Solitary bee dispersal

[Nick Dorian]

Hello all,

Just a quick note to share our work measuring dispersal in the solitary bee Colletes validus. This involved mark-recapture of females both at nest sites and at flowers, allowing us to estimate dispersal and foraging distances separately but within the same system. Our main results are putting a number on the (ever elusive) distance at which solitary bees disperse, and showing that dispersal and foraging can occur over dramatically different scales.

Given the importance of population connectivity to bee conservation, and the strong interest in bee conservation in this group, I thought some of you might be interested. I certainly welcome comments or questions, especially about the mark-recapture methods which I know are of interest to many!

You can find our open-access paper here: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.70437

Take care, and happy beewatching,

Nick 

—————————————
Nicholas N. Dorian

nicholasdorian.com

watchingbees.com

Assistant Professor, Biology 

City College of New York

[Droege, Sam]

All

I just want to use Nick as an example. 

There are many of you on this listserv (1000+), but we rarely obtain this sort of interesting life history information.  I encourage more posting.  We are all interested and often this would be the only place we would learn of these things.  Additionally, it is a good way to gain some visibility (talking to you there grad students...).  So, more life history posting please, now I will have a look at Nick's new paper.

The Door-to-Door Saleswoman

Look, I’m knocking on your door,

satchel full of flyers for the best subscription

I can offer you—deals for a scholarship

to the school of the world, jars of honey,

honeysuckle’s perfume, the sky swept

cirrus by big bluestem, the zigzag work

of bees, the four directions of the compass

signaled by the compass plant, sunflowers’

fix on east, a wind to make a chime

of leaf stir and branch when ice shackles

the prairie grass—look at its brilliance

flashing as it drips!

                                   And maybe this

is a return to my girlhood work,

knocking on neighbors’ doors with deals

for Time and Life subscriptions, scholarship

to the college of my choice, in a town where

Uranium-235 was carefully sorted from U-238

to make the bombs that could blow up our world—

this wish to spend life tending what grows.

        - Robin Chapman

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From: beemon...@googlegroups.com <beemon...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Nick Dorian <dorian...@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2026 2:05 PM
To: beemon...@googlegroups.com <beemon...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Nick Dorian <ndo...@ccny.cuny.edu>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Beemonitoring] Solitary bee dispersal

 

 

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