Tailoring your bee sampling protocol: Comparing three methods reveals the best approaches to capturing bees

Abstract

Abstract Bees are prolific, vital pollinators in agricultural and natural settings, but some taxa are declining. Surveying bees is crucial to understand the needs of these taxa; however, we lack a fine‐grained understanding of assemblages associated with different sampling methods that would enable us to analyse data range‐wide. Here we examine the difference in abundance and richness of bees (bee bowls and vane traps only) and bumble bees (genus Bombus; bee bowls, blue vane traps and target netting) sampled with these methods from mixed‐grass prairie to alpine habitats in Wyoming, USA. We collected four times more bees and twice as many genera of bees in vane traps than bee bowls. Vane traps captured more individuals of abundant genera than bee bowls. Bombus species abundance did not vary between vane traps and target netting; however, richness was higher in vane traps. Bee bowls captured few Bombus species. Overall, we recommend using vane traps to sample most bees, and a combination of vane traps and target netting to collect bumble bees. We evaluated how three sampling techniques perform when surveying for wild bees, which will aid in identifying declining species as well as monitoring species of conservation concern.