UW researcher finds eight new native bee species

UW researcher finds eight new native bee species




A researcher from UW unintentionally discovered eight new species of bees when collecting pollinators in Chelan County.

Autumn Maust, a former Ph.D. candidate in the Tobin Lab, in the School of Environmental and Forestry Sciences, studies plant pollinator interactions with the Brosi Lab. During the summers of 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024, Maust traveled to Chelan County to study pollinator community changes in post-fire landscapes, when she unexpectedly collected eight undiscovered native Washington bee species.

These new bee species include: Melissodes nigracauda LaBerge, Dufourea dilatipes Bohart, Atoposmia abjecta abjecta Cresson, Coelioxys funerarius Smith, Dianthidium cressonii Dalla Torre, Dianthidium singulare Cresson, Osmia cyaneonitens Cockerell, and Stelis heronae Sheffield.

Describing new bee species requires the help of professional taxonomists — scientists who classify organisms. Maust turned to the Washington Bee Atlas (WaBA), an organization that completed a groundbreaking checklist containing all bee species ever recorded in Washington back in 2024. Karen Wright, a pollinator taxonomist at WaBA, and researchers Joel Gardner at Washington State University and Terry Griswold at Utah State University, helped Maust with assigning names to these species that weren’t recorded historically.

Understanding the exact characteristics that distinguish these species is a highly nuanced process.

“Often it’s slight changes in the morphology of the insect, which can include the edge shape of the plate on the abdomen of the bee,” Maust said. “For one of the species that was included in our first records paper, Stelis heronae, you use maculations on the abdomen, which are like colored patterns.” Courtesy of Autumn Maust

The utilization of distribution maps also helps describe the rarity of these new bees. While some species were well documented across the western United States, some have a more complex history. Maust assumes Melissodes nigracauda, which was only previously documented in California, now has a genetically distinct population in Washington.

Maust believes understanding the existence and distribution of certain species within the state is a key first step towards effective conservation.
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“My hope is that our ability to record these eight new species will sort of inform those management plans going forward, especially considering that pollinators are declining, insects are declining, and we currently don’t have a lot of federally protected insect fauna,” Maust said. “Part of that is due to the fact that they’re not charismatic megafauna.”

Maust praises WaBA as an organization that conserves native pollinators by allowing volunteers to become involved in citizen science. In 2024, volunteers collected over 17,000 specimens, and 25 of them were rare or new species, including the eight species belonging to Maust’s study.

Karla Salp is a communications consultant for the Washington State Department of Agriculture, which WaBA is a part of. She is also a volunteer instructor for WaBA and has become one of the top bee collectors across the state.

You don’t have to have a scientific background to participate in WaBA volunteering’s wide range of research, according to Salp, and Salp feels people can make a difference even by supporting pollinators at home.

“In addition to the bees that the bee atlas volunteers collect, we also document the host plants they are using. From those, we can develop both host plant and bee lists for different ecoregions.” Salp said. “But people don’t need to wait for plant lists. They can start supporting bees now by planting flowers. Both native and cultivated flowers can support native bees. One place where I have found the most diverse bees is my mom’s garden in Central Washington.”