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JAMES GORMAN
NYT Syndicate
One hundred sixty kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, by the side of a dusty road, two women in anti-mosquito head nets peer at a queen bumblebee buzzing furiously in a plastic tube.
"I think it's the biggest bumblebee I've caught in my life!" Kristal Watrous says.
S Hollis Woodard looks at the prize and says,"It's the biggest bumblebee I've ever seen in my life!"
Woodard, an assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside; her lab manager, Watrous; and a small team of young academics have embarked on a bee-hunting road trip from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay and back, about 1,600 kilometres all told, some 1,280 or so on the Dalton Highway.
They want to find out more about the bees of the Arctic, the planet's advance experiment in climate change. Melting sea ice and a rising ocean affect its coasts. Longer, warmer summers are changing plant life in the interior, and are bound to affect the lives of insects. But even though bees are by far the most important pollinators for tundra plants, some of which, like berries, are traditionally prized by Alaska Natives, not enough is known about bee populations and behaviour even to spot change when it occurs. That's what the team hopes to remedy.
I joined the group the night before, and we are now tramping over tundra and through low willows near a maintenance site for the nearby Trans-Alaska Pipeline. The site, called the Chandalar Shelf, lies in the shadow of mountain peaks as sharp as freshly made Stone Age axes ” the beginning of the Brooks Range.
Jessica Purcell, an assistant professor in the entomology department at Riverside, said that at the Arctic Circle two days ago,"you couldn't shake a net at a flower without catching a bee."
She and her husband, Alan Brelsford, both newbies to the bee business, caught 40 each."We had to let some go," said Brelsford, who is starting at Riverside this fall as an assistant biology professor.
Here, the bees aren't quite that numerous.
Woodard's brother, Bren, an ex-Marine and devoted participant in military history re-enactments, carries a shotgun when there is a concern about grizzlies. He ranges far and wide, as does Jeff Diez, a plant ecologist and the grizzled veteran of the group. He has been at the university for three years.
The bee stalkers run and pounce, swiping hand-held nets like the ones butterfly collectors use, calling out,"Bee!" or"Got one!" when they are successful. They pop them into plastic tubes and bring them to Michelle Duennes, a postdoctoral researcher in Woodard's lab, for identification.
As she looks at the bees, species names roll off her tongue. Sylvicola. Neoboreus. Balteatus. All bumblebees, all in the same resonant genus, Bombus.
The trip is being financed by a university grant to encourage collaboration among young scientists.
"We're at a special place in our careers," Woodard said.
They hadn't been in the field together, but given the available grants,"We said, well what's the craziest thing we could think of doing?" The answer: going north to Alaska to scout the condition of bumblebees in the Arctic, where climate change is occurring at a rapid rate.
There are 250 species, a small fraction of the world's 20,000 bee species. Genetic studies suggest that they first appeared on the Tibetan plateau, where the greatest variety still exists. But they have spread around the Northern Hemisphere and into South America.
They are social insects. While honeybees may congregate in insect cities of 100,000 bees or more, bumblebees live in the equivalent of small towns, with colonies of 50 to a few hundred.
Almost all bumblebee colonies last just one season. As cold weather approaches, female workers, the queen and male drones die. Only fertile females that have mated ” queens in waiting ” seek refuges under the tundra, sometimes in old mouse burrows, where they outlast the winter in a state of torpor. In the spring, they emerge to start the whole cycle over.
Bumblebees are the only bees that live in the high Arctic. They have adapted to the darkness and cold of wintertime that dips to minus 50 Celsius and then to the explosion of growth and pollination under summer's midnight sun.
And that's why the bee hunter caravan is on the Dalton Highway.
Some changes to the climate are already obvious. Willows are taking advantage of a milder climate to spread north to areas where only the low-lying plants and lichens of the tundra had lived before. Moose follow the march of the willows.
There are gaps in the knowledge of Arctic bees that need to be filled. The group on this expedition wants to help build up information on current populations and behaviour against which to measure change.
One bee dominates the hunts, and the conversation. It is Bombus polaris, the Arctic bumblebee. Other bumblebees live in the Arctic, but polaris survives closer to the North Pole than any other bee except a parasitic species that lays its eggs in polaris nests. Polaris hasn't been studied that much since Bernd Heinrich examined its physiology in the 1990s. For Woodard, Bombus polaris is the trophy bee.
It has adapted so well to the cold that by shivering its muscles it can raise its internal temperature to more than 35 C when it is zero C outside. It lives around the world, in the northern reaches of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic, and in Greenland.
But by the end of the day at the Chandalar Shelf, no one has yet found a bee they can identify as polaris.
That night, we camp at a gravel pit where pipes and other material for the pipeline are stored. Each captured bee is in a plastic tube, and Duennes first gases them with compressed air. She removes the guts to study later for bacteria and viruses they may harbouring, and places them in a solution that preserves them for genetic study. The bee bodies go into ethanol.
The next day, we arrive at an oasis of luxury, the Toolik Field Station, an Arctic research base run by the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
But with the luxury, the bees disappear. For two days, we try sites in and around the station. Here and there someone finds a bee, but they seem to have mostly disappeared.
But in July, I watch as Duennes identifies the first Bombus polaris. Once the trip is over, and the researchers do genetic testing at the University of California, Riverside, they will realise that they found more than 40 Bombus polaris bees along the way, but they don't yet know that.
The first Bombus polaris bee is a gift. A researcher who has been using fine mesh nets to capture birds has also caught a number of bees by accident. She gladly turns over two dozen or so.
Bumblebees come in many colour combinations of yellow, brown, black and red, and only experts can tell one species from another. In some cases, only a microscopic examination of the male genitalia or DNA analysis can provide a definitive identification.
But one restored bee has telltale dark colour in a yellow patch on its side. Duennes and Watrous compared it to illustrations in a guidebook. They won't say what they think until they bring Woodard in to examine the bee.
When Woodard picks the right bee out of the lineup, Duennes is exultant.
"I am almost certain that's polaris!"
After scrupulously considering every possible objection to the identification, everyone in the group raises a glass to Duennes' toast:"Extreme bees, extreme people."
