Native Bees Need Native Plants

Long-horned Squash Bee, Peponapis pruinosa
Photo by Rollin Coville

On your next wildflower hike, take notice of the unusual, diverse winged insects pollinating the colorful blooms. Are they all honey bees, or are they one of 1,600 native bee species that call California home? While honey bees tend to dominate the bee landscape, they are not native to North America, but were brought here by early European settlers. California’s native bees have evolved over thousands of years with the diverse flora over our heterogeneous landscape. The various shapes, sizes, and colors of blooms have adapted to fit with their most preferred pollinator, native bees. Bees are built for pollination and have specialized hairs on their bodies in which to carry pollen back to their nests and feed to their developing young. They also time their emergence to sync with the bloom of their preferred plants. This means that as the first spring blooms open, with them comes a group of native bees built specifically to pollinate them, including bumble bees, spring long-horned bees, digger bees, and mining bees. As the season progresses a new group of bees emerge to collect nectar and pollen.

Morrison's Bumblebee, Bombus morrisonii
Photo by Rollin Coville

Many native plants rely on their bee pollinators so they can set fruit and go to seed, which then provides food to a myriad of animals and birds. Bees can be placed in two different groups, either generalists or specialists. Specialist bees have evolved to collect pollen from either one family of plants, i.e. Asteraceae or Malvaceae, or even one genus or species of plants. Their offspring will only survive if they consume the pollen from these specific plants. One famous specialist is the squash bee (Peponapis pruinosa), which requires plants in the Cucurbitaceae in order to survive. Squash bees are common garden visitors as many gardeners and farmers have planted squash, zucchini, and pumpkins all across the U.S. Some flowers may not be able to set seed if their specialist bee is missing and often the reproductive success of both the bees and flowers are tied to each other. Most bees, however, are generalists and can take pollen and nectar from most flowers.

Through our research in the Urban Bee Lab traveling all over California, we have found that native bees have a strong preference for native plants. Most home gardeners, however, plant non-native exotic ornamentals, especially as that is what is found at most plant nurseries. To encourage native bees into your garden, plant a diverse palette of flowering plants, which bloom from early spring into late fall. Plant natives including Ceanothus, Arctostaphylos, and Salvia species, and plant large patches of smaller plants like Penstemon, Achillea, and Lupinus species. For more information on gardening to attract bees, visit www.helpabee.org.

— Jaime Pawelek, UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab

Jaime Pawelek visited Bishop this past summer sampled bees in all gardens of the Community Garden.  The native garden, pollinator garden, and annual (sunflower) garden were the most attractive for bees. She is looking forward to coming a little earlier next year in order to catch more of the early blooming flowers.  We hope to have Jaime Pawelek as a guest speaker at our general meeting when she comes back in the spring, if road conditions allow.

See a recent publication of the Urban Bee Lab: http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/8498.pdf

Interested in creating your own pollinator garden? Check out Eastern Sierra Land Trust's Pollinator Garden Project - their list of recommended plants includes MANY that will be available in our annual Bishop Native Plant Sale!

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Have I got a Workshop for You!

Occasionally, and in this very same newsletter, there are notices for botanical workshops and conferences held all over the state or elsewhere in the west, such as the annual Eriogonum convention, the biennial California Botanists Conference and others. Included among these are workshops hosted by the UC Berkeley Jepson Herbarium. These were the brainchild of the editors of the first complete Jepson Manual published in 1993 as a companion to the new treatments and keys. What better way to introduce the users to the new manual than by spending time with the authors of these treatments? These informal workshops were designed to educate botanists and plant enthusiasts on families and genera that might be challenging or interesting or just plain beautiful. Taxonomy was the primary focus but regional flora or field workshops were also introduced, like those taught by Jim Morefield in our White Mountains or Dana York at the Eureka Dunes.

I began my workshop attendance back in 1995, because our local Tahoe Chapter of CNPS had very little to offer the plant enthusiast beyond the occasional field trip. I wanted tools and knowledge and I wanted them now! So I traipsed off to Berkeley and sat in a lab looking through a microscope for an entire weekend. I was in heaven! Actually, I was in way over my head, rather intimidated by the level of advanced botanical expertise exhibited during a weekend immersed in Asteraceae, the Sunflower Family. But I was hooked! There's nothing like getting to know a key and all its subtleties than by learning from the person who wrote it. I found the field workshops to be even more fun, such as those held at the Sage Hen Field Station near Truckee or the Yuba Pass Field Station further north. Bishop even hosted some of these early workshops in Rosaceae and Astragalus. Socializing with other participants in a beautiful location was an important aspect of these events. I have met many other botanists, amateur and professional, and now count many of them close friends. I have partaken of a lot of great food as well, as field workshops are almost always well catered!

I have attended over 30 workshops in the intervening 19 years. They were not inexpensive but always well worth it. I started out with a focus on taxonomy. Travis Columbus from Rancho Santa Ana taught an outstanding Poaceae (Grass) workshop. Following this workshop I immediately went out and bought a microscope of my own. I started keying grasses like mad, even driving an hour away down out of the snow to collect non-native grasses in the Sierra foothills.

Since then, my interest in taxonomy has given way to workshops focused on unique regions of California as my passion in photo documenting plant taxa has grown. For example, just this year I began with a workshop to Anacapa and Santa Cruz Islands off Santa Barbara in April. We boated to both locations and stayed 3 nights at a UC field station on Santa Cruz Island. We bounced around the back of a truck over 4 days, getting to locations not easily accessible by the general public, lead by Steve Junak of the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden.

I scooted back to Berkeley for a Cryptanthinae workshop anchored by Michael Simpson of UCSD the following weekend. We got a great overview of the genera Cryptantha, Plagiobothrys. Pectocarya and Amsinckia—known to many as Popcorn flowers and Fiddleheads. Although this was entirely lab work it was very satisfying.

June brought me back down south with a field workshop to the Tejon Ranch. Centered just east of the I-5 corridor at Tejon Pass, this is the largest contiguous private landholding in California and has only recently been open to botanical research and limited public access. We spent 3 days exploring this section of the Tehachapi Mountains with Neal Kramer who has been doing surveys on the Ranch for 3 years. Newly described Eriogonum callistum (Tehachapi Buckwheat) was seen, as were many taxa that were completely new to me. A real high point was a close encounter—100 meters—with a group of California Condors!

In July I was off to Mt. Eddy, a 9,000 ft. mountain just west of and overshadowed by Mt. Shasta. What sets Mt. Eddy apart is that it is part of the largest serpentine outcrop in North America. As with our carbonate rocks here in the eastern Sierra, serpentine rock with its unusual chemistry leads to a remarkable abundance of endemic plants, including, as you might expect, more rare Buckwheats, Mt. Eddy sky Pilot (Polemonium eddyense), and much else. Dana York and Julie Kiersted-Nelson treated us to a pack train supported camping trip, great weather, excellent food, pleasant companions and great leadership.

While these workshops may not be for everyone, I can highly recommend them, although many fill up quickly and you may be wait-listed. Check out http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/workshops/ for further information. The workshops are winding down for this year, but in the late fall keep an eye out for next year's roster of workshops.

Happy botanizing

— Steve Matson

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Book Review:
Fish Springs and Black Rock: Forgotten Towns of Owens Valley, by Janice Emily Bowers

Janice Bowers, a member and former board member of the Bristlcone Chapter and the author of “Birch Creek Journal” for our newsletter, has written a book on the abandoned towns of Fish Springs and Black Rock. Today Fish Springs, south of Bishop, isn't even a ghost town. Black Rock, now Aberdeen, is a mobile home park. But in the 1870s, they had a thriving population. Fish Springs and Black Rock: Forgotten Town of Owens Valley focuses on a little-known boom town in the late 19th century halfway between Bishop and Independence. This is a serious historical study of the small boom town between 1864-1922, and Bowers makes an important contribution to the history of the Owens Valley.

Bowers writes in her introduction, “My book is not yet another history of how Los Angeles took (or stole) the water of Owens Valley. It is both broader and narrower than that—narrower in that it focuses on one neighborhood of many that were destroyed so Los Angeles could thrive, and broader in that the story of this one neighborhood tells in miniature the history of Owens Valley and indeed of Inyo County.”

Extensive appendices and notes, including detailed township maps and a bibliography, complete the book. If you have Sierra Nevada/Owens Valley books on ecology, natural history, water, or geology, this book needs to be included. The book (signed) is available at Spellbinder Bookstore in Bishop and the Eastern California Museum in Independence.

— Thomas Brill

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Inyo National Forest Plan

Inyo, Sierra and Sequoia National Forest Plans - NOI POSTED
Don’t miss the opportunity to provide comments and concerns

The Notice of Intent (NOI) for the Draft Environmental Impact Statement on the three forest plan revisions- Sierra, Sequoia, and Inyo - will be posted in the Federal Register on Friday (8/29). The comment period will be 30 days beginning 8/28/14. The NOI will inform the public of the Forest Service’s intent to prepare and develop an environmental impact statement (EIS) that will revise the forest plans. Our comments will be included and addressed in the NEPA process. The final resulting documents will be three individual Records of Decision for each respective forest’s management plan. Since management plans are typically in place for 15-20 years it is a very important step in the NEPA process – to voice our concerns.

The Inyo National Forest will hold a public scoping workshop on Thursday, September 18, 6-8pm at the Tri-County Fairgrounds, Sierra Street & Fair Drive, Bishop, CA.

For more information and to review the planning documents go to: www.fs.usda.gov/main/r5/landmanagement/planning

OR, see the individual documents linked below:

• Notice of Intent (pdf)
• Scoping Letter 8/25/2014 (pdf)
• Scoping Letter - Detailed Proposed Action 8/22/2014 (pdf)
• Scoping Letter - Location Map 8/22/2014 (pdf)

This process may seem long and slow but it is important for the Eastern Sierra and for those who love its plants.

— Julie Anne Hopkins

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BLM Botanist, Martin Oliver, instructing volunteers on 2013 Planting Day

BLM-CNPS Indian Fire Bitterbrush Planting Day - October 18

On Saturday October 18, 2014, the Bristlecone Chapter of the California Native Plant Society will team up with BLM Botanist Martin Oliver and the Bodie Hills Conservation Partnership for a Bitterbrush planting in the footprint of the Indian Fire - south of Mono Lake in beautiful Mono County, California. Martin has several hundred young bitterbrush, and a few grasses – many of which our Plant Sale/Greenhouse Coordinator and President, Katie Quinlan, grew from seed – ready to be placed and planted. Join in on this opportunity to help with this post-fire restoration project.

Meet: at Mono Mills off Hwy 120 at 9:30am
Contact: Julie Anne Hopkins, Conservation Chair (831) 566-6012

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