that are lost as to how can we care for something when we don’t even know their names?

How much do we really know about bees?  Little, for example, we are about 100 years behind what the bird people know about birds.  Simple things like where they nest, giving names to all the species, documenting what flowers they visit and pollinate and their role in agriculture all are basic deficits.

How many species of bees globally have been named/what %?

There are few more than 20,000 named bees, but there are thousands more that need to be named.

How hard/easy is it for people like you to learn more about this?

Learning about bees is like learning about birds, you can take it to any level you like.  A good pair of close-focusing binoculars is all you need to get going, watching bees on flowers.   At higher levels, where identifying species are important, you need microscopes and more technical guides.  Depending on the part of the world identification can become difficult.

On the positive side, there are many organizations now focused on bee conservation, though many do not go further than working with domesticated honeybees, and so a little googling and regional websites with good information popup about common wild bees.  Efforts to learn through photographs (e.g., iNaturalist) also allow people to take pictures and learn from others experience as they share and identify photos together.