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Save the bees! Protect the pollinators! Phrases like these are heard all the time, but what do they mean? Pollinators are animals (usually insects) that help the transfer of pollen from flower to flower, leading to the fertilization and reproduction of plants. Having a healthy diversity of pollinators is essential for ecosystems, and for the plants and animals in it to thrive. However, pollinators are easily affected by factors such as global warming, parasite infections, and use of pesticides; and this can take a huge toll on our prairies and fields. We can combat some of these problems by making sure bees have access to high quality food sources, but even those relationships may be negatively affected by anthropogenic changes. Healthy pollinators help reduce carbon emissions and promote the growth of plants that are the source of crops. This is why there is a lot of research occurring to figure out what is the best way to keep our pollinators healthy, prevent decline of pollinator communities, and restore communities that have been affected by these factors.

Annaliese Wargin, a graduate student under the mentorship of Dr. Alex Harmon-Threatt, is interested in pollination ecology in restored landscapes, and interspecies interactions. Broadly, Annaliese wants to see how soil conditions & soil microorganisms can scale up to affect plants and their pollinators. She studies how different traits and attributes in the plants and their soil can affect the health and behavior of pollinators such as bees. Within the GEMS institute, she is specifically interested in how the plant’s reproductive traits are affected by the quality of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil and how pollinators respond to different bacterial treatments for the plants. The focus of her project has been in the development and creation of a system to be able to track plants and their pollinators, which is still in the design and planning stage, in order to evaluate how organisms in the soil affect both plants and pollinators. She hopes to find out if the quality of good nitrogen-fixing bacteria for the plant matters at higher trophic levels like pollinators. The implication of such findings would be very interesting. It would give us evidence that more “hidden” factors, such as the quality of bacteria in the soil, can impact higher trophic levels; other similar factors could include insecticides used in agricultural farming.

The results of this project hopefully can make clear that the benefits of having enriched bee and/or other pollinator communities are important not only for ecologists. Having a healthy enriched bee community means improvement of agricultural yields, and further protection against systemic factors that are pushing bee communities out of their respective ecosystems.

This summary was written by David Vereau Gorbitz, Graduate Student, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.