Drivers passing through Sturgeon County and other areas outside of Edmonton this summer may come across signs reading "bee study ahead."
Once you come across the sign just up ahead on the highway, you will likely see two tents sitting in the ditch.
Those signs and tents mark the locations where University of Alberta master's student Shea Giesbrecht is researching how roads, trees and flowers impact native bee populations.
"I'm interested in the floral abundance next to roadways as well as shelter belts, which are strips of trees next to cropland," said Giesbrecht. "So I'm interested in the combined and separate effects of the two."
Giesbrecht explained that strips of trees do promote other pollinators, and she is looking to see how they affect native bees. By examining how flowers adjacent to highways affect bees, Giesbrecht will be able to determine if it is beneficial to have flowers in the shelter belts and if trees have an impact.
"We know that shelter belts do promote other species of pollinators. I want to see if that also extends to flowers. Are they [bees] crossing the highway? Are they getting killed? And then, How do trees play a role in that? Do they promote bees as well? Does that help bring their population up? How does that affect their mortality?" said Giesbrecht. "So that's basically what I'm looking at is just the separate combined effects of trees and flowers."
Giesbrecht is using several methods to track bees and their movements. Malaise traps, the tent-like structures set up in roadside ditches, collect insects that fly from the highway or nearby cropland. Blue vane traps, the colourful structures are known for attracting bees, are used to measure abundance and species diversity.
"Then we're also doing active sampling, so we have sweet nets, so just using a net, catching the insects," she said, explaining this will help tell them what insects and the population of them are in the area. "That combined also with floral surveys, so we're counting the flowers and seeing what flower species are here."
In areas with fewer natural flowers, the team has transplanted alfalfa to boost floral abundance. Giesbrecht is also experimenting with a sticky trap mounted to the hood of a truck to track insect mortality.
"We're gonna be driving down the highway next to our sites, and we're gonna see how many and what species we're catching, and that's going to be our representation of our mortality data," she said.
For approximately the next two months, Giesbrecht and Quinn Burns, her summer student, will be at the sites collecting data. Surrounding Edmonton, there are 22 sites located along highways with daily summer traffic ranging from 4,000 to 7,000 vehicles.
Site selection required extensive planning, utilizing government traffic data, Google Maps and in-person scouting. Giesbrecht visited over 200 potential locations, narrowing them down based on factors such as the presence of shelter belts, flower density and distance between sites.
"We needed our sites to be far away from urban locations, as well as at least two km away from each other," she said. "Because so for certain bee species, the running average for how far they'll forage from their nest is about two km. So we wanted to make sure that we're not collecting in that overlap."
Giesbrecht's two main goals of the project are to inform farmers and policymakers of the benefits of shelter belts and flowers.
"If we find that shelter belts actually do benefit bees or insects in general, we want to express that to growers and land owners to say, if you have an existing shelter belt, you should maintain it or even consider planting one," said Giesbrecht, explaining that native bees are very beneficial when it comes to pollinating crops.
Giesbrecht added that changes to roadside mowing times or planting native flowers along highways could also make a difference.
For now, Giesbrecht will conduct research and collect data alongside Alberta highways. She hopes people will take small steps to help pollinators in their backyards.
"Just care about our native habitats. Care about our pollinators. If you want to know how you can help native bees, plant native flowers," said Giesbrecht. "But bees are starting to get a lot more attention, which is really good."
