A Silver Digger Bee in Flight at Bodega Head – Bug Squad

So there we had been, trying out the bumble bee mimics (Anthophora bomboides stanfordiana) on Could 9 at Bodega Head, Sonoma County, and alongside buzzes a pollen-packing Habropoda miserabilis, the bee that UC Davis doctoral alumnus Leslie Saul-Gershenz research.

The feminine bee was actually making a “bee-line” for the mustard and wild radish. Bee analysis scientist John Ascher recognized it.

We bear in mind when Saul-Gershenz lent her experience to the “lengthy misplaced” silver digger bees present in March of 2019 within the newly restored sand dunes on the San Francisco Presidio.  The Presidio, a former navy submit, is now owned and operated by the Nationwide Park Service.

An authority on digger bees, Saul-Gershenz confirmed to the Nationwide Park Service officers that they’re H. miserabilis and had been most likely widespread within the sandy dunes of that space as late because the Nineteen Twenties. When non-native ivy, eucalyptus and ice crops took over their habitat, the bees disappeared.

“The invention of a thriving native bee colony on the western aspect of the Presidio is the newest instance of how the removing of invasive crops and the restoration of dunes and grasses on the former navy base have helped convey again coastal habitat that thrived in San Francisco for tens of hundreds of years earlier than town was constructed,” stated Saul-Gershenz, now a analysis scientist on the U.S. Division of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Analysis Service.

“I’m very joyful to see this nest website on the Presidio,” she instructed us on the time. She’s labored on the biology, chemical ecology and parasite interactions of this group of bees within the genus Habropoda for a lot of years–on analysis journeys which have taken her to the Oregon coast and the Mojave desert, amongst others.

She and several other colleagues are finishing a paper on H. miserabilis on its distribution and host plant use in western United States: “Habropoda miserabilis Cresson (Hymenoptera: Apidae): Floral Habits, Distribution, and Nesting Biology.”

“This nest parasite M. franciscanus was initially described from the dunes in San Francisco close to Lake Merced by Van Dyke in 1928,” Saul-Gershenz associated. “It’s presumed to be domestically extirpated in San Francisco attributable to habitat alteration. Nevertheless, its host bee, H. miserabilis,  seems to have lastly discovered an appropriate nest location in a sand dune space being restored by the Presidio Belief within the Presidio Nationwide Park.  The resiliency of nature offers hope for the long run.”

In a information story printed within the San Francisco Chronicle on March 29, 2019, science reporter Peter Fimrite quoted the UC Davis-trained entomologist as saying that the silver digger bees had been “all however gone” by the mid-Twentieth century.  Nevertheless, Saul-Gershenz has stored in search of them. Actually, she collected one close to Baker Seaside in 1998.

With restoration, comes hope for the return of native crops and bugs.

“Biologists have reported a greater than tenfold improve within the variety of native crops within the Presidio, together with not less than 4 which can be federally listed endangered or threatened, amongst them the Presidio clarkia,” wrote Fimrite. “The Franciscan manzanita, which was believed to be extinct within the wild, was found within the Presidio in 2009. It was the primary of its type seen in its native San Francisco for the reason that outdated Laurel Hill Cemetery was bulldozed in 1947 and paved over for houses.”

Gershenz and collaborator Jocelyn Millar of UC Riverside and others deciphered the intercourse attraction of Habropoda miserabilis and the misleading mimicking mix utilized by its nest parasite Meloe franciscanus working with a inhabitants on the coast of Oregon (Saul-Gershenz et al. 2018). They documented a brand new parasite-host location system whereas conducting analysis on associated species in the identical genus Habropoda pallida discovered within the Mojave and Sonoran Desert (Saul-Gershenz and Millar 2006).

The comeback of silver digger bees just isn’t restricted to San Francisco. Fimrite associated that a number of different areas in California are witnessing comebacks, together with Bodega Marine Reserve in Bodega Bay and Lanphere Dunes within the Humboldt Bay Nationwide Wildlife Refuge. 

Sure, they’re.