Experiments with bee keys

There is a huge need for more and better diagnostic tools for bees. Particularly for the vast audience of non-specialists that are not fluent in the terminology and shorthand typical of the primary literature. These folks include state and federal land managers, ecologists, graduate students, and citizen scientists of all kinds. Fortunately, ID resources are appearing in lots of places. Some are very local. In my region, The Bees of the Willamette Valley: A comprehensive guide to the genera is a go-to. Identification of Bees in Southwest Idaho—A Guide for Beginners is another example. There are keys with broader scope — a favorite is Exotic Bee ID, a beautifully illustrated Lucid key.

DiscoverLife is the most comprehensive, with 70 guides to US genera. The keys are aimed at citizen scientists, with an interactive structure, and written in (mostly) plain English. Of course any such endeavor, attempting to sort out thousands of species, is going to be a work in progress. I do my piece, adding trait and specimen images, particularly to Andrena and the Osmiatemp key.

The other thing I do is to explore new ways of making complicated taxonomy accessible for non-specialists—like me. Links to examples below.

Identikit keys: This interactive key software was developed by the Field Studies Council, which is based in the UK. It is free and open source, on Github.

• Weak-veined Lasioglossum of the Prairie Pollinator Project. Lasioglossum are a genus of sweat bees, and represent the largest number of bee specimens that we have collected in Oregon and Washington since 2017. The majority of these are members of the weak-veined subgenera—Dialictus, Evylaeus, Hemihalictus, and Sphedogastra. They are famously difficult to ID to species: tiny (less than 7mm), speciose, and there are no keys to the western species. As of Jan 17, 2023, the key is based on 7 species we have identified by barcode.
• Andrena, select examples. A proof-of-concept, using a subset of Andrena species and character traits from the DiscoverLife key.
• Ceratina of the Pacific Northwest. For the 8 species known from Oregon.
• Bee genera of the Willamette Valley. Work in progress.

Keys in Xper3 software

Bee genera of the Willamette Valley. This interface is also interactive, and the software is pretty straightforward. I learned of it via another key using Xper, IDMyBee.

See also: Keys to species of Ceratina, Megachile, Lasioglossum, Halictus. These are NOT intended for use outside of our local work — they're examples of another niche for keys, used to establish common criteria for IDs in one small project.

Background

The Prairie Pollinator Project is a collaborative effort of Quamash EcoResearch, and the Institute for Applied Ecology. There are two parallel projects. In Oregon, we have intensely sampled pollinators of an endangered plant, Erigeron decumbens. In both Oregon and Washington, we have developed pollinator networks for every plant in bloom in more than a dozen prairie sites, between 2017 and 2021.

We are not taxonomists, but by necessity we have learned to identify most of the taxa among our collection of 10,000 insects. So we are users of keys, which are the basic tools for species diagnosis. The standard approach is dichotomous, presenting a sequence of choices that narrow down to an end point: species X! If you are not a practiced specialist, this is a fraught process: the key fails with one wrong choice. An interactive key is less restrictive: the user decides which characters are clear and easily scored, and evidence accumulates in favor of the most likely fit. The excellent DiscoverLife bee keys work this way, though they are somewhat technical, and their regional coverage is inconsistent.

Our keys are intended to be simpler, and useful to a citizen scientist. It is important though to know that they are:

• Far from comprehensive. We only attempt to describe species within our own collection, which are associated with prairie habitats in the Willamette Valley and Cascadian area of Washington. Males are poorly represented in these keys.
• Not perfectly accurate. Any IDs made with these keys should be considered a hypothesis, pending further expert advice.
• Always in draft form. We regularly revise our categories and correct errors.

This effort is based on the work of the Institute for Applied Ecology and Quamash EcoResearch. However any oversights or errors in the keys—I own those.
—David Cappaert, Feb 2022