Youngsteadt to Study Urban Bee Movement With Support From Kriz Endowment

Youngsteadt to Study Urban Bee Movement With Support From Kriz Endowment

In urban places, bees encounter numerous hazards such as buildings, roadways and barren parking lots as they forage for flowers. Elsa Youngsteadt, associate professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at NC State University, studies bees on a landscape scale, researching how bees move through urban environments.

In past urban ecology studies, scientists mapped their study site by drawing a radius of how far they thought a bee could fly in a given area, such as a backyard pollinator garden. However, this approach is not realistic, as bees are unlikely to fly an equal distance in every direction. Furthermore, researchers cannot truly understand what bees perceive as a barrier or a corridor because they are nearly impossible to track.

Radio collars are a common telemetry tool for large animals, particularly mammals. But even the smallest telemetry tag currently available in the U.S. is too big for a bee to carry without affecting its behavior. Youngsteadt has used alternative methods such as fluorescent dye transfer, but with this method, the exact movements of bees are still a mystery.

“Studies using fluorescent dye transfer let you infer that yes, a bee visited point A and point B. But you don’t know exactly who that bee was, or how they got there,” Youngsteadt explains.A bumble bee visits a flower treated with fluorescent dye (left). A bumble bee equipped with a telemetry tag (right).

With funding from the George J. and Rhoda W. Kriz Study Leave Award, Youngsteadt will embark later this year on a sabbatical to gain new skills to further her research at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany.

“My goal is to learn ecological modeling approaches to develop spatial models of urban bee movement,” Youngsteadt says. “I want to be able to understand how bees navigate through an urban environment and what counts as habitat connectivity. Even though bee movements and decision rules are hard to observe, you can simulate them with a model and see if your simulated bees end up in the same places real bees do.”

The department of Ecological Modeling at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research is known for its contributions to BEEHAVE and Bumble-BEEHAVE, computer models that simulate bee behavior in an agricultural environment when exposed to real-world factors such as pesticides, parasites and habitat loss. Youngsteadt will collaborate with her host and BEEHAVE co-creator Jürgen Groeneveld to modify the model to stimulate bee behavior in an urban environment. The Urban Ecology Lab led by Youngsteadt studies bees in urban landscapes including Raleigh, N.C.

After returning home from sabbatical, Youngsteadt hopes to incorporate what she learns into actionable projects with the City of Raleigh.

“Raleigh is a big city; a patchwork of private land owned by separate people. How do you get everybody to work together?”

“It will definitely be a challenge, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable,” she continues. “Raleigh is a Bee City USA, which means that the city government has committed to implementing practices that support pollinators across their landscape.”

As Youngsteadt prepares for her trip abroad, she shares, “I’m excited to go be a student again and start learning to do new things in a totally new place.”