For the first time, the rare chestnut mining bee has been discovered in upstate New York. The small, brown insect was found by researchers at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse.
Molly Jacobson, a pollinator ecologist at SUNY ESF, found the bee in a grove of American Chestnut trees the college is nurturing. It’s the first time it’s been seen north of the New York City area.
“This is the first population upstate that really has ever been found in the historical record at all,” Jacobson said. “And it's right in Syracuse, so that is super exciting.”
Jacobson discovered it in a research orchard run by the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project at ESF, meant to reintroduce blight tolerant American Chestnut trees into the upstate ecosystem.
“The fact that it has shown up a couple hundred miles north of where we ever knew it to be, that is very exciting in and of itself. Jacobson said. “That maybe it occurs in many other places in the state where there might be other chestnut orchards far north of where we ever thought to look. So maybe the bee is more widespread in the state than we thought, which is a good sign for its conservation status.”
The chestnut mining bee is not a flashy insect. It looks like any kind of smallish or medium sized brown bee. Jacobson said bees often get a bad rap, but this particular insect isn’t like stinging bees.
“This chestnut bee is a solitary bee,” she said. “It actually is incapable of stinging. It's a type of mining bee and mining bees can't sting.”
The chestnut mining bee is not an endangered species, but it is designated as imperiled in New York and is one of the state’s rarest bees. Jacobson said the bee sighting is important.
“They are an indicator in the sense that we have a diverse connected functional environment around us that is able to support these species that really are really locked into one kind of resource,” she said. “And that will be the first to disappear when we make changes to the environment.”
