Matthew: Welcome to Bug Banter with the Xerces Society where we explore the world of invertebrates and discover how to help these extraordinary animals. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate.

Rachel: Hi, I’m Rachel Dunham in Missoula, Montana.

Matthew: And I'm Matthew Shepherd in Portland, Oregon.

Rachel: How are native bee species in the U.S. doing in light of the major threats they are facing? What more do we need to know to protect them? There are over 3,600 species of native bees in the United States, but we only know the conservation status of about 20%. This makes it difficult to make decisions about how to prioritize bee conservation.

Rachel: Joining us to discuss this problem—or challenge—is Saff Killingsworth, Xerces’ endangered species conservation biologist. Saff coordinates the State of the Bees initiative, working with researchers and land managers to assess the status of wild bees in the Western U.S., and address their conservation needs. She also works to advance conservation of butterflies and fireflies in Arizona.

Rachel: Welcome, Saff! We’re very excited to have you on Bug Banter today.

Saff: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Matthew: Yeah, no, great. Thanks for joining us. What do we know about the status of bee species in the U.S.? I mean, like, how many are there? I mean, it seems like even some of these really fundamental questions we don't always have great answers to.

Saff: Yeah, yeah. Well like Rachel just said, there's at least 3,600 species of bees in the U.S., and they come in all different shapes and sizes, and they live super diverse lives—have lots of interesting life history. But we only know the conservation status of about 600 species. So that means for the vast majority of U.S. bee species, we don't know which ones are stable and which ones are in decline. And our understanding of those 600 species that have been assessed, that only comes from just a couple of bee groups. Those are primarily the bumble bees, the leafcutter bees, wool carder bees and mason bees. And those groups of bees are not necessarily representative of bees as a whole. So while we do know some things about bee extinction risk, it's largely based on just a fraction of U.S. bee species.

Saff: And this is especially important because over the last several decades there's been huge increase in pollinator conservation funding and interest, which has been awesome. It's like delivered a lot of great conservation for species that we know are imperiled that desperately need conservation attention. But we still need information about all species so we can tailor effective conservation efforts to meet the specific needs of the species that are most imperiled. Without that kind of information, we risk losing some of our lesser-known, more specialized, or even our less widespread species if we're tailoring conservation towards the species that we know a lot about.

Matthew: We tend to work on what we know and overlook what we don't. You mentioned, you know, some species—do we know how many bees are imperiled? I mean, there's a lot we don't know, but, how many are there out there that we need to be worried about?

Saff: Yeah. Based on the groups that have been assessed, we know that about a quarter of North American bumble bees face some risk of extinction. And for assessed bees overall—so that bigger 600 species number that I mentioned—that number is about closer—it's closer to about 35% of all bee species that have been assessed face some risk of extinction.

Matthew: Wow, so a third of our species?

Saff: Yeah.

Matthew: Wow. Yeah, that's shocking. So what are the major threats that they're facing?

Saff: We're still working to understand a lot of what the specific threats to individual species of bees are. But we know that many species of bees are threatened by climate change, by habitat loss and degradation, exposure to pesticides, especially insecticides, pathogens spread from managed bee species, including the European honey bee, and also managed populations of bumble bees that are used in agriculture, and also in some cases competition with honey bees.

Matthew: Yeah, it seems like the usual suspects. I'm sure many of our listeners have already heard that—a similar list many times. But it's always good to remind people that these are the things we're struggling with. You mentioned more than 3,600 species of bees in the U.S. How many of them are non-native? I can think of three in my own garden—I've seen the European wool carder, I've seen horned-face mason bee, and I've seen honey bees. Are there many non-native bees in this country?

Saff: There's been about 30 non-native bee species reported from the U.S. and 14 of those are reported just from Hawaii. So Hawaii sees this larger burden of non-native bee species, which is a common scenario in invasion biology on—small islands have higher proportions of non-native fauna. Of those 30 that I mentioned, it's not totally clear how many of those have persisted in the wild since their first recording. Some of these species were recorded in the sixties and there's not great data on if they have stable populations in the U.S. still. The three that you mentioned are particularly well established, especially the European honey bee, compared to some of the other species on that list.

Matthew: I know when we talk about conservation, we focus on supporting species in need. I mean, with our non-native species, should we be worried about them from a conservation perspective?

Saff: I think that these non-native species warrant some attention because of their possible impacts on native species here in the U.S. Some of those non-native species have been reported to compete for nest sites, or floral resources, facilitate the spread of pathogens, they may disrupt pollinator networks. And I think probably we need more resources devoted to tracking exotic species here in the U.S., and exotic species wherever they occur. They're probably not the main threat to our native bee fauna here, which is much more likely to be threatened by habitat loss and degradation, and climate change, and exposure to pesticides. In terms of working on the conservation of non-native species in their ranges where they're non-native, that's not a conservation priority that I'm focusing on. I'm not focused on the conservation of say like the European honey bee. It may be a conservation priority in its native range, but in the case of the European honey bee here in the U.S., that's a managed species that is not a concern from a conservation standpoint.

Rachel: Thank you for that great background information. I'm excited now to dive into something that you have been and will continue to work on, and that's the State of the Bees project. Can you explain what that is?

Saff: Yeah, the State of the Bees initiative is a multi-year collaborative effort to assess the status of all U.S. bee species. So we have 600 that have been previously assessed, and we're working to assess all of the species that have not yet had their conservation statuses examined. To do that we use standardized methods from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Red List—that's the IUCN for short—as well as NatureServe. Both of these methods are standardized, and in the case of the IUCN methods, they're used internationally, and in the case of the NatureServe methods, they're used in Canada and the U.S. And they translate pretty well from one to another—they use a lot of the same criteria. The assessment process is an iterative process. So I think in an ideal world, it's meant to be done every 10 years or so, but it's quite labor intensive, so on the ground it might not look like that.

Saff: The methods that I mentioned are used to determine the extinction risk of all sorts of organisms, from whales to corals, also plants are included in these methods, as well. And they include the evaluation of a number of criteria. So briefly, that includes looking at things like the population size of a given species, determining if it's—if that population is in decline, examining the range, size, and threats that might be occurring on that range, as well as a number of other criteria.

Saff: So in my work, I work species by species, and I examine each individual bee species—conduct a number of analyses that are outlined in these methods. I do a comprehensive review of the species biology. So that includes looking at things like their dietary breadth—how many species of plants do they forage from? I look at their habitat, and I also look at their phenology. So when they emerge, when they're mating, when they're hibernating, when they're in, when they're populating—all that information is phenology. And then I do an assessment of threats, and then finally assign a conservation ranking. So this is anywhere from “Least Concern” to “Critically Endangered.” And then I'll also note that “Data Deficient” is a category, as well, which is fairly common to assign to invertebrates just based on the data that we have available for them.

Rachel: So just to clarify, the bee species that are included in this initiative are all 3,600?

Saff: Yeah. In the long term we wanna assess all U.S. bee species. Just a tiny, little project. Haha. Yeah, so we're primarily focusing on the 3,000 that have not yet been assessed. In the short term, I'm working on, the mining bees from the genus Andrena. And this genus of bees has a little over 400 species in the U.S. And there's a high proportion of dietary specialists in this genus. So, those are species that restrict their foraging to just a suite of plant species—sometimes as broad as a plant family, like all of the sunflower family, and sometimes that's just as narrow as one single plant species. And dietary specialists are hypothesized to have an elevated extinction risk based on ways that climate change may impact their host plants.

Rachel: So earlier you mentioned “Data Deficient,” and I imagine with a lot of these smaller bees, it's not like bumble bees—. Like with the Bumble Bee Atlas program, you're going out and you're capturing these bumble bees, and you're cooling them down, taking photos, and being able to identify them. A lot of these smaller bees, unfortunately, you have to take lethal action to be able to even identify them. So I imagine there's some data missing. But where do you get the data for all of these bees? And what proportion, I'm wondering, like is data deficient? Or are you—do you have enough data at this point?

Saff: Yeah, great question. Data come from, primarily from digitized museum specimen records. And these are records that are generated—from across the U.S. and elsewhere—from a variety of different research projects. So researchers asking questions about local bee fauna, or looking at bee fauna over time. And these records get curated in museums, and the associated data is digitized and then becomes publicly available. So the data that I'm using comes largely from a team of researchers led by Paige Chesshire, who collated all of this publicly accessible, digitized museum specimen data. And then cleaned it, and vetted it, and had taxonomist consult on the validity of certain occurrences. And this is considered the best quality data for the U.S.—using digitized museum specimen records.

Saff: And then I also use private research collections, as those are provided to me by researchers, which is super helpful. Shout out to the people that have generously donated their data—it makes a big difference. 
Yeah, so that's primarily where the data comes from. In invertebrate assessments thus far, it's common to see—for other groups—it's common to see something around 50% data deficiency. In our work so far, we have probably a little bit less than that—somewhere maybe closer to 30—and we have some kind of workarounds for that [that] I can get into when we talk about methods—some of the specifics on the methods I'm using.

Rachel: That's a really small number. So you had mentioned that you have worked with other folks. Are you doing this by yourself, or do you have other organizations that you're partnering with, or researchers?

Saff: Yeah. This is a really kind of “It Takes a Village” sort of project. I work primarily with Dr. Hollis Woodard's lab at the University of California, Riverside, and her amazing postdoc, Oscar Martínez López. We also collaborate with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, and the state wildlife agencies of Vermont, Texas, Washington, and California that all have a stake in getting these unassessed bees assessed. And then we also benefit from the input from a variety of bee researchers across the U.S.

Rachel: That's amazing. I think conservation is always better when we partner together. There's a lot of great people doing good work out there.

Saff: For sure.

Rachel: Happy to hear it.

Saff: Yeah. Yeah.

Rachel: So before we move on, you know, this is a big project. Haha. It's a lot of, a lot of effort, a lot of work. What's the timeline?

Saff: Yeah. I mean, to do all of them it'll be many more years. Right now we have the goal to complete 500 assessments, and we're funded to do that through 2026. Beyond 2026 our funding is uncertain, but we'll be pursuing additional funding to be able to assess all of the U.S. bee species. So definitely a multi-year project with kind of a long timeline, but hoping to get all of those Andrena and some additional species done by 2026.

Matthew: And I think it's amazing because I remember when I started in pollinator conservation, we didn't even know really how many bee species there were in this country. And you know, over the 20, 25 years since these numbers have become better and better refined. And so, to have you doing this project is amazing. And in the introduction, Rachel noted that not knowing the conservation status of native bees can hinder decisions or conservation projects. I'd just like to explore that a little bit more. First, could you explain what is meant by conservation status?

Saff: So that is the shorthand for the conservation rank that we assign to a species. So, we wanna know where a species is between stable and critically endangered. And so knowing that piece of information helps us to advance their conservation. So we're able to sort of—. If we were given, you know, when we are given a list of all 3,600 bees, do we work on the conservation of all of them with our limited resources, or do we focus on a subset? And how do we prioritize them? So it's basically this ranked system, assigning a conservation status to each species, so we're able to communicate across the country and into other countries, as well, about a category that we all agree on.

Matthew: Yeah. And that's the advantage of having a standardized system, as you were explaining earlier, so that—.

Saff: Yeah.

Matthew: —when it's assigned, people understand what it means. This information obviously can help conservation decisions and projects, and maybe you've already covered this, but I'm just, you know—do you have examples of maybe how your work—is your work already being adopted and used by people?

Saff: Yeah, there's a lot of interest in this work, especially at the state level. So state wildlife agencies conduct a revision of their State Wildlife Action Plan every 10 years. So this is a document that each state wildlife agency generates to outline their conservation priorities within the state. And within that is a list of Species of Greatest Conservation Need. And these are the species identified as in need of conservation attention within the state. And for species that are included on that list, it makes it possible to allocate resources and funding to them.

Saff: Many of these State Wildlife Action Plans are currently in review right now—they're having their 10-year update—and so a lot of these states are wanting more information about the bee fauna that occur within their state, and what their conservation status is. When a species of any group has a conservation ranking, like “Least Concern,” or “Vulnerable,” or “Critically Endangered,” that makes it easier to include them on these Species of Greatest Conservation Need lists. And so by having species that have a conservation ranking, they can be added to the conservation priorities of the states in the United States.

Matthew: No, it's really exciting that your work is already being used by others. You can see it's already having an impact. Presumably part of the information that you gather means that there can be more detailed conservation focus on some of these species. Because I mean, essentially all bees need the same thing, right? They need flowers, they need somewhere to nest, they need protection from pesticides. A stable climate would probably help, too. But do your conservation assessments allow someone to really focus in and drill down into providing the details of habitat, and protecting that?

Saff: Yeah, yeah. I think that I want to just go back about this concept of all bees needing the same thing.
We do know that, like you said, bees need safe places to nest, and overwinter, and they need access to food. So in the case of bees, that's pollen and nectar. And they need protection from pesticides. But within that, all of the different biologies of bees makes—there are a lot of room to play in here, there's a lot of different needs within this sort of umbrella. And so when we focus on the—our conservation on just the species we understand, we risk missing some of these species that have more specific biologies. We talk a lot in conservation about this umbrella effect where the protection of one species may have conservation benefits for the species that it co-occurs with. And this may be true in some cases, but it's probably a lot more complicated than that.

Saff: So I think a helpful example is the western bumble bee and Andrena blennospermatis. Unfortunately, that species does not have an accepted common name, so I'll be getting tongue tied over that a bit, but the western bumble bee, Bombus occidentalis, that's a species that's currently under review to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. It's a species that Xerces has been working to advance the conservation of for over a decade now, and we're happy to see U.S. Fish and Wildlife consider it for listing under the Endangered Species Act. And it was historically common across much of the Western United States. Andrena blennospermatis is a bee that occurs just in threatened vernal pool habitats in the greater San Francisco Bay area. It's an extreme dietary specialist. It only forages from a few species of plants, and it occurs entirely within the range of the western bumble bee.

Saff: So conservation actions that benefit the western bumble bee like reducing pesticide use across its range would probably benefit Andrena blennospermatis. But Andrena blennospermatis needs a much more tailored conservation plan. It needs protection for its threatened habitat. It needs stable and plentiful food from its real narrow host plants. It needs protection from mosquito abatement projects that sometimes occur in its habitat where it's adjacent to residential areas. So tailoring conservation actions to just the species we understand means that things like Andrena blennospermatis might not have their very specific and serious threats mitigated. So each of the assessments that I conduct will outline sort of the specific habitat needs that are required by each species, and it will make it a little bit easier to develop these specific conservation actions for specific species.

Matthew: I won't even try and pronounce the species name of that Andrena. But you mentioned vernal pools and the little I know about vernal pools, that mining bee likely has a very distinct seasonal period of activity, as well. So like you say, western bumble bee actions may not support it a great deal, but that may be because, you know, is that bee only active in April or May, for example? Whereas the peak emergence and activity periods for the western bumble bee is probably later in the year?

Saff: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And there's a number of species like this that I've already uncovered just through the Andrena that have these discrete ranges with very specific needs, and maybe they co-occur with a species that's already receiving conservation attention, but the conservation attention that's being tailored for that known species might not be enough to address these lesser-known species.

Matthew: Yeah, that's very true. We're talking here about, you know, it happens that there's the western bumble bee, probably considered the generalist, and this vernal pool mining bee, which would be a specialist. You know, and don’t know if I'm just being a devil's advocate here and asking you annoying questions but, do you think that generalists have, you know, are more ecologically important than the specialists? Or do they all have their place of importance?

Saff: Yeah. Yeah, all bees occupy an important niche in our ecosystem, and we understand that niche better for some species than others. I would say generally speaking, generalists may contribute to the pollination of a wider suite of plant species than specialists, which makes them super cool and important for ecosystems, and—but specialists are likely to play a sort of outsized role in the pollination of the plants that they visit, especially if they're the only regular bee visitor to that specific plant species. So they all have their important place. And I'll just add that I think we often focus on like what bees can do for us. They pollinate our crops, they help produce our food, they maintain ecosystem stability. And I think that all bees, and all organisms for that matter, are intrinsically valuable. The bee diversity that we have today is fascinating, and it's beautiful, and it's the product of thousands of years of evolution. That alone makes bees worthy of conservation. No matter if they're specialists, or a generalist, or super common, or super rare, I think they're all worth considering.

Matthew: Yeah, I'm so pleased you went in that direction, because over the years I've had many conversations, and people are always like, “Well, what does it do for me?” And I'm like, “Why is it all about you?”

Saff: Yeah.

Matthew: You know, this is a species, and it has an intrinsic right to exist. And we need to recognize that as one part of this amazing planet that we live on.

Rachel: A part of me really hates that question because from my perspective I'm like, it doesn't matter, they're all important. But I think it's important to be said. Because I do hear some people say like, “Well, it's just only existing in this area, so how is that really gonna have a big impact?” But for all the reasons you said, Saff, they all matter, and they all have an important place. Whether that's an intrinsic value, or contributing to their ecosystem for this like one flower that wouldn't exist without this one bee. And I think that's so cool, like, that's so cool. And that's what's beautiful about diversity is that not everything is the same. Because it would be so boring if that were the case. Thank you for answering that really annoying question—I will admit, it's an annoying question. Haha.

Saff: My pleasure.

Matthew: And thank you, Rachel, for having me ask the annoying question.

Rachel: You are welcome. Haha.

Saff: Haha.

Rachel: So earlier you had mentioned that we don't have 100% data of all the bees. Can you tell us what are some of the challenges of assessing native bee populations?

Saff: Yeah, great question. We lack a lot of information about many species of bees. That includes about their life history, or where they occur. And that makes it really hard to apply some of the criteria for assessing extinction risk that the IUCN and NatureServe use. So just as a contrast, like assessing something like pandas is a lot easier because you might actually be able to like estimate the number of pandas alive in the wild, and track how that number changes over time. And that is simply not a luxury that we have for bees. Bee data is limited in its quality and its quantity. And there's been a number of recent studies that highlight some of these issues.

Saff: One of them is Paige Chesshire et al., 2023. This is the paper that generated the data set that sort of provides the backbone of my dataset that I'm using to assess extinction risk. One of the findings of this paper described that bee data completeness in the U.S. is limited. So that means there's a lot of regions in the U.S. where the observed species diversity is a lot lower than the expected species diversity. So we would expect to see many more species of bees in some regions, and we don't see that for a variety of reasons. It could be because there's been limited sampling there, or there's been—there's limited digitization of the specimens that have come from there. Or perhaps also because there's not currently an alive taxonomist that knows how to identify that suite of bee species. There’re all sorts of issues with regards to how bees get from—how be data gets from like the actual organism to available for use.

Saff: Another bee data paper that came out in 2024 from Josée Rousseau et al., described how rare it is that specimen records include important contextual information like sampling effort and survey protocol. And so those are two little bits of data that really help contextualize each occurrence. It helps us to understand how rare or common something might be. So when I look at an occurrence record, I'd like to know what are the conditions that produced that record. So I wanna know something like for this particular occurrence I'm looking at, is it because—was it generated because somebody walked out their front door and netted that species immediately? Or was it generated because 10 people looked for 10 hours to find it and only found one? That kind of information would be super helpful in trying to determine if a species is common, if a species is rare, and we don't typically have that for most digitized museum specimen records.

Saff: So this presents a bit of a problem when we try to employ the standardized methods from the IUCN and NatureServe. There are hundreds of species in the U.S.—bee species in the U.S.—that are known from 20 observations or fewer. So we can't really make any determinations about a population trend like we might be able to do with a panda. So to address this, Xerces and our project partners, we've been working with the broader bee research community to develop some widely accepted methods that work a bit better given what we know about bee biology, what we know about the state of bee data, and that fit within existing frameworks.

Saff: Central to these methods is the use of species distribution models. These are basically a hypothesis of where a species might live. So when we're trying to make a determination about a bee’s range, one of the crudest ways that we could do this is look at all records of the species and draw circle around it and say, this is the species’ range. Species distribution model is on the more refined end of this, where we take the bee data that we have—. And this can be—this is an approach that can be used even when we don't have that many records for a species. So we look at where we know the bee occurs, and then we look at the conditions where those bees were collected. So we can include factors like the climate, the vegetation community, the elevation, the soil type. And then we use that information to generate a distribution of where those other conditions occur.

Saff: So with that sort of hypothesized range, we can examine the—where we think a species occurs—even if we don't know that much about it—and then make determinations about what kinds of threats are occurring there from climate change, or pesticide use, or land use change and use that to assign a rank to a species. So it's been a really awesome process to collaborate with all of these researchers to try to figure out what methods are the most meaningful, given that we have this huge need for assessing the extinction risk, so that we're able to work on their conservation.

Rachel: It's so much more involved than what meets the eye of what people would think of. Like, “Oh yeah, you're assessing the bee status. I totally get that.” But as you're talking about these challenges, it's, yeah, it's a lot deeper than that. But it sounds like you've come up with some good solutions. So are there any particular regions of the U.S. that are lacking records compared to others? And what do you do to make up for that? For bees that are really wide ranging.

Saff: Yeah. Based on some of the findings from that Chesshire et al., 2023 paper I mentioned that looked at bee data completeness, they showed a big hole in Nevada. So there's—a lot of Nevada there's much higher expected species richness than has been observed. That's also true for a lot of the Southeast U.S., and then some parts of Montana, as well, are some of the highlighted regions from that paper. Yeah, I think that—. First of all, like just beginning this project and elevating the need for some of this data can help sort of make up for that, like inspiring people in those regions to either digitize the existing material that they have, or look for certain species. This is all limited by funding for taxonomy, which is—has been a huge issue in this field for a number of decades. So it's not really so easy as just like digitizing the existing records—it requires funding and dedicated staff. But that would be, you know, the first approach to making up some of those gaps in the data. But short of that, the ability to use species distribution models can identify habitats that might be suitable for a given species, even if it's not yet been recorded there. So again, it's a hypothesis that we'll need to be tested, but yeah, that's how we work around it at the current stage, given the data we have.

Rachel: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, with a recent State of the Butterflies report that we had a previous podcast about, we talked a lot about [how] a lot of survey data was gathered by community scientists. Is there any similar survey data existing for the bees that you're assessing?

Saff: Yeah, it's a little bit more tricky because as you alluded to, a lot of bees need to be killed to be able to be identified, or at least examine them in the microscope. They're not—many species of bees are not identifiable in the hand by novices, by non-experts. And so there are a number of native bee atlases that are starting to work on this within states. Those include Washington, and Oregon, and Vermont, among others. There's a number of other states that are working on initiatives like this that are training up community members to be able to look for these bees and then identify them. So that's a huge push. But yeah, it's—the availability of community sourced data is a lot more limited compared to butterflies because of how difficult many of these species are to identify.

Matthew: Obviously, there's so much work that goes into developing these assessments, and you've already mentioned that some of the states are taking the data for their Wildlife [Action] Plan reviews. I mean, is there anything else that you plan to do with this information?

Saff: Yeah, so the first thing is that all assessments will be publicly available through the IUCN and NatureServe website, so any member of the public can check them out. As part of the funding agreement that I'm working in right now through 2026 with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, that—Vermont Center for Ecostudies is working on collating a database of all of the species that we're assessing to include information about their life history traits, and where they occur, and when you can detect them. So that immediately becomes a resource for the states that are interested in working on the conservation of these species, as well as any interested party in bee conservation.

Saff: All of the results are communicated with state wildlife agencies, and other land management agencies so that the species most in need of conservation can be included in conservation efforts. And then Xerces can then work to develop species- or region-specific recommendations for conservation, or perhaps developing monitoring plans down the line for the most imperiled species, or focusing on a data deficient suite of species. So there's really kind of unlimited future directions here, given the right funding, and staffing, and availability to sort of dial down into some of the findings of this, and focus on species that are most in need of conservation, or regions that are most in need, or regions that are data deficient, et cetera.

Matthew: So this is pretty much like the kind of background foundation work that you're doing that will provide something that other people can build from. I remember many years ago now, 15, 20 years ago, we did a, an initial kind of red data list of bees. And listening to the information that you are gathering, I mean, I realize how far advanced you have become from that. But even that simple effort people will be seeing it, and then be like, “Oh, this one says ‘Data Deficient.’” And they will be taking that and trying to fill in that, some of those gaps. So it's exciting to just, to sit back and, and think about what the potential impact of your work is.

Saff: Yeah. Yeah, it's the same kind of path that we saw in Xerces with the bumble bee—with bumble bee assessment. So it was Rich Hatfield and other collaborators, Sarina Jepsen, and others that conducted the bumble bee extinction risk assessments that led to the identification of a number of bumble bee species in need of conservation attention. And that sparked a lot of our work in developing Bumble Bee Atlases so that we could look for the species that are most imperiled, and collect other information about their habitat needs. And that's really contributed to the conservation of those species. So it's really a necessary first step for beginning to figure out like which species should we be focusing on, and what do they need?

Matthew: And do you think that your work might spur people to do similar—State of the Flies, State of the Beetles? You know, there are so many.

Saff: I hope so!

Matthew: Yeah. There are so many other pollinating insects that it'd be so cool.

Saff: Yeah.

Rachel: Are there ways that the public can get involved in this initiative, or contribute? I mean, we've talked a lot about providing habitat, not using pesticides, doing what you can to reduce your carbon footprint. I mean, I assume if there is a state initiative in your state to get involved in doing some community science, that seems like a great step for people.

Saff: Yeah, for sure. If your state has a native bee atlas like Washington, Oregon, Vermont, and there's others that I, forgive me, I can't remember right now, but joining those is especially important—especially if the data generated from that are publicly available. That becomes immediately useful to me and my team working on the assessments. The recommendations that you made with regards to what people can do in their own communities and homes like reducing pesticides, and providing abundant and diverse forage for bees is great. Working—. If you're living in a state with a Bumble Bee Atlas, participating in that is—continues to be helpful for our understanding of bumble bees, even though it's just a narrow suite of the bees that live in the U.S. And then lastly, I'll just say if any listeners are bee researchers and you'd like to contribute your data, I'd be happy to accept it. We have an email for this project that is stateofthebees@xerces.org, and I'd be happy to talk about using your data and correctly attributing you. So get in touch if you have bee data you're sitting on and would like to share.

Matthew: Yeah, no, it's definitely important to be able to tap into as much good data as you can. So, thank you so much, Saff. This has been really great. We're coming to the end of our conversation—there's always a little bit of sadness when it's been such a good one. But we like to end our episodes with the same two questions that we pitch out to every one of our guests. So, I mean, what inspired you to pursue a career in insect conservation?

Saff: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I started my schooling and career as a botanist, so I was really interested in plants. And it wasn't ‘til my last year of my undergrad that I had an opportunity to do some research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Colorado. And I worked with Jessica Forrest from the University of Ottawa, who's just a fabulous ecologist—she studies all sorts of interesting dynamics between insects and plants, and hybrid zones, and climate change. And it was with her that I started working with mason bees, and just looking at all of the really interesting behaviors that arise from bees that specialize on a restricted suite of plants. So once I—yeah, once I sort of saw this, the plant pollinator dynamic from the pollinator perspective, I was hooked.

Rachel: I love that. My cheeks always hurt during that question because I smile so much. I just love hearing people's stories, and what inspire them.

Saff: Yeah.

Rachel: So, last question—and this one is a hard one for folks. If you could see any bug—bug being a very loose term—in the wild—being anything not in captivity—what would it be?

Saff: Yeah, definitely a hard question. I am a sucker for the really shiny glittery bugs, and so I think that I would probably—I would love to see one of the really shiny metallic orchid bees, the Euglossa bees. I've never seen one, so that's top of the list, but there's so many options, so many good ones to choose from.

Rachel: Well, thank you so much, Saff, for the work that you're doing on this initiative, and just getting all this great information for people, and for the future of our native bees, and for joining us today. I learned so much. It's been such a pleasure.

Saff: It's been a blast. And yeah, thank you for your excellent questions.

Rachel: Yeah, of course.

Matthew: Thanks.

Rachel: Bug Banter is brought to you by the Xerces Society, a donor-based nonprofit that is working to protect insects and other invertebrates—the life that sustains us.

Rachel: If you’re already a donor, thank you so much. If you want to support our work go to xerces.org/donate. For information about this podcast and for show notes go to xerces.org/bugbanter.