Going Wild at NBDC

Guest Blog by Dr. Gail MacInnis

Northern Alberta is home to the only national laboratory dedicated exclusively to pollinator health. The National Bee Diagnostic Centre (NBDC) had previously concentrated solely on honey bee health, but has recently expanded their focus to improving the heath and diversity of Alberta’s native bees.

Their new research program, led by Dr. Gail MacInnis, has several active projects over the next two years, including studies on pollen DNA, native bee diseases, and wild bee diversity in crops and disturbed landscapes. Leveraging their genetic technology, she is investigating how pollen diets influence bee heath using DNA barcoding. Analyzing pollen DNA can accurately determine the plant species a bee has visited and uncover links between bee health, floral resources and routes of disease transmission between bees. Gail is also beginning work to detect and monitor wild bee pathogens in general, which have been understudied especially in comparison to honey bee pathogens.

As northern Alberta is dominated by croplands, Gail’s team is also investigating how farm management influences native bee diversity. She is working with the regenerative agricultural community to determine how practices such as cover crop management and rotational grazing can boost bee diversity on farms. Her work also involves monitoring wild bees in disturbed landscapes, like pipeline corridors. In Northern Alberta alone, there are over 30,000 kilometers of pipelines traversing the region. These sites often contain habitat and floral resources needed by a diversity of wild pollinators and represent a unique opportunity to study and monitor and our wild and native bees, in an especially under-sampled area. This work will contribute to provincial monitoring efforts, like those of the ANBC, and we hope to continue working together with Gail on these new wild bee research initiatives in Alberta!