He later found a second nest nearby, possibly made by the same bee as a way of spreading its resources and offspring, and researchers also located two nests at Ocala National Forest. Gibson was assessing a site with blooming false rosemary at Lake Wales Ridge when he happened to see a bee zip toward a small sedge and disappear into the root structure, leading him to a nest. Given how few bees the team observed and how fast they fly, the discovery of the nest was “just kind of pure luck,” Kimmel said. The blue calamintha bee’s underground nesting habits came as a surprise to the researchers, who expected it to use hollow stems or holes in dead trees, as many of its close relatives do. “This bee could be closely tied to the pollination of these endangered plants.” “It’s a story of a really rare bee using a really rare series of plants,” Daniels said. The team also collected pollen samples from blue calamintha bees to determine whether they visit other plant species. Researchers learned the blue calamintha bee visits false rosemary earlier in the year, before Ashe’s calamint is in bloom, leading to concerns about food availability if warming temperatures decouple the timing of the plant’s blossoming from the bee’s emergence in February. False rosemary, Conradina brevifolia, is even rarer, listed as endangered at both state and federal levels. The bee’s common name comes from its main host plant Ashe’s calamint, Calamintha ashei, itself a threatened species in the state. “It’s not just that we’re going to study the decline of this bee. “Those kinds of stories where we can restore and promote habitat for this bee really gets us excited, knowing we’ve got examples where we can actually make a difference,” he said. Kimmel said that while he gets “a little bummed” as he drives through the region, watching bulldozers overturn the ridge’s fragile habitat, this year’s field season also sounded a note of hope: The site at which the team confirmed the bee’s second pollen host plant, false rosemary, is a former citrus grove now restored to pine scrub. Sequencing its genome may also provide insights into other species within the Osmia genus, including the blue orchard bee, which is an economically important pollinator in agriculture. DNA analysis will help reveal how genetically isolated the bee’s populations may have become over time. When Kimmel marked individual bees to track their movements, he often saw them later in the same area - even at the same shrub.
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