Pollinators of the Black Hills
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Jewel Cave National Monument’s 125 Years of Discovery Podcast Discovery Hour. Join us this episode as we listen to a presentation on the pollinators of the Black Hills, presented by University of Wyoming student Nina Crawford, recorded on July 5th, 2025. A transcript of this episode is available on our website, www.nps.gov/jeca.
Thank you for listening!
Well, thank you guys for joining me today! My name is Nina, and I'm a PhD student at University of Wyoming, so I'm actually not part of the park service, but I like to think I'm adopted by them because I am doing some research in the parks to learn more about bees and butterflies around here. So today I'm going to talk about what a pollinator is, some of the bees and butterflies you might see around Jewel Cave and on other hikes in the Black Hills of Wyoming and South Dakota, as well as what I'm doing when I go out into the field to learn more about these pollinators. So, I took these pictures: that is a half black bumblebee hanging out there on some showy milkweed, and that is a western tiger Swallowtail, also on some showy milkweed, so we really like milkweed around here. So, starting off, do you guys know what a pollinator is? Does anyone want to try and guess what a pollinator is or what they do? [They go from each flower to flower to spread pollen.] You nailed it. That is like seriously, almost exactly what I wrote on here. So, it’s any organism, which is just a fancy name for a critter that transfers pollen from one plant to another. So, here we have a bumblebee, it’s flying to one flower, and it's a really pretty flower that's attracting the bee with the color of the petals, and it's eating the pollen that's on the flower for some protein, and it's drinking the nectar for some sugar, and while it's munching on the flower, it picks up pollen, so accidentally it gets stuck to its body 'cause pollen's really, really sticky, and then it flies to the next flower 'cause it's not done eating quite yet, and that pollen can fall off; and when pollen is moved from one flower to another, then the flower can make seeds, which then makes more flowers!
So, without pollinators, flowers wouldn't be able to spread throughout the landscape and without flowers, bees and butterflies and other pollinators wouldn't have anything to eat! So, it's a very beautiful relationship between the two different organisms and they couldn't survive without one another. So, what does this look like in real time? Here we have a video that I'll play pretty shortly of a golden northern bumblebee, which is Bombus fervidus, hanging out on some wavy leaf thistle, Cirsium undulatum, which is really popular; it's a native thistle around here, and this is what it looks like in real time, so that bee is getting all up in there, it's eating all the nectar in the pollen and you can kind of see, if you look really closely on its behind, it's got lots of little speckles of pollen, and so when it goes to the next flower to have its dessert, it's gonna drop off some more of that pollen and the wavy leaf thistle can make way more flowers throughout the whole landscape, so, super helpful relationship between the two.
Alright, I've gave you guys some hints about what a pollinator is. Can anyone think of any kind of insects or animals that might be a pollinator? We just saw one. [Bees.] Great job! So, when we talk about bees, that's actually really interesting 'cause there's lots of different kinds of bees. So, the one that a lot of people are really familiar with are the honeybees, but honeybees are actually not native to the U.S. They're from Europe, like this European honeybee right here, and they are intended for agriculture. So, we'd love to eat honey. They are actually the only kind of bee that can make honey and beeswax. So, people have large farms, sometimes they're beekeepers themselves and they raise hives of honeybees to eat that honey. But there are actually thousands of other kinds of bees.
Even in this little area of the Black Hills of Wyoming and South Dakota, there's over 300 species. We get bees like sweat bees and bumblebees. There's lots of different kinds and it takes a really, really trained eye to be able to identify the different species of bees, and that's where I come in. I sit at a lab all day and I look at bees under a microscope, and I look at things like patterns on their wings, what color their abdomen is, if they have special hair under their legs, and stuff like that. And I just love it. It's so, so much fun. I hope to be a taxonomist that works in a museum that just IDs bees all day long. But there are just so many different kinds of bees that are all unique to North America, so even in the US there's over 4,000 species of bees, and honeybees and bumblebees are actually the only social ones. The majority of bees around here are actually solitary, so they live alone. They don't have a hive.
Moving on from bees, you already guessed it, butterflies are another huge pollinator. There's lots of different kinds around here, and I'm gonna go through some slides later that show all the common ones that you can see around here. They're just really beautiful, really great pollinators. Does anyone else have any guesses about what other pollinators there are? [Bats.] Nice! Okay, you absolutely killed that, but that's a little bit later. So, some other insect pollinators that we have are beetles - lots of beetles are good, great pollinators. Moths are really, really great pollinators, especially during the night. Some flowers only bloom at night, and those are moth-pollinated flowers. We also have ants, so sometimes when you pick a batch of peonies, they might be covered in ants. That's because peonies are pollinated by ants, which can sometimes be a nuisance when you bring 'em inside. Um, flies are another really great pollinator. Sometimes they will mimic the way that bees look, such as this bee fly absolutely named here, as well as hover flies are really good bee mimics and they're just trying to blend in as a bee and be like, “I'll sting you if you get too close to me”, but they don't actually sting. Wasps, as much as sometimes we don't like wasps, they are also really important pollinators. They have a really cool relationship with figs, that they're a fig pollinator and they eat their way in the figs and lay their eggs, and then when those eggs hatch, they help pollinate the fig. Birds, like you mentioned. So, something like a hummingbird is a really, really great pollinator 'cause they have those really, really long beaks that can help get into those flowers that have really deep petals. So those are made specifically for hummingbird pollinators; and then bats, great job! No one ever thinks about bats as pollinators because they don't pollinate a ton in this area. They're more tropical pollinators. But they eat fruit and visit flowers to drink nectar, much like all of these other pollinators do, and they help transfer pollen in that way, ‘cause a pollinator is just anything that transfers pollen from one flower to another. Alright, and then a quick shout out. All these photos are from Joel Sartor, who is a photographer with National Geographic and he's doing a project called The Photo Arc. He's trying to take a picture of every single organism on planet Earth and it's really, really cool, so I highly suggest checking it out. There's a couple of documentaries about him. Yeah! [Do humans count as pollinators?] That is a great question. Humans can be pollinators, especially for certain plants like pumpkins really need specialist pollinators, so sometimes people go out with like paint brushes and they'll pick up the pollen and then drop it into the next pumpkin, so then you would be a pollinator! Great question.
So why should we care? So, there's a lot of different reasons that pollinators are really important, but starting off with the human aspect of it, their huge agricultural importance. So, we have a graphic here that explains all the ways that pollinators are important to agriculture, and it kind of boils down to one and every three bites of food is thanks to a honeybee. Honeybees are really important tools for agriculture. In fact, there's a lot of different orchards such as almond orchards that will rent honeybees and they'll bring in their hives and they will pollinate all the almond trees and then that we get almonds. So, over half of the global leading crops benefit from pollinators, 35% of food from global food benefits from pollinators. So, without pollinators, we would not have a lot of the food that we love and enjoy on our plates. But beyond just agriculture, they're also critically important to our ecosystem. All of these flowers pictured here are thanks to pollinators. They're all insect-pollinated plants, and approximately 80% of all flowering plants are pollinated by animals. So, if we didn't have birds and bats, and bees and butterflies, and beetles and flies, and all those pollinators that I talked about, we wouldn't have beautiful wildflowers. You wouldn't be able to enjoy them on your trail hikes. Other organisms that eat flowers like deer and elk and mountain goats would not have their food supply, and then critters that eat those animals like raptors and mountain lions and coyotes would lose their food source too. So, we commonly regard pollinators as a keystone species, which means that when we lose pollinators, the rest of the ecosystem kind of collapses around them.
So, it's really important that we are protecting our pollinators, because, unfortunately, our pollinators are in danger. They're facing a variety of threats globally. Whether it is they're losing food and habitat resources due to agriculture expansion or urban expansion or pollution is a huge one - pathogens, there's a lot of different diseases that pollinators are struggling with right now, as well as pesticides, which we'll talk a little bit more about later, but even in these public lands that are dedicated to conservation like national parks, we're still seeing a 75% decrease over the past 27 years. And as upsetting as this might be, hope is not lost, I promise. You guys can help in a variety of ways. So, limiting chemical use on lawns is a huge one. People ask me about this a lot. Of course, I'm gonna be like, hmm, maybe no insecticides. Neonicotinoids that are a really commonly found ingredient in insecticides have been proven to be entirely fatal to bees and other pollinating insects. It disrupts their nervous system. But even something like Roundup, which is an herbicide, has shown to have 90% mortality for insects, so pretty sad. I'm here to give you a really great excuse to not mow your lawn during the month of May, so you can blame it on me. “No Mow May” means that you don't mow your lawn for the whole month of May and leave woody debris because that's really great nesting habitat for these solitary bees - there you can see a little bee peeking out on some undisturbed pile of soil so you don't have to do yard work for the whole month of May. And then planting pollinator friendly plants is huge. Some of you guys might not be from around here, so I encourage you guys to look up what is native in your own home, but here, milkweed, minarda(?), asters, and native thistles are really great food for pollinators, and I encourage you guys to plant that, something that blooms throughout the whole summer. So, having some springtime flowers and having some late summer flowers can really provide food for pollinators throughout the whole season that they are active.
Alright, moving on to some pollinators you can see around here. I'm gonna be going through some of the really broad families of butterflies you guys might see on your hike. There are nearly a hundred different species of butterflies in the area, so unfortunately, I don't have time to go over all of them, but I'll give you some really big groups so when you're on your walk and you see one whizzing past you, you might be able to get an idea about what it could be.
So, starting with the blues, which is in the family Lycaenidae, these are really tiny blue butterflies. They're about the size of a quarter, and they love grassland and mowed areas, so when I'm walking down Canyons Trail or around Roof Trail, I feel like I see a lot of these kind of hovering pretty low. They will do this behavior called puddling, which is kind of seen in the bottom picture there, where if there's a little body of water, like a puddle, then they will all gather and drink up all the water and get all the nutrients that that water leached out of the soil, so it's really fun to see them, they'll all hang out there. That orange one with the little orange band is a Melissa's blue, which I've seen plenty around here. And the one of the top corner is a silvery blue, so very fun. These ones are guys I feel like are pretty common.
Next, we have the sulfurs. As you can tell, scientists are really creative when they come up with common names for butterflies, and these are called the sulfurs because of that sulfury color. So, we have two major species in this area. Over here we have the orange sulfur, and on the far end there we have the clouded sulfur, and they hybridize sometimes, so it can be really difficult to like distinguish exactly what species they are, but they're medium size. They're often found in grasslands and on flowers. I see them a lot on the purple, um, woolly vervane(?) that's blooming right about now, um, as well as native thistles, like that wavy leaf thistle, so really fun. I feel like I see these guys a lot and I have some up there too, so afterwards, if you wanna come check out what the butterflies look like, I have plenty.
Next is fritillaries, and these are a bit of a larger butterfly. They kind of look like monarchs 'cause they're those large orange monarchs or large orange butterflies, but they love meadows and they love milkweed and thistle. They're more common than a monarch, I would say, but they're about the same size, and it can be really difficult to distinguish a species between them, so I don't even try, when I'm out in the field for the most time, I just write them down as fritillaries, except for that special guy right there is the Regal Fritillary, which is proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act, but they are a little bit easier to ID when they're flying past you. Can anyone figure out what is different about this butterfly that the other ones don't have? It's kind of tricky. [The dot.] Yes. Yeah, so the dots at the bottom are a huge one, and this one has black on the hind wings there at the bottom, so it's easy when they're flying past me. If I see that chunk of black, then I know it's a regal fritillary that is proposed threatened, so that's good data to have, and hopefully if you're lucky, you'll see one out in the field.
Next is the beloved Monarch and some of its siblings. This is the family Nymphalidae, which doesn't have a snappy name like some of the other ones, but they are the brush footed butterflies, and there's a really wide variety, but they're mostly larger to medium size. This is the Monarch, which is also proposed threatened. Unfortunately, this past winter was the lowest number of recorded overwintering monarchs in recorded history, so there is definitely a fight to preserve them. Planting milkweed is huge because they only lay eggs on milkweed species. That way when the eggs hatch, there are caterpillars and they can eat the milkweed right away, which makes them poisonous to other insects, and it's a way they ward off predators.
So, we're hoping to see some more monarchs. They're the ones that migrate across the whole country, so they overwinter when it gets really, really cold, the monarchs will fly to either California or down to Mexico, where it's nice and warm and they'll hang out in the trees and wait for winter to pass in North America. Some other common Nymphalidae that I see are the Red Admiral, which are medium size. They're all black and you're looking for these orange bands is the best way to ID them, but they look really similar to painted ladies over there on the right, um, but those I feel like are starting to come out more; they're more of a late summer butterfly, whereas these guys are early summer, so I feel like right now they're switching.
Next, we have skippers, which are really tiny guys, and like their names suggest, when they fly, they kind of skip. They're really fun to watch fly around. They're pretty small except for this guy. This is the silver spotted skipper, which is a little bit bigger, but I see them mostly in grasslands. These butterflies really like to hang out on grass and rest there rather than flowers, and they're kind of muted colors: it can be kind of dark like this dusky wing here, or more orangey like the Argo skipper up there in the top right corner, so really fun to see. I feel like I see them pretty frequently around here.
Next, we have some favorites, which are the swallowtails, which I definitely see a lot in Jewel Cave because I love the forested ecosystem, which there are plenty of Ponderosa pine in this parkland. They're really, really large butterflies. I have some pinned up there, and the most common ones that I see around here are the Western Tiger Swallowtail and then the black Swallowtail over there, and they're just like really fun to see. They do this behavior called tree topping. So, they'll come check you out, and then when they decide that you're a predator, they fly high up into the treetops where you know that you can't reach them, especially when I'm chasing them down with a net. It is like just the most aggravating thing in the world because they just fly straight up and I can't get 'em that way, but really fun to see. I see lots of them around here.
Alright, we're almost done with our butterflies. So next we have Checker Spots and Crescents, these remind me a lot of the blues, they're just kind of an orangey color, so they just, they display the same puddling behavior where if there's a puddle and there's some water nearby, they'll come hang out, drink the water, and they're about the same size as blues. They're just orangey black and they have that checkerboard pattern on them, so really, really cool. This is a Pearl Crescent right here, and I think that's a, I can't remember what that guy is. Alright.
And then our last group of butterflies that I see really commonly around here are the Satyrs, part of family Satyrinae, and their uniting factor is either the butterflies that have the fake eyeballs on them to ward off predators and make them think that they're a little bit bigger and a little bit scarier than they actually are. So, over here we have the common wood nymph, which these are starting to come out and they just come out in waves. There was one last season in Devil's Tower during a 45 minute transect. We counted over a hundred just walking through a site, so they're really, really abundant. They love the forested areas. They feel like they hang out a lot on grass and dead wood because they blend in really well with the dead wood. And then over there is the common ringlet, another medium sized butterfly, really common here during springtime. And they like the grass as well. So, yeah, they have the fake eyeballs on them, which I think are pretty cool.
Alright, moving on to bees next, like I mentioned, there's over 300 different species of bees in the area, so I can't go through all 300 species, but I will go over some large groups that people normally ask me about. That is my finger right there with another, I think that actually might be a brown belted, bumblebee on my finger there, 'cause normally we cool them down after we catch them, and then I can take fun pictures like this while they're warming up and they hang onto my finger to get my body heat.
So, as we were just talking about bumblebees, everyone loves bumblebees. I absolutely love bumblebees. I just think they're the cutest thing ever. They all belong to one genus, which is the genus Bombus, and like I mentioned, they are social, so they live in a hive. They can be pretty big. Some of the biggest ones get up to be nearly an inch in size, and then the smallest ones are about a quarter inch, and here are three different species. They're all large and fuzzy, and I think these are the most common ones that I see. I think my data would agree too. Over here we have the Golden Northern Bumblebee, which is Bombus fervidus. In the middle we have Bombus rufocinctus, which is the red belted bumblebee, which I think is aptly named 'cause he's got kind of like a ginger belt on there. And then the far end, we have Bombus vagans, which is the half black bumblebee, so you're looking for a bee that has two little sections of yellow, and then the rest is black.
Next, we have sweat bees, which is a huge variety of bees. This is a bunch of different genera. They all look really, really different, but they all have one thing in common: that they like to drink your sweat. So, it's happened to me in the field and I've been chilling, writing down some data, they'll fly up to me, land on my skin and lick up my sweat to get some salt in their diet. So, they can be huge. They can be different sizes and shapes and colors. They can be really small like that Halictus ligatus hanging out on the little flower there, or they can be larger, like some of these Agapostemon or maybe more the size of your thumbnail, and they can just be really vibrant colors. I see a lot of the Agapostemon out, so if you look in blooms of flowers, you might find one hanging out too! They're just so fun. I love them.
Next, we have mason bees. These are the ones that will dig into wood to make their nest where they'll lay one to three eggs per season 'cause they are solitary. They don't live in a hive. They live all alone. They're about medium-sized and they can often be kind of metallic in color, so there you got blue ones over here, or they can be kind of gold and look more like a honeybee, like that guy over there. So, really, really fun to see. I like these ones a lot. They're really, really round is the other thing that I feel like I see with them.
Next, we have the mining bee, which is the genus Andrena, and these are the ones that look the closest to honeybees to me. They’re medium size, I find them hanging out a lot on the prairie cone flowers, and the purple cone flowers is a really good way to find them, but yeah, they kind of just look like honeybees to me. They're easy to mix up and, they nest in the ground. That's why they're called mining bees. They make the little holes in the ground, kind of like the picture that I showed for the No Mow May picture.
Next is one of my favorite. It's called the Longhorn Bees, and there's a couple different genus that belong to this group, but they all have really cool pollen pants on, is what I call them, is their scopa. They have special hair that is branched. It kind of looks like they got really bad split ends, but it's a really good way for them to hang onto the pollen for them to eat later and then to bring to other flowers, and then the males all have really long antennae, which is where the longhorn names comes from, so it's like really, really fun to see those out in the field. All the males don't have a nest that they have access to. Only females have nests, so sometimes we've got, really early in the morning you might see some male longhorn bees hanging out on flowers, 'cause that's their kind of like bachelor pad that they hang out on overnight. It's really fun.
Alright, now that I went over all those bees, I want to talk about my research next, and I really wanna emphasize the importance of the National Park Service in their role for research, whether it is cultural research and people are doing archeology or anthology research, or it's something more like ecology, where we're studying bats or bees or cave systems. The National Park Service is a really great way for to support research, as it contains ecosystems that are protected from outside influence, and by supporting parks, you're supporting research, so thank you to you all for visiting parks and helping support scientists in their effort to learn how to conserve the natural world.
So, context for my research, we kind of already talked about this a bit, that we're seeing this decline in pollinators, and some of the major causes of decline are pesticides, like I mentioned, and then that habitat disruption, whether it's fragmentation for agriculture or urbanization, but my research is mostly focusing on how do herbicides and prescribed burn, which is a commonly used land management tactic, used to get rid of invasive plant species or prevent wood like forests from taking over prairies. How do those two land management actions influence pollinators? And since we know that there are so many pollinators, I'm specifically looking at bees and butterflies. And so, the parks requested an inventory of all the bees and butterflies in their parks, and we decided to pair that inventory with an investigation about their land management techniques so that they can balance land management goals, like treating invasive plant species with pollinator conservation.
So, my research takes place at four parks, including one that we're sitting in right now. So, I am sampling for three years from 2024 to 2026. So, this is my second field season, and I get to sample at Devil's Tower, Jewel Cave, Wind Cave, and Mount Rushmore, ‘cause all of these parks implement land management for invasive plants, um, which they all spray herbicide, and then those three on the bottom do prescribed burns. I sample from June to August, and I visit each of these 37 sites three times throughout the summer, and I've set it up in a way that's called a BACI design, which stands for Before / After Control Impact, so I sample for pollinators before herbicide and burn, as well as after, and then I have sites where there is herbicide and burn and say, so there aren't, so I can compare the effects of the action. It's kind of convoluted a little bit, but.
So, the major question that I'm asking is how do prescribed burns and herbicide application alter the abundance and diversity of pollinators in the Northern Great Plains? And so some more specific questions that I have along with this overarching one is how does the time since burn, so say we have an area that was burned 25 years ago at an area that was burned two years ago. How do the pollinators differ between those two sites? As well as how does the burn season, so if we do a burn in the fall and a burn in the spring, does that look different? And then with herbicide, I wanna look at the ingredients and see how changes in ingredients might affect pollinators as well, if there's any sub-lethal effects. So, the herbicide might outright kill the bees or the butterflies, but it also might make them really sleepy and drowsy and unable to do their job.
Next, the other question I'm asking is, like, what bees and butterflies are even in these parks? My research is the first inventory of pollinators in both of these parks ever, so I am building a database of what bees and butterflies are here, as well as their common floral associations, so what flowers these bees and butterflies are visiting, what is their favorite snack? And so alongside that, I'm also looking for changes in plant pollinator networks, so like what they're eating and what flowers are visiting, as well as if invasive plants find their way into those networks - if invasive plants are really good food for these pollinators.
I get all my data in a couple different ways. So, one of them is active netting, so I have a butterfly net there with me. It is a very cartoonishly, like large looking butterfly net. It feels like a video game when I go out and play. And sample and collect data, but I walk throughout a site for 45 minutes, and I catch bees and butterflies that I might see, and I transfer them, and I'm gonna keep them. For butterflies, it's a lot easier for me to identify them down to species in the field. So, I only need to collect one of each species. That way the parks has an example to look at; I don't need to collect every single one. That way we can practice kind of a conservative collection. But for the bees, like I showed, I need to sit in front of a microscope and ID them all, so every time I catch a bee, I do keep it, except for queen bumblebees, because they'll raise a whole colony. So, if I take a queen bumblebee, that's kind of like taking hundreds of bees, so I try not to do that, and then species of conservation concern, 'cause there are some bumblebees that are proposed to be listed under the Endangered Species Act. So, I essentially walk throughout a site, and I see a butterfly, and then I go after it, and I chase it with my net, and I grab it, and I take it back with me. I put the specimens in a freezer to euthanize them humanely, and then I take it back to the lab where I will pin them, and they will become a museum display that I will give to the National Park Service. So, I have some specimens with me after I'm done speaking. You are welcome to come check them out and see what a pinned insect looks like.
Next, I have blue vein traps. So, sometimes if you're in the area you might see these out 'cause I'm deploying them at the four parks in the area, but it is a form of passive traps, so I kind of set it and forget it. I put 'em out in the field for 24 to 48 hours and they just look like a giant flower to them. They have this UV reflectance that tells the bee “Look, I'm a giant flower, come pollinate me”, but there's actually nothing in them. It's a completely dry trap, and I only put them out, like I said, for 24 to 48 hours and the bees just flood into them. They're still alive when I find them, so I'm able to release again those queen bees and species of conservation concern. And this is kind of what they look like. I hang them on a piece of rebar at the height of the vegetation and they collect some bees. It's not a ton. Again, I don't wanna over-collect and take away all these important pollinators from the area, but they do get a good idea of what's in the area that I wasn't able to see with my net, and it's just another way for me to collect bees.
Next, highly technical, we have some GoPro cameras (not actually, science can get really creative in some ways). So, I put these GoPro cameras with a special kind of lens fitted on them that allows me to see really small things called a macro lens, and I install it on a blooming flower for about an hour while I'm walking my transects, and this is gonna give me data about who is visiting what flowers and if their behavior changes. So, this gets into that question of sublethal effects. Maybe they have to rest a little bit more after those herbicides sprayed, or maybe they're walking a little weird, or they're grooming more. So, this is what some of the video looks like. Here we can see is a green sweat bee or an Agapostemon species is coming to visit this purple cone flower, Echinacea angustifolia, and it's visiting, and it's getting some of that pollen off of the flower. It's eating and drinking nectar, and it's collecting that pollen to bring to another flower. So now I have this piece of data that tells me that green sweat bees like visiting purple cone flowers.
Alright, next up we have something new that I'm developing and helping to publish steps on how other people can implement this in their research, which includes nesting blocks. So, I made 40 blocks of pine wood. I drilled 55 holes into each of the blocks, so you can do the math about how much drilling I did, but my hands still hurt thinking about it, and this way I can install them in sites that have herbicide applied to them to see what the nesting rate is. So, maybe the herbicide is making pollinators so sick that they can't lay eggs, they can't build nests, and this is how I'm gonna get to the root of that question. So I hang them up, and hopefully, since these bees are solitary, they only just need one little hole to go into and lay their eggs, and then they plug it up, and they wait, and they leave little pollen snacks for their babies. The eggs will hatch, they'll eat the pollen, and they'll make their way out of the hole. So, I put two blocks per site. I install it just in the process of now checking them, 'cause they've been installed for one month, and then I'll collect them at the end of the summer, bring them all the way back to University of Wyoming, and then hopefully they will hatch and I'll have a bunch of baby bees and I'll be able to see if, are they laying eggs? And if they are, are those eggs healthy enough that they can hatch and then become bees? So, there on the right side of the picture I took last week, it's really difficult to see, but in some of the rows, like, let's see, like B1, C1, D1, they're all actually plugged up with mud, meaning a mason bee. It came around and laid an egg and plugged it up. It decided it was a good enough one-bedroom apartment. We signed the lease and now hopefully those eggs will hatch later in the winter, and we'll see some healthy bees!
Alright, like I mentioned, this is my second field season, so I actually do have some data from my first field season, which was last summer. We did see some species of conservation concern. We saw the regal fritillary pictured there at the top. We saw that at Wind Cave, and we also saw that at Mount Rushmore. The western bumblebee, Bombus occidentalis, is also proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and we saw that at Devil's Tower and at Mount Rushmore, and then the monarch butterfly, we saw lots at Devil's Tower, which was great, and we also saw it at Wind Cave, so really exciting to see some of those species that we're a little bit more worried about. Um, I observed over 1800 butterflies, which was great. I collected about a hundred over 28 different species, so that was really great to get finally, a list of some species that occur in these parks. I collected over 2,500 bees, which means I have to pin them all, ID them all, and then prep, prepare them for that museum display, so it's a lot of work, but it's work that I really enjoy doing, and then I have over a hundred hours of footage from those GoPro cameras, and I need to watch and see if there's any visitors to any of the flowers that I installed them on, so really great data and will take me a while to get through.
And then what's next? Field season two and three are coming up, which includes the post burn data, so some of these parks are hoping to do prescribed burns, both this fall and next spring, which means when I sample next summer, it will be all data that help paint the picture of what pollinators look like post burn. I have to keep IDing bees. They're in the top right corner is what some of my bees from last field season look like, so I need to go through, look at them under a microscope and decide what species they are if I'm able to get down that far into the taxonomy. There's still a lot of missing gaps about how to exactly identify all the bees in the Western U.S., so hopefully more people are getting onto writing that. This is what it looks like when I look at them underneath a microscope. And I'm looking at things like, what's the size of this cell? Is this a point or a rounded area? So, it's pretty intricate, but it's really fun to be able to look at all these beautiful specimens under a microscope all day. I am creating those plant pollinator networks, so beyond just looking at the, um, observation videos, I'm able to take pollen from them - some of these bees and butterflies - and I can send it off to get identified using DNA, and they can tell me exactly what plant that pollen came from. So, it helped me understand, oh, even if I didn't see this bee on wild bergamot, it actually did visit that at some point and decided to keep some of that pollen, so, really helpful thanks to DNA meta bar coding is what it's called. It's a very fancy name. And then I have lots of video footage to watch that little video of that green sweat bee flying onto that purple cone flower. I have lots more video of that to analyze. I write down all of their behavior at all points in the video, so it's a little time staking, but it's not a bad job just to sit around and watch pollinators pollinate all day.
Alright, and then I wanna give a special thank you to my advisor, Dr. Alicia Tronstad and the lab taxonomist Brian Tronstad, as well as my lab members. Madison Manning is my lab tech or my field tech. She is awesome. She actually went caving this morning, so she couldn't come today, she was still washing all the manganese off of, out of her hair, so, but she's awesome. I would not be able to collect this data without her as well as everyone at all the parks, the staff, I could not do without you. I need people to light these fires and spray this herbicide and get excited about pollinators, so huge thank you, and I'm happy to take any questions or if people wanna come up and check out my equipment and some of my specimens that I have, they're welcome to do so as well.
[Applause]
Join PhD student Nina Crawford and learn about the pollinators of the Black Hills.