Elizabeth Elle's favourite bees are the "boys."
"I think they are pretty cute," said the plant biologist from Simon Fraser University. "The boy bees have facial hair, kind of like their own little mustaches."
On Wednesday, Sept. 7, Elle and her suitcase of bees are visiting Quest University, where she will present a public lecture on the destruction of her tiny friends' habitat.
Elle has studied bees for six years. She's examining how bee population and the specie's diversity effects plant life. Elle's also looking at the toll activities, such as farming, logging and cattle grazing, has on the insect's communities.
It's serious stuff, she noted. Bees are in the midst of a global extinction that may rival that of the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
"I think people take bugs for granted," Elle said. "It like 'There's a bug, squish it.'"
There are more than 450 species of bees in B.C. - including 30 varieties of mason bees, a few bumble bees, another 30 species of mining bees and more than a hundred variety of sweat bees. Most of the provincial bee species are solitary, rather than living in colonies.
"A lot of them look like flies," Elle said.
Everything creature on the plant needs things to eat and bees pollinate the majority of our food them. What is seems the bees need are places to live, Elle said. What she's finding in her research is the province's mining bees, which dig homes in the ground, are having a hard finding suitable turf.
In B.C., a lot of bee species going extinct or who have already gone extinct, Elle said. This year, during her research, Elle didn't find a single Western Bumble Bee. Twenty years ago, the bees were common around the province.
"We are still figuring out why they are declining," Elle said.
But Elle doesn't want people to entirely focus on the doom and gloom. Her long-term goal is to help produce growers use both native and managed bees to provide reliable and economical crop pollination. Conservation and agriculture can work hand-in-hand, she said.
"I don't want people to give up," Elle said.
The Wednesday night lecture starts at 7 p.m. For more information visit www.questu.ca.
