Bee conservation in Oklahoma: Assessing producer perceptions of wild bees and effects of insecticides on bee communities and pollination services in canola.
Knoch, Ashley Rebecca
Citations
Abstract
As pesticides are a significant contributing threat to pollinators, it is vital to assess their impacts on not only the target pest species, but on wild bees and their respective pollination services. Additionally, understanding how producers in south-central United States perceive bees, perceptions of their pollination services, and their conservation is essential to integrating realistic conservation practices. We evaluated the impacts of three insecticides with different modes of action on pollination services and wild bee richness and abundance for canola fields in north-central Oklahoma. Specifically, we compared seed count, seed mass, and bushels per acre between canola fields treated with flonicamid (narrow-spectrum), sulfoxaflor (narrow-spectrum), lambda-cyhalothrin (broad-spectrum), or not treated with any insecticide. We used blue vane traps to compare wild bee species richness and abundance in these fields. Furthermore, to assess the perceptions of bees by producers in south-central U.S., we surveyed producers in Oklahoma and Kansas at regional agricultural meetings. We also evaluated effects of pollinator dependency of crop grown on producer perceptions. There was no statistically significant effect of insect treatment on bee richness or abundance or seed set. The relatively low pollinator-dependency of canola as well as the timing of bee sampling may have influenced results. We found that producers in this region overall have positive perceptions of both honey bees and wild bees, which may be due to their benefits and overall lack of negative impacts, as well as cultural norms. There were some instances where producer groups differed in their responses, but not in ways we predicted. This may be due to differences in representation by different genders between pollination dependency types. Further research is needed to evaluate the impacts of broad- and narrow-spectrum insecticides on bee communities and subsequent pollination services in crop types with high pollinator-dependency. Further research in human dimensions of pollinator management is also needed to evaluate how perceptions of conventional producers and producers that grow crops that are either primarily pollinator-dependent or pollinator-independent.