D3118: Can urban green infrastructure improve bee health in a legacy city?

Legacy cities are characterized by long term economic disinvestment and often experience aging and or decaying sewer infrastructure. This contributes to frequent combined sewer overflow (CSO) events, whereby polluted stormwater overflows into nearby water bodies. Legacy cities host an abundance of vacant land which makes using green infrastructure (GI) to mitigate CSOs an appealing option. Aside from providing effective wastewater management, GI can provide pollination and nesting resources for wild bees. While previous research has examined how bee diversity is affected by GI, its effect on bee health has not been examined. Our objective is to determine if urban habitat provided by GI sites influence the  development and reproduction of the small carpenter bee Ceratina calcarata in the legacy city of Cleveland, Ohio. We hypothesize that bees collected from GI sites will have larger body sizes and higher lipid contents compared to bees from vacant lots. In mid April 2023 ~20 raspberry canes each were deployed at 7 vacant lots and 7 GI sites across the cities of Cleveland and East Cleveland. Canes were collected and returned to the lab in mid June. The number of brood cells per nest was counted, and larvae were raised untill adulthood. Body size was approximated through determining the head width of each bee, measuring from the outermost section of each compound eye. Wet weights were taken for each bee, and lipid analysis was performed. This poster shows the results from the first year of our two year data collection period.