SAM DROEGE, HEAD OF BEE INVENTORY AND MONITORING LAB, U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY:

 

[Sam Droege playing mouth harp]

For me, it’s all about what’s intriguing, what’s a little bit different.  A poke in the eye of society adds an element of positiveness to anything I might do. 

Well, when I was young there was really no question that I wouldn’t be working outside and I wouldn’t be working with animals.  When I was an undergraduate, I did a lot of collecting of insects. I took Advance Insect Taxonomy just so that I had an excuse to go out and learn about those groups.

I don’t have a lot of boundaries with what’s work and what’s home life.  So you’ll see that I am working on bees late at night or Photoshopping and I might also go out and collect in the field.

The real reason that I go interested in bees was because there was this discussion of declines in native bees and our regional bees and there are a lot of issues like that.  And as a person who deals with surveys and censuses and quantities and statistics, I was curious to see whether there was any information that was quantified about that. Can you prove that they were declining?  And it turned out the short answer was no.  There wasn’t any census of bees or those kinds of things.

Our insect photography I think of as more like insect wedding photography.  We’re looking for really pretty bees, as frankly as we say.  We’ll have to have good hair.  Their pose has to be something that is appealing, so their legs can’t be all over the place.  We have to see the eye.  The eye is something that everyone is focusing on.

We take these very detailed, high-definition pictures of bees so that people will have what essentially be a virtual museum.  You can look them up online even if you don’t have a museum nearby or you don’t have your own collection.

We can say that in bumblebee species, some of the bumblebees have either disappeared or declined greatly.  The only reason we can say that is because the decline has been so massive.  Moving from something that was one of the most common bees around, and now we can’t find a whole set these.  So we knew that was a problem, that’s an issue.

The main factor that drives the decline and the conservation issues surrounding any plant or animal on the United States which is loss of habitat.  The majority of bee species in the wild are looking for native plants of a certain kind.  So you remove those native plants, you remove those bees.  And the more we affect our environment by building on it or moving into agriculture, we just naturally have lost a big chunk of bee populations.

The main human compunction is to neat and tidy things up.  So if I own a piece of property then I’m very likely to want to mow it all the time and make it look like a magazine house.  And that is the absolute worst thing that you can do for any kind of native animal or plant.  And certainly for bees.

SAM DROEGE SOT: “This is the kind of thing that I encourage people to have.  This could just be lawn but instead it is a bunch of wild blackberries, there are other native plants here.”

I feel very strongly about recycling and living a, I don’t know in a way, a clean life or a right life where I have a low impact as I can on the Earth.

I want to be in a place that resonates with me.  I guess my philosophy is you are what you see.  And this house, and at least components of it, are my sense of beauty and harmony.  I’m not saying it is for everybody but when I go in I feel relieved.  It’s something I want to be in.  So, you can’t really buy that.