Paper published on bees on green roofs

Led by former undergrad Jordyn Riehn, we have just published Jordyn’s investigation into the bees found on three green roofs growing crops in St Louis. This article is part of a special issue for World Bee Day.

For this project, Jordyn, with the help of co-author Jordan Hathaway and Josh Marino sampled bees over the course of two years (2017 and 2018) on farms managed by Urban Harvest STL.

The authors celebrating! This is Jordan and Jordyn’s first publication. From left to right: Jordan, Jordyn, Nina, Gerardo.

For the paper, we looked at the bee differences between roofs and compared them to ground level sites. We found that the bee diversity on the roofs is a nested subset of the ground level, which means that some, but not all of the bees are on the roof that we find at the ground.

There are many non-native species found on the roofs, especially Megachile and Hylaeus. There was also very few bumblebees (Bombus), which was surprising to us given that Bombus are usually thought to be one of the main pollinators of crops.