Jim has spent many of the past 24 years studying the nesting ecology and pollination biology of native bees, such as Peponapis bees for squash, Nomia bees for alfalfa, and Osmia bees for cranberries and raspberries. For the past 12 years, he has worked for the US Department of Agriculture at the Bee Biology and Systematics Lab at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, USA. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of Auburn University in Alabama, a Miller post-doc at UC Berkeley, a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and a B.S. from the College of Forestry at Syracuse. His agricultural pollination work is primarily focused on bees that pollinate cranberries and blueberries (Vaccinium, Ericaceae), alfalfa (Medicago, Fabaceae) and more recently, raspberries (Rubus, Rosaceae), squashes (Cucurbita) and almonds (Prunus). In addition, he quantifies foraging and nest provisioning dynamics, pollen nutrition and pollen/nectar toxins, effects of habitat fragmentation on native bee communities, and patterns and causes of variation in bee abundance at various time scales. Recent work ecological work is focused on the breeding biologies, pollination needs of prevalent Great Basin wildflowers, their pollinator guilds, and their use for native seed growers as part of the Great Basin Native Seed Increase Project under the Great Basin Restoration Initiative with BLM and USFS.
Jim has spent many of the past 24 years studying the nesting ecology and pollination biology of native bees, such as Peponapis bees for squash, Nomia bees for alfalfa, and Osmia bees for cranberries and raspberries. For the past 12 years, he has worked for the US Department of Agriculture at the Bee Biology and Systematics Lab at Utah State University in Logan, Utah, USA. Prior to that, he was on the faculty of Auburn University in Alabama, a Miller post-doc at UC Berkeley, a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and a B.S. from the College of Forestry at Syracuse. His agricultural pollination work is primarily focused on bees that pollinate cranberries and blueberries (Vaccinium, Ericaceae), alfalfa (Medicago, Fabaceae) and more recently, raspberries (Rubus, Rosaceae), squashes (Cucurbita) and almonds (Prunus). In addition, he quantifies foraging and nest provisioning dynamics, pollen nutrition and pollen/nectar toxins, effects of habitat fragmentation on native bee communities, and patterns and causes of variation in bee abundance at various time scales. Recent work ecological work is focused on the breeding biologies, pollination needs of prevalent Great Basin wildflowers, their pollinator guilds, and their use for native seed growers as part of the Great Basin Native Seed Increase Project under the Great Basin Restoration Initiative with BLM and USFS.
Positions
Present
Research Entomologist,
Utah State University
‐
Biology