Visiting The Smokies Spring 2021
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Ashes to wings:
Wildfire research reveals bee species new to park records Great Smoky Mountains National Park had record-breaking attendance in 2019, but the most surprising visitor was extremely small and decided to move in. Permanently. Its taxonomic name is “Epeolus in ornatus” and it’s a bee. The story of what kind of bee it is and how it got to the Smokies is an odd one, as told by Discover Life in America’s (DLIA) Director of Science and Research Will Kuhn, who discovered the bee’s presence in 2019 but only announced it in a Dec. 10 social media post. The bee is one of the few positives that derived from a hellish event: 2016’s Chimney Tops 2 Fire, which tore through the GSMNP over story. Picking up the pieces from that disaster, part of a series of wildfires, is an ongoing process, but not all of it is bad.
In recent years, scientists have been assessing how an estimated 11,000 incinerated park acres have brought new life to the area. After large fires, nature doesn’t just grow back: It diversifies. Kuhn told The Daily Times in a recent phone interview he found the bee because of a “BioBlitz” in summer 2019, a DLIA-sponsored, short but intense effort to discover as many species as possible in one location. This one was called the “Fire Recovery BioBlitz” and yielded a biological treasure trove. Bee-eat-bee “We wanted to look at the effects of the ... fire, so we collected insects from a high burn area and a low burn area to compare them,” Kuhn explained. “The Baskins Creek area was a severe burn: It scalded the hillside Continue on page 26
