Lila Westreich is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, in the Department of Environment and Forest Sciences. She has a B.S. in Plant Breeding and Genetics from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on the effect of varying landscape composition on the solitary mason bee, Osmia lignaria. Lila is currently working on the analysis of nutrition in pollen as well as the genetic sequencing of plant pollen to connect native solitary bees with the landscape around them.

Listen in to learn more about what drew Lila to Osmia lignaria, and how she is finding the effect of these bees on their landscape, and vice versa.

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“Orchard mason bees are really easy to work with, they’re easy to buy, which is rare for a native bee, and they’re really easy to place in different places, so it was easier for me to use than bumblebees.” – Lila Westreich

Show Notes:

• Why Lila was so drawn to the orchard mason bee – Osmia lignaria
• How Osmia lignaria‘s select flowers in different landscapes
• How the solitary mason bee cares for it’s larvae
• The pollen collection method that has left Lila with “vats of pollen” to study
• What mason bees are looking for when they are collecting pollen
• What Lila is hoping to learn by putting mason bees out early and late in the season
• How climate change is affecting mason bees
• The “special mud” of the mason bee

“What we found was really interesting. We found that bees were collecting pollen with the same concentration of protein at every site we studied. This was in spite of the fact that there were totally different plants at the different sites. What this tells us is that the bees are specifically choosing pollen from the landscape with higher protein levels and they only work with that pollen.” – Lila Westreich

Links Mentioned:

• Learn more about the Annual Orchard Bee Association Meeting in Davis, CA (December 7-8, 2018)
• Article Lila talked about: Soil textures of nest partitions made by the mason bees Osmia lignaria and O. cornifrons (Hymenoptera: Megachilidae) (2018) Pinilla-Gallego et al.
• Check out Lila’s favorite bee, Bombus vosnesenskii