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Until a few years ago, nobody knew much about the wild bees of Marin County, California. Then volunteers with One Tam, a community science effort on Mount Tamalpais, spent six years catching and counting them. They found 279 species in 32 genera on a single mountain. Now the project, the Tamalpais Bee Lab, is moving from finding out what lives there to watching particular bees closely.
How it started
One Tam runs a Peak Health assessment to judge the overall health of Mount Tamalpais, whose slopes include parts of Golden Gate National Recreation Area and Muir Woods National Monument. The assessment found a gap: pollinators. The Bee Lab was set up to fill it, working with Dr. Gretchen LeBuhn and her lab at San Francisco State University.
From 2017 to 2022 volunteers collected bees and prepared them to be sent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, whose specialists identified them. The count — 279 species — is in One Tam's latest Peak Health report.
What comes next
The second phase, which began in 2024, looks at particular bee communities, gathers data that land managers can use, and feeds local results into three wider efforts.
| Project | Run by | What it's after |
|---|---|---|
| California Bumble Bee Atlas | the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation and California Department of Fish and Wildlife | where the state's native bumble bees live, to help conserve them and map bumble bees worldwide |
| Ground-nesting Bee Surveys (GNBee) | the Danforth Lab at Cornell University | where and when ground-nesting bees nest — about 75% of native bee species nest in the ground, yet little is known about the places they choose |
| Bay Area Leafcutter Bee Search Party | a new regional effort | a lost bee: Trachusa gummifera |
The missing leafcutter
Trachusa gummifera lives only in this region and is known from a handful of old records. It was last seen on Mount Tamalpais in 1977. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife lists it as a species of special concern, but almost nothing is known about how it lives, so no one can say how endangered it is or what it needs. Targeted searches should show whether it still exists and what habitat it uses — the first step to protecting it.
Joining in
The Bee Lab relies on volunteers. Dates for field days are on the One Tam calendar, the project has its own website, and questions go to communityscience@onetam.org.
Sources
Written from "What's the Buzz about Bee Research in Marin?" by Sara Leon Guerrero, Community Science Program Manager at the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (June 2024), published by the National Park Service on its Bay Area Nature and Science blog.
In these publicationsGolden Gate National Recreation AreaMuir Woods National Monument
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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