Speaker: Dr. Joe McHugh, Herbert H. and Jean A. Ross Memorial Distinguished Professor of Insect Systematics and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Entomology, University of Georgia; Curator of Arthropods, Georgia Museum of Natural History
Host: Becky Griffin, National Coordinator, Great Southeast Pollinator Census
Co-host: Rich Braman, UGA Center for Urban Agriculture
Also speaking: Amanda Bratcher, NC Cooperative Extension, North Carolina State Coordinator
Duration: 1:13:54
Series: Great Southeast Pollinator Course
Webinar Date: July 28, 2026
Opening and Introductions
(intro music)
Rich Braman: Becky, I’m ready and raring for this, but I cannot believe it’s here. It’s, uh, been my pleasure to welcome everyone for my last chance to say this. I’m, uh, Rich Braman. I’m with the Center for Urban Agriculture, and of course, we support this through Becky, and we’re always ecstatic to support all of her programming. But this course has just been one for our history books, Becky. It has been marvelous all around. And so it is my pleasure to hand things off to our own host who makes all this happen, our Becky Griffin, National Coordinator of our Great Southeast Pollinator Census. Becky, take it away.
Becky Griffin: Thank you, Rich. Thanks for being such a great co-host. Um, I’m excited about today. Beetles. Those of you who didn’t catch on, we played a little appropriate Beatles music to get us warmed up. I have on my beetle earrings, and I have on a shirt I had made just for today, so I am very excited.
I’m extremely thrilled for our present- presenter today. So our presenter for our final session is Dr. Joe McHugh. (coughs) Excuse me. I got carried away. He is the Herbert H. and Jean A. Ross Memorial Distinguished Professor of Insect System- System and Evolutionary Biology in the Department of Entomology at UGA. What a mouthful. Joe is also the curator of the Georgia Museum of Natural History. (coughs) Excuse me, folks.
So he brings both the research depth and storytelling ability to help us appreciate beetles and some of the other insects we haven’t covered yet. A perfect way to wrap up seven weeks together. Welcome, Joe. The floor is yours.
Joe McHugh: Okay. Hold on a second here. Let’s get started. Okay. Does that look okay?
Rich Braman: You might need to sh… Let’s see. Reshare? If you don’t mind.
Joe McHugh: Okay. Hold on a second. I’ll go back to share. And back share. And I’ll come back down here to share. Okay, and then can you see that?
Rich Braman: Okay, Joe, that’s perfect. I’m seeing your title slide. All right. We’re in business.
Greetings from Vergennes, Vermont
Joe McHugh: Oh, all right. Hello, everybody. Greetings from the public library in Vergennes, Vermont. I am up here moving my daughter to a new location. Uh, we just got in with a moving truck last night, and I am in a library I’ve never been in before because they have Wi-Fi and, uh, hopefully this all goes smoothly, and we don’t have any connectivity, uh, issues along the way. Fingers crossed.
Thanks for the very nice introduction. I appreciate it.
An Entomologist and a Systematist
Joe McHugh: I’m an entomologist. I’ve always been an entomologist since I was a child. I was one of those little boys who always loved insects, and I never outgrew that love of insects. I went to college to study insect diversity specifically, and after, uh, I finished graduate school, I, uh, was fortunate enough to be hired at the University of Georgia at, uh, Department of Entomology, and I’ve been on the faculty there for over thirty years now. Um, I am the curator for the collection of arthropods at the Georgia Museum of Natural History. That’s a collection of over two point two million specimens of insects and related arthropods. So I’m an entomologist to the core since forever.
Um, but I’m a particular kind of entomologist. I am a systematist, and systematists are people who study the science of biodiversity. And so I’m… I study things like the discovery and description of new species, the classification of insects, the, uh, biogeography, the nomenclature, the evolution of insects. So all things that have to do with, with diversity.
And in particular, my interests are focused on beetles, and so I’m talking about my passion here today, my love of beetles. But I am not an ecologist. I am not a population… I’m not a pollination biologist. I’m not a conservation biologist. And so, um, my presentation will have a bit different sort of, uh, focus and, um, bias than maybe you have seen in some of the other presentations. All right.
What Was Missing from the Course
Joe McHugh: So we’re here at the end of the course, and you’ve heard about all these, uh, fantastic insect groups that are, uh, pollinators. You’ve heard about the butterflies and the moths. You’ve heard about wasps and bees. Uh, you’ve heard about flies. This is the great pantheon of insect pollinators. But something sadly has been missing. Beetles, beetle pollinators. So I’m so happy that we actually have a presentation devoted to beetles because I think they deserve some love as well when it comes to talking about insect pollination.
So how am I gonna proceed here? Uh, I’m gonna give you sort of a, a, beetle presentation that, uh, connects different aspects of beetle biology to pollination along the way. And I wanna talk to you a little about anatomy, a little about the history of beetles, a little about their diversity, their biology, and then talk to you about a few different types of beetles that are common in the southeastern United States. They’re common pollinators in the southeastern United States, and hopefully, uh, familiarize you with them if you don’t already know them. All right.
What Makes a Beetle a Beetle
Joe McHugh: So what are beetles anyway? Beetles are a group that people usually have a very clear picture of in their head. When they think about it a little bit, they usually can conjure up, uh, a typical classical beetle. There’s some sort of beetle-ness that they all have that help people to, uh, to recognize them.
Beetles have been recognized all the way back to the time of Aristotle. They, um, they are distinctive enough that two thousand three hundred years ago, Aristotle thought that beetles formed some sort of natural cohesive group. He could see those features.
Since the very start of zoological nomenclature, beetles have been recognized as a formal group in classification as well. Linnaeus in Systema Naturae, uh, recognized an order Coleoptera, which is the order for the beetles. So since seventeen fifty-eight, uh, they have been… Since the start of zoological nomenclature, beetles have been a formal group.
But, you know, when you look at beetles and you dig more, uh, deeply into beetle diversity, the things you think make a beetle a beetle get fuzzy. (laughs) It gets a bit more complicated to actually figure out what features beetles have. Beetles are unbelievably diverse, and the more you look at, uh, beetle diversity, the more confused you get, I think.
Beetle Anatomy
Joe McHugh: So let’s talk a little bit about anatomy. All right? Uh, by talking to you about anatomy, I’m hoping that it’ll help you to recognize beetles in their various different forms, but I hope it also will help you to understand some aspects of beetle pollination that are directly, uh, impacted by their anatomy.
And now I need to give you a warning, okay? Pretty much everything I say about beetle diversity from this point going forward is going to be a half-truth or a partial truth or not a lie, but it won’t exactly be an airtight, complete sentence because beetles are so diverse. There is an exception to every single rule with beetles. There’s some beetle someplace that doesn’t follow the rules and, uh, is different. And so with that warning, we’ll move forward.
Elytra, and the Trade for Armor
Joe McHugh: So if look at the beetles, there are some beetles here on the left-hand side of the screen, and you look at some other insect groups on the right-hand side of the screen, some big differences jump right out at you. If you look at the, uh, if you look over here on the right ha- right-hand side of the screen, we have things like dragonflies. We have things like the butterflies and moths here. We have bees here. There’s a cicada here. You can see that flying insects typically have, uh, four well-developed flight wings. I know that you heard about flies last week, and they have four wings, just two of them are very tiny. But, um, but most insects, most of flying insects have four large, well-developed flight wings. And usually the forewings are the bigger, more powerful wings that drive most of the flight.
If you look over here at the beetles, something is going on with the beetles. And what exactly, what exactly is the story here with them? If you look at a beetle, they have this characteristic look to them where over the abdomen, there are these two plates that meet down the… And so what are these two plates? What, what’s going on with this?
These are the structures for which the beetle order Coleoptera gets their name. Coleoptera means sheath wing. It translates to sheath wing, and it’s in reference to the fact that the anterior pair of wings, which are usually the, the major wings that, that power the flight in insects, are now hard shells that are protective, covering the abdomen. All right? They’re no longer capable of powering flight, so they have a whole different function, and that’s what you think of when you see beetles. You know, the, the elytra, um, jump right out at you. You kind of notice this feature of them, this, the line down the middle and these two hard shells. So the interesting thing is that beetles, when they pop open those elytra, they still have fully developed hind wings. Um, they still have these membranous hind wings back here. They’re all folded up or coiled up underneath the elytra.
So beetles can fly, but they’ve given up two of their wings for a protective covering, and that might sound like a terrible mistake to make, right? When you give up two of your wings, you’re flying only with your hind wings, and that’s, that’s called posteromotorism. Um, but you’re flying just with your hind wings now, and so why in the world would beetles do that?
By making their top pair of wings hard shells that protect their abdomen and protect their hind wings, beetles are… were now able to utilize all different kinds of other habitats and access all different other kinds of resources. They could bore through wood. They could burrow underground. They could crawl through rocks. They could live underwater and swim, and still have wings.
They could still come out, pop the elytra open, and then fly away, and so they kind of have the best of both worlds. It’s really kind of an amazing, really important adaptation. But they did trade off their forewings for that.
A Rigid Body and a Clumsy Flier
Joe McHugh: Beetles are also covered with very hard shells. Um, they’re very heavily armored, and oftentimes, the plates that cover their body segments are, are very hard, crunchy sort of shells, and they fit very tightly together with each other. Beetles don’t have a lot of exposed membrane. They’re not very flexible sorts of insects, right?
If you look at a beetle, you see all of these plates all tightly abutting to each other, you know, hard, hard plate to hard plate, and that makes for a very rigid sort of body. Think of a beetle as sort of a, a tank, right?
And so this affects how you pollinate. If you think about it, you gave up, you gave up your two primary flight wings to make hard shells over your back, and you’re, and you’re covered with these hard plates that all tightly fit together.
And so, uh, those kind of things all combine together to make beetles very clumsy flyers. They’re not particularly agile in the air and, um, if you’re gonna be a pollinator, that’s a problem, right? That, that poses some special, uh, issues for beetles that some of the really good flyers, like flies and like Hymenoptera and like Lepidoptera, are really good at. They can hover. They have precise kind of flying ability. Beetles do not. So they’re clumsy flyers. What else about their anatomy impacts their pollination?
Mandibulate Mouthparts, and Why Beetles Cannot Drink Nectar
Joe McHugh: Beetles have mandibulate mouthparts. Okay, and what do I mean by that? They have biting, chewing mouthparts. They have these structures called mandibles that oppose each other and act sort of like chisels to pinch or to chop and chew things for their food.
Things like stag beetles, male stag beetles, have gigantic mandibles, and they’re really, really obvious. Things like this carabid beetle have normal-sized mandibles for a beetle. You can see them there, though. And so biting and chewing types of mandibles.
And so right around now, you’re probably thinking, “What about weevils?” Weevils don’t have biting and chewing mandibles, right? They have sucking types of mandibles. They have that long beak that sticks out in front of them. Weevils are beetles, and they have this big rostrum here, but actually, that rostrum is just part of their head capsule that’s elongated. And at the very end of that long rostrum are little mandibles and little biting, chewing mouthparts.
They are not drinkers either. And so beetles lack the ability to drink up liquid fl-fluid types of food.
So, so far in this course, you’ve heard about bees. Uh, bees have a tongue. They can, they can lap up, uh, nectar from flowers with a tongue. Butterflies and moths have a proboscis. They actually have a straw, a coiled straw that they can stick down deep into a flower and drink up nectar. Flies have a labellum that they can use to lap up liquid food and drink that as well.
Beetles do not have that. Beetles do not have the ability to drink up liquid food like those other groups can. And that is obviously going to impact how they interact with flowers, right? Not being able to drink up that nectar.
Antennae and Sensoria
Joe McHugh: What else about their anatomy is relevant here? Well, if you look at beetle anatomy, they have antennae on their head, and the antennae are wildly variable. Uh, in fact, the antennae are very important for taxonomy and identification of beetles.
But for the purposes of our discussion, what’s important to know is that those antennae are covered with tiny little structures called sensoria that are responsible for detecting different types of things. There are certain sensoria that can detect chemical cues, there are sensoria that can detect temperature, ones that can detect humidity, touch, or even sound vibrations.
But for the purposes of pollination, these two cues here, chemical cues and temperature cues, are very important because those are things that flowers actually use to lure in pollinators. And so beetles on these crazy antennae have the ability to detect these chemical cues and these temperature cues from flowers.
A History Lesson: Older Than the Dinosaurs
Joe McHugh: All right, let’s stop the anatomy lesson and switch over to a history lesson now. Okay?
Putting Beetle Age in Perspective
Joe McHugh: If you look at the history of beetles, some interesting things come up. Scientists are able to date the age of different, uh, organisms, uh, including the beetles, based on, uh, fossil evidence and based on molecular phylogenetic dating methods. And so you can get an idea when different types of creatures have, have appeared. Right, so what can we say about that? Well, whenever you’re talking about, uh, these kind of very, very old events, uh, it’s hard to wrap your head around people talking about the Triassic period or the Miocene, and, you know, uh, your head just kinda gets confused about what that all means. So let’s try to put this in, uh, a little bit easier terms to digest.
Let’s get a reference point here for age. We’ll pick Fido, okay? Our, our friend Fido here. And, um, Fido belongs to a family in the classification system called Canidae, and, um, the date that Canidae are thought to have, uh, appeared in the evolutionary, uh, record is about forty million years ago. That’s when that branch of the tree of life seemed to appear.
What about these guys? Dinosaurs. Okay, dinosaurs, they go way back. That’s a ancient, prehistoric group. That goes deep, deep into evolutionary history. And so those have been dated back somewhere, you know, there’s a lot of debate, uh, you know, some- somewhere around two hundred and thirty million years ago. So deep in history.
What about our friends, the beetles? Where do the beetles sit relative to these ones, the Canidae, which are relatively recent, and the dinosaurs that are really ancient? Beetles go back at least three hundred million years. Beetles are older than the dinosaurs, and they’re still here. (laughs) They’re still here, and they’re still here in huge numbers. They have tremendous diversity.
Pollinating Before There Were Flowers
Joe McHugh: If you think about that, three hundred million years ago, beetles were here. Beetles were around, and they were actually active pollinating ancient forests of gymnosperms and, you know, things like cycad forests over a hundred and fifty million years ago.
That means that beetles were pollinating plants before there even were bees, before there were butterflies. Beetles were pollinating plants before there were angiosperms with flowers. Okay?
They are an ancient group. They were the pioneers of the pollinating world. Thrips were also involved, but beetles were one of the key pollinators of ancient forests, and they continued to be pollinators through history. When the angiosperms did arise, beetles, lots of different beetle groups, became pollinators of them as well.
What’s interesting is if you look at some of the ancient plant lineages, things like cycads, things like… in the angiosperms, things like water lilies or magnolias, they are still pollinated by beetles today, and that’s sort of a remnant of that anct- ancient connection that goes way back deep in history. All right. Let’s switch… Let’s stop the history lesson.
Diversity: Beetles by the Numbers
Joe McHugh: Let’s switch over to diversity. I’m a beetle systematist, and so my, my bias is going to shine through here. Humor me. This is something that I really always have been passionate about.
But I think this is the most amazing aspect of the Coleoptera, of the beetles. Their diversity is just astounding. They are hyper-diverse in any measure you want to use.
How diverse are they? Let’s get a reference point again.
Weevils Against the Dog Family and Everything Above It
Joe McHugh: Here’s our… here’s Fido. We’ll pull up Fido one more time. Fido is in that family Canidae. It includes things like wolves. includes coyotes, foxes, and all the different types of dog groups.
And this is the family Curculionidae, the weevils. Okay? Weevils are a big group of beetles, not the biggest ones. Staphylinidae are the biggest family of beetles, but they are probably the second-biggest family of beetles. How do these two families match up with each other? Okay.
I have the Linnaean classification system here, uh, so kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and I have a family versus family comparison. The dog family, about thirty-five species. The weevil family, about sixty-five thousand species of weevils alone. Okay? All right.
Let’s go a little bit higher over here on the classification. Let’s compare the weevils to the entire order of animals in… called the Carnivora. The Carnivora. These are the flesh-eating or meat-eating groups, and that includes not just the dogs, but bears and skunks and seals, whales, raccoons, the cat family, pandas, and a whole bunch of other groups that eat, uh, meat. Okay? Two hundred and seventy species versus sixty-five thousand species of just the weevils.
Let’s go a little higher. The entire class Mammalia, let’s compare them. That adds things like the ungulates, the primates, the marsupials, and the rodents. Five thousand species. Sixty-five thousand species of weevils. Still, the weevils dwarf the entire class Mammalia.
Let’s go higher, the phylum. The dogs are in the phylum Chordata with all the animals that have a ventral nerve cord and a whole bunch of other features as well. This includes things like frogs, reptiles, birds, and fish, as well as all those other things. Five thousand species versus sixty-five thousand species. Okay? Uh, Curculionidae still dwarfs the group.
I could go even higher and compare the kingdom that the dogs are in with the weevils, except for that the weevils are in the same kingdom with the dogs. And so, uh, they’re part of Animalia, and so it’s a little bit of a confusing comparison. But I could throw this one up here for you.
Uh, the order Coleoptera, which is the order for the beetles, compared to the plants, the kingdom Plantae. The plant kingdom has thirty-two, uh, two hundred, uh, three hundred and twenty thousand species, and the beetles have about four hundred thousand species, uh, described. Okay? So beetles are bigger than the entire kingdom Plantae.
Every Habitat but the Sea, Every Continent but Antarctica
Joe McHugh: Beetles occur in almost every type of habitat on the face of the earth, except for the, the marine habitat. They occur on, uh, every continent except Antarctica. They are everywhere from treetops to subterranean. They are in deserts. They’re in tropical rainforests. They are every imaginable place.
How Many Beetles Are Actually Out There
Joe McHugh: Those four hundred thousand species of beetles make up about a quarter of every, uh, animal sp- of all the animal species that are out there. So if you think about it, one out of every four animal species known is a beetle. All right? That’s pretty amazing.
What’s even more amazing, though, is that is just the, uh, number of described beetle species. All right? Those are the ones that actually some scientist has named and officially described.
We’ve only scratched the surface of knowing the beetle diversity that’s on the Earth. Estimates of the actual diversity of species on Earth range everywhere from, from a million species to eight million species to even higher. And so you see that we, we barely even know the diversity of beetles on Earth today, and it’s still astounding.
Beetles range in size from the size of a baseball to the size of a single-celled paramecium. Shocking range of size, uh, diversity.
The Beetleverse: An Analog for Almost Every Animal
Joe McHugh: And if you look at the beetle, the beetleverse, if you will, you can find sort of an analog of almost every other kind of animal within the beetleverse. Elephants, very cool, unusual body form. We’ve got our own elephants over in the beetleverse.
Giraffes, yeah, we got those, too. A triceratops. Oh, is that a challenge? Nope. Atlas beetles. In fact, any horned animal you can, you can picture, there is a beetle that pretty much matches that horned animal, uh, in the beetleverse.
What about a peacock? Spectacularly beautiful, iridescent creature. Stunning, right? There are all kinds of outrageously beautiful iridescent beetles to choose from.
What about this guy? A vespid wasp. It’s another kind of insect. What about… what have the beetles got to compare to that? Well, if you look in the beetle world, there are a whole lot of beetles that look an awful lot like vespids because they’re trying to mimic them. Uh, a lot of beetles that hang out on flowers, uh, become mimics of stinging Hymenoptera in order to avoid, uh, being preyed upon. They, they look like they’ve got a, a stinger, and so predators don’t wanna mess around with them. But we’ve got our own vespids even in the beetle world.
This is a moth. This is a lepidopteran, and you can see the proboscis. There are moth-like beetles that are out there. These two look an awful lot alike because they’re involved in a mimicry complex. In this case, it’s thought that both of them are toxic, and they’re just in a Müllerian type of mimicry complex.
Beetle Behaviors, Light, and Fuzz
Joe McHugh: What about behaviors like this? You’ve got two deer here fighting two bucks, uh, fighting with their antlers over a territory or over a mate. Happens in beetles too. There are lots of beetles that have horns, that use the horns to fight with each other over a territory or over, um, uh, over a mate. In this case, these aren’t horns on the head or horns on the thorax. These are actually the mandibles that are enlarged in stag beetles. And the, and the males will fight with each other to throw each other off the log here. That’s a prime spot for either a mate or, um, uh, for maybe for, uh, the female to be able to lay eggs after mating.
Nest-making behavior. This seems like a higher level type of behavior as well that we see in the animal world. In the beetleverse, it happens as well. There are beetles that make nests. For example, this is a dung beetle. Dung beetles burrow underground. They make galleries underground. They provision little cells with, uh, dung balls, lay eggs on the dung balls for their young to grow up, uh, in their nest underground.
What about parental care? Think of a mama bird feeding the baby birds. Something like that happen in beetles? Absolutely. Just think of the bess beetle. If you crack open some logs, you, you’ve surely seen some bess beetles. Um, bess beetles actually pre-chew food to feed to their larvae in their galleries inside old rotting logs, and they also provide protection for their larvae, and they also communicate with them with stridulation. And so even that type of thing occurs in the beetles.
Bioluminescence. Things like anglerfish and, uh, some other types of animals are able to produce cold chemical light for various reasons. We have that in beetles, of course. You all know Lampyridae, the fireflies, are able to produce light with their body. Uh, in fact, there are five different families of beetles that are able to produce light, bioluminescent light. It’s an amazing ability, and there are five different groups of beetles that can do it. All right.
But what about this guy? A furry little hamster here. Do beetles match that in the beetleverse? Yes. There are furry little beetles, and what’s interesting is with respect to pollination, uh, many beetle pollinators have an unusual little vestiture of setae, these hairs you see on the body, either little scales or hairs, and that helps make them more effective pollinators. They’re sort of like a dust mop picking up all of the pollen as they’re milling around, and they’re able to move the pollen more effectively with that. So we have our own little, our own little, uh, fuzzy mammals.
All right, so I could go on all day with that, but I’ll spare you.
Where Pollination Sits on the Beetle Tree
Joe McHugh: If you look at the history of, of beetle evolution, you’ll see an interesting pattern or you’ll see an interesting pattern with respect to pollination. This is a phylogenetic tree that was produced in a collaborative study that my lab worked on back in twenty fifteen with, uh, Duane McKenna. Uh, and these are some of the higher level groupings of the beetles here. And so all that beetle diversity can be jammed into one of these groups that you see here. Right? So this kind of reflects how they’re all related to each other.
And if you map onto this tree here, which ones are known pollinators? Which ones of these groups include species that are known pollinators? They’re all over the tree. Uh, there are lots and lots of groups here that have known pollinators in them.
And so beetles have an extensive, uh, range of different interactions with, uh, with the flowers throughout the tree here. Multiple different evolutions of, uh, pollination, uh, behavior have popped up in the tree for the beetles. Okay.
Beetle Biology and Development
Joe McHugh: Let’s talk about the biology for a bit now. Okay, if you look at beetle biology, we’ll talk about the development here.
Complete Metamorphosis and the Larval Stage
Joe McHugh: Beetles are a holometabolous group. They’re like the, they’re like the butterflies and moths. They’re like the bees and wasps. They’re like the flies. Uh, they lay eggs. The eggs hatch into larvae. The larvae pupate, and the pupae hatch out into the adult. So they’ve got complete metamorphosis.
Beetle larvae are unbelievably diverse, like everything else about beetles. They have many, many different forms. They live in many, many different places. They have many, many different feeding behaviors, okay?
Beetle larvae are the longest living stage in the life history of a beetle. Okay? Some of them live two years or longer in the larval stage alone. And in the larval stage, beetles do most of their feeding.
What’s interesting is that the larval stage is not, um, the stage that’s responsible for pollination. Pollination in beetles is always limited to the adult stage.
What’s interesting also about the larvae here that I should mention is that in beetle species that are known to be pollinators, typically, always, the larvae have nothing to do with the flowers, okay? You’ll find beetle pollinator species whose larvae actually are borers in wood or are detritivores that live in leaf litter or soil inhabiting, totally disconnected from the biology of the adult, which is to be feeding on the floral materials. So it’s a very, very strange kind of split between the, the larval biology and the adult biology. But the larvae aren’t the pollinators.
Ecological Roles
Joe McHugh: Ecological roles of beetles, they do everything. Again, diversity. Uh, they can be predaceous, parasitic, coprophagous, necrophagous, detritivorous, mycophagous, and herbivorous. And this is, of course, the, the type of ecological role here that we’re interested in for this subject and for this course is a connection to plants.
But even within that category, they do everything. There are frugivorous beetles, granivorous beetles, pollinivorous beetles, nectivorous beetles, florivorous beetles, folivorous beetles, xylophagous beetles, rhizophagous beetles, and detritivorous beetles.
Only these categories here in red are related to pollination, though. So let’s focus on those.
Cantharophily: Pollination by Beetles
Joe McHugh: There actually is a term for pollination by beetles. It’s called cantharid— cantharophily, and that is, uh, literally is pol— is love of beetles or pollination by beetles. All right? And so you can see a couple of different beetles here on flowers.
Mess and Soil Pollinators
Joe McHugh: What can we say about cantharophily? Beetles are, um, not very elegant diners, okay, if you wanna put it nicely. They’re considered mess and soil pollinators, and the reason why they’re considered that is that, um, they get in there, and they use those mandibulate mouthparts that I mentioned to chew up the flower. They chew up the petals. They chew up the sexual parts. They plow their way around the flower. They do a bunch of damage.
They have a habit, a nasty habit of mating with each other on top of the flower, and even a worse habit of defecating on the flower while they’re wandering around on it as well, okay? Not elegant dining guests for sure compared to a lot of the other groups.
So mess and soil pollinators. They’re kind of like a mixture between a dust mop that’s cruising around picking up pollen while they’re just kind of bumbling around on the flower, on the flower head, and kind of like a tractor plowing their way around and, and doing damage along the way. All right.
Flowers That Specialize for Beetles
Joe McHugh: What can we say about the flowers that, that are associated with beetles? They have a particular sort of syndrome of features if they are specialists that rely heavily on beetle pollination.
They tend to have strong fragrances that may be fruity, spicy, like a fermenting smell or a musky smell, okay? And, uh, if you think back to those crazy antennae that I told you about that are covered with those sensory structures, remember that beetles rely very heavily on olfactory cues and, and thermal cues to, to recognize their, uh, flowers. And so these fragrances are meant to lure in the beetles to be able to find them. Um, beetles don’t rely as much on vision as a lot of other pollinators, okay?
What else can we say about beetle-pollinated flowers? They tend to be active, uh, open during the daytime, okay? They tend to be diurnal flowering, opening flowers. Okay? And, uh, part of their explanation for why that is that those, those fragrances that the flowers produce can be produced and, uh, spread widely more easily when it’s warm out from the heat of the day.
What else can I say? The color of beetle-pollinated flowers tend to be white, yellow, pale green, and sometimes reddish-brown, burgundy in color. Okay? And again, color is not so important to beetles because they’re using other, uh, cues to find the flowers.
Flowers that are beetle-pollinated, that are kind of specialists for beetle pollination, don’t have nectar guides because beetles don’t really care to be finding the nectar. Okay? Beetles are flying in primarily to look for pollen, protein-rich pollen, and petals to chew on. Okay? They’re not focused on the nectar ‘cause they can’t really drink it.
What about the form of the flowers? There’s sort of like three different appearances of flowers that you’ll see that are, uh, beetle-pollinated. They can be big flowers that are bowl-shaped with big, thick, fleshy petals that the beetles can just flop into. Okay?
Remember, the beetles gave up a pair of their wings, pair of their flight wings, and they’re heavily armored. They are not good flyers. They’re clumsy, and so they just wanna fly over the flower and kind of flop down onto it. And so you see flowers that have these big open kind of bowl shapes, uh, that they can flop onto. And then they have big thick petals that the beetles can, can munch on.
The other, option is a big open-faced flower that again, they can fly into and flop onto like a sunflower. Or big broad clusters of tiny flowers in this kind of inflorescence that again, the beetles can flop onto. Beetles need a big landing pad to land on, and then they wander around and they want to chew up the pollen and chew up the petals. And so typically, those flowers provide lots of those resources, lots of pollen and lots of petals for them to munch on while they’re milling around picking up pollen to carry on to another flower. Beetles, again, don’t have the ability to drink nectar very easily, so that’s not what they’re there for. Okay.
Who You Will See on Southeastern Flowers
Joe McHugh: With that, I wanna change tracks one more time here and talk to you about who are some of the usual suspects that you might see in the southeastern United States when you’re looking at, uh, flowers, when you’re surveying pollinators.
This is not a beetle taxonomy course. Um, I, I teach one of those at UGA, and I spend a whole semester and, and barely scratch the surface of beetle, uh, taxonomy, and it requires a lot of really good microscopes and, and squinting at details of tarsi and, and antennae. Uh, but that’s not what my purpose here is. I wanna just try to show you a couple of, uh, types of beetles so that you can recognize them.
And I’m well aware of the fact that beetles in pollination surveys usually fall into this other category down here. You know, carpenter bees get their own category, bumblebees get their own category, honeybees their own category, small bees their own category. Poor beetles don’t even get their own order-level category. They get dropped into the other insect group. (laughs) All right.
So let’s talk about some of those beetle groups that are likely suspects that you’ll see out there when you look at your flowers.
Scarab Beetles (Scarabaeidae)
Joe McHugh: Uh, the first one is the Scarabaeidae, and the Scarabaeidae are commonly known as scarab beetles or June beetles and chafers and things like that. How do you recognize them?
They have a stout body. It’s convex, so it’s humped up dorsally. Uh, they have antennae that have those fan-like, uh, clubs. These really spectacularly beautiful clubs that can close up to look like a club or open up to look like a beautiful, delicate fan. Their front legs are fairly thick, and they have teeth on them, denticulate projections off the sides of the legs. You can see that here on this guy.
And if you look at them from above, you’ll notice that normally their abdomen isn’t completely covered by the elytra. Okay? You can see part of their abdomen sticking out beyond the elytra. Right? So those are the scarabs.
And you can see this guy here is covered with setae. He’s one of the fuzzy ones that picks up a lot of pollen in the process of crawling all over the flowers. All right.
Longhorn Beetles (Cerambycidae)
Joe McHugh: The next family is Cerambycidae, and the Cerambycidae are the longhorn beetles, and these are much more elongated beetles. They tend to have either a cylindrical body form like these guys here or sort of a diamond-shaped body outline like these guys here. Um, the head is usually roughly about the same width as the pronotum.
Uh, the antennae, however, are very, very distinct. That’s what they get their common name from. The antennae are very long and typically thread-like antennae that are at least as long as half the body length, and sometimes they’re even way longer than the entire body length. So long to very long antennae.
If you look at the elytra, the elytra are very broad anteriorly, and they give these kind of shoulder, these shoulder pad sort of look to them. So that’s what, um, the longhorn beetles look like.
Leaf Beetles (Chrysomelidae)
Joe McHugh: Chrysomelidae are the leaf beetles, and, uh, these are small, oval to round-shaped beetles. They’re strongly convex dorsally. Uh, they look a little bit like a weevil at first glance, but they don’t have a snout.
Uh, their antennae are not more than half their body length. Their pronotum usually has a sharp edge to it laterally. Look here, you can see a sharp edge there. Their elytra are hard and crunchy, kind of hard, crunchy, shell-like types of elytra, and they typically cover the entire abdomen. There’s no abdomen sticking out posteriorly.
One other feature is if you can get a careful, look carefully at their legs, you might notice that chrysomelids have fat, spongy types of feet, if you will. Their tarsi have, uh, pads on the bottom that make them look fat.
Soldier Beetles (Cantharidae)
Joe McHugh: The next family is Cantharidae. These are the soldier beetles.
Uh, soldier beetles are yellow, brown, or reddish in color, oftentimes with black markings on them. Their body is squishy. These are squishy beetles, not crunchy beetles. They are leathery, okay, instead of hard.
Uh, they’re very similar to fireflies in appearance, but they have no light organ on them, and their head is visible from above. In fireflies, the pronotum covers the whole head, so you can’t see it from above. But cantharids look like a firefly, but you can see the head from above, and they can’t bioluminesce. They can’t bioluminesce.
Uh, the antennae of cantharids are long and thread-like, and their elytra are soft and leathery. That’s soldier beetles.
Blister Beetles (Meloids)
Joe McHugh: Meloid beetles, these are the blister beetles. Uh, blister beetles are unusual looking because their head narrows abruptly posteriorly. It makes it look like they have a neck. The pronotum is also very narrow anteriorly, and that helps to accentuate that neck appearance that the beetles have.
The elytra are soft. They’re kind of flexible, and they’re kind of floppy and loose over the back. Sometimes they’re extremely short, like in these guys over here, these black ones.
The coloration is usually striking. It’s aposematic. It’s warning coloration. There’s usually some kind of contrasting color pattern or bright color pattern that’s warning you not to touch them.
And the reason why they’re warning you is because these are the blister beetles. They are able to exude droplets of cantharidin from the joints on their body, and that causes blistering of your skin. That’s their protective, uh, their protective mechanism.
Click Beetles
Joe McHugh: Piridae [VERIFY: "Piridae"; click beetle family name] are the click beetles. They are— these are a favorite of kids everywhere. If you, uh, have spent much time out in nature, you surely have, at some point or another, played around with click beetles.
They have this elongate kind of typical sort of body form. Uh, they have a very unusual sort of junction between the, the pronotum and the rest of the body here that forms sort of a joint that, uh, is kind of a hinge between the anterior part of the body and the posterior part of the body, and that’s what they bend in order to latch their clicking mechanism, and that’s what allows them to pop up in the air when they want to flip.
If you look at the pronotum carefully, the posterior edges laterally have this sharp tooth on each side. You can see it on this guy over here very nicely. Uh, but that backward-projecting tooth is another thing that’s helpful to recognize the click beetles. But these guys are another pollinator group that you will see.
Sap, Picnic, and Pollen Beetles (Nitidulidae)
Joe McHugh: Nitidulidae are the sap beetles, picnic beetles, and pollen beetles. These are, are oval to oblong in body form. They’re sort of dorsoventrally flattened. They’re not as convex as many of the other beetles that I’ve mentioned to you.
If you look, they have a kind of broad head that’s visible from above. And on that head, they have a very unusual type of antenna that ends in a very abrupt club that is round and, uh, flat. It looks like a lollipop on a stick. Uh, so think of lollipop on a stick antennae for the nitidulids. That’s a great character for recognizing them.
The elytra in nitidulids are truncated. They’re very sharply cut straight across, and it usually exposes two or three of the abdominal seg- segments. So Nitidulidae, very common.
By the way, nitidulids are a family. They’re, they’re nitidulid beetles that are the known pollinators of, of the pawpaw tree. And so pawpaws are one of… They are the largest edible fruit in North America, and it’s nitidulids that are, uh, one of the key pollinators for that fruit.
Tumbling Flower Beetles (Mordellids)
Joe McHugh: Mordellids are the tumbling flower beetles. Mm. These are very, very distinctive looking beetles. They have a, a humped back.
The head is turned underneath, and it’s very small. The abdomen, at the end of the abdomen, has a very long spike-like projection off the end. And they’re usually covered with a very fine sort of fur or, uh, scales that make them look kind of fuzzy looking.
They’re called the tumbling flower beetles because if you’ve ever gotten up close to these guys and touched the flower that they’re on or got too close with your camera, they pop off and, uh, drop down into the ground down below. So they’re able to kind of jump. They have, big hind legs and this spike that help them to push off and, uh, drop to the ground. All right.
References and Closing Thoughts
Joe McHugh: And so that is it of our quick tour of common pollinator groups in the southeastern US. Uh, there are some fantastic… As I… I’m wrapping up the, the presentation here.
These are some general, uh, references here, uh, that you can go to online about beetle pollination. Uh, for beetle identification, bugguide.net is a really fantastic reference for identifying beetles. They have some fantastic photographs of all different kinds of beetles.
And this book here by Arthur Evans called The Beetles of Eastern North America is fantastic. If you’re interested in learning more about beetle diversity or identifying beetles, buy that book. Uh, he’s got pretty much every genus of beetle in the southeastern United States illustrated with descriptions and, uh, diagnoses and biological information.
And so to wrap up, final, final comments here. I hope you have a newfound respect for beetles as pollinators. Beetles have a very long, very rich and diverse history of being pollinators through evolutionary time. They were pollinating before there even were angiosperms, before there were bees, before there were butterflies, and they continue to be very important pollinators today as well.
And last but not least, just because you’re a clumsy flyer, you’re a weak flyer, and just because you lack specialized mouth parts that allow you to suck up or lap up nectar, and just because you’re a sloppy, destructive, and illele- and inelegant diner, it doesn’t mean you can’t also be a really important pollinator. And so I hope you’ve come to appreciate, uh, beetles as important pollinators out there.
And with that, I wanna just say thanks very much to Becky and to Rich for helping me to be part of this. And, uh, the image credits go to canva.com and to, various Bugwood, uh, contributors and photographers out there. And with that, I can wrap it up and take questions.
Questions and Answers
Becky Griffin: Joe, I, I like your last slide. I think there’s some life lessons in there. Uh, just ‘cause you’re not the most, uh, logical pollinator doesn’t mean you’re not an important one.
Joe McHugh: Yeah. So should I sh- stop the share now?
Becky Griffin: Yes. Now we’re ready. All right, so we’ll go through a couple questions.
How Do Beetles Get Water?
Becky Griffin: How do beetles get water?
Joe McHugh: A lot of it is what they ingest. So beetles, what they’re eating has some, has some, uh, water in it.
Um, beetles do have other s- other mouth parts that are capable of maybe picking up a little bit of water. But, you know, they have maxillae and, and, uh, a labium that can maybe get a little bit of liquid, but a lot of it is just what they’re ingesting. And beetles have special mechanisms in their digestive system for retaining water. They’re really, really good at surviving with very little water.
Uh, beetles have recycling systems in their digestive system for holding water, the little bit of water they get, and so that’s why we actually have problems with some stored product pests. Beetles can live inside a bag of flour or, uh, a, a bag of dog food or seeds or something like that and have m- many, many generations for a whole year without any access to free water. And so they’re just really, really good at, at getting by with little, little water.
Becky Griffin: Excellent.
Do Beetles Pollinate Coontie?
Becky Griffin: Uh, Wendy wants to know if beetles pollinate I’m gonna spell this C-O-O-N-T-I-E ‘Cause I’m not sure what that is
Joe McHugh: I’m actually not sure either.
Becky Griffin: Okay.
Joe McHugh: I’ll have to, I’ll have to, I’ll have to look that up and- Okay. I’m gonna look that one up and see. Yeah. I’m a- Sorry. I’m a, I’m a beetle guy. I’m not a, I’m not a plant-
Becky Griffin: Not a plant guy
Joe McHugh: Sorry. Sorry, folks.
Becky Griffin: Oh, no, no. This is great. If…
Are the Vespids as Old as Their Beetle Mimics?
Becky Griffin: Laura wants to know if beetles mimic the vespids, then the vespids had to have been around about three hundred million years ago also. Is this true?
Joe McHugh: No. Um, the, uh, the ones that are mimicking the vespids came much later. And so if you look at that evolutionary tree that I showed you, there were ancient lines of beetles that were associated with cycads, long, long, you know, millions, hundreds of millions of years ago. But then there were many beetles that much more recently became pollinators. And those beetles would have much later been involved in these mimicry complexes and would have evolved to, to, uh, be able to utilize, uh, mimicry to help to protect themselves out in the open on a flower.
Becky Griffin: That’s sort of fascinating. Yeah, I think everybody has a new respect for beetles.
Joe McHugh: Mm-hmm.
Census Wrap-Up
Becky Griffin: So right now, Joe, I’m gonna send you over to the Q&A to type up some answers, and I’m going to share my screen, and we’re going to talk a little bit about the Census in general. Okay. Let’s see I can do this correctly. All right.
So as you all know, th- well, this was a fantastic, a fascinating study on beetles. I’ve always respected them. I feel I was shamed because the original counting sheet that Joe showed did not have a beetle on it. I think we have fixed that.
Uh, we’ve been through some iterations since then, and so we know that we chose beetles as one of the other insects, like Joe said, not because we don’t have respect for them, but just because we, uh, had to keep our list at a certain level. And we are gonna see in August some insects that don’t fall into those eight categories that we’ve pr- previously discussed. Uh, and these are just some examples of things I’ve seen.
We have one of the flower beetles that Joe was talking about on a jewelweed. Very cute. Um, we’ve seen dragonflies and mantids. I know somebody sent me a picture of a mantid today, uh, on, on some plants. It was really cute. Over here we have an ambush bug, which is a really tiny insect. This was on mountain mint.
So these are the kind of things, lady beetles, these are the things that we are going to see that you would put in the other category. If it is not an insect, uh, let’s say it’s a hummingbird because I know everyone loves hummingbirds, and they really, really, really wanna count them during the census, but we are looking at insect. Um, just kinda keep that in mind as you go along in your counting.
Resources for Running a Census Event
Becky Griffin: Now, uh, we have had, uh, seven weeks of some pretty intense scientific information and some really good hints on counting and creating your wonderful pollinator garden. I know I have taken copious notes every week. We’ve had some really amazing speakers. But this all leads to August twenty-first and twenty-second for this year’s census. So, um, if you are in the southeast, as part of the course, we want you to lead a census event or at least participate. And if you have not checked out the census website, I definitely need you to do that ASAP.
There you will have everything that you need to lead a census program or to participate. There are PowerPoints you could use to train your garden club or the day of your event, um, have those pulled up. There are videos where I explain in detail how to count. Um, if you’re an educator or you have a boys and girls club, we have lessons and games and books and all sorts of recommendations on things you can do around a census event.
We also have rack cards and bookmarks that you are welcome to maybe send to a place like Vistaprint where you can add your own event information. So those are… Everything you need should be at the, um, website. If it’s not, and there’s something there that you need that’s not, please email me and let me know, and we can get that to you.
This Year’s “I Counted” Sticker
Becky Griffin: Uh, we unveiled, I think it was last week, the twenty-twenty-six I Counted stickers. They feature, uh, lady beetles in honor of Joe here and our, our, uh, emphasis on beetles in the other insect category.
These are located on the website for you to easily print out, um, use them on social media the day of the events. Print them out for stickers. Um, oddly enough, people collect these, and I’ve had people email me and wanting to have one from twenty nineteen or one from twenty twenty-one. Uh, I think that’s kind of funny, but this is, uh, this year’s official I counted sticker.
The Insect Mascots
Becky Griffin: You are also… You— anyone is available, is able to use the insect mascots, and I have this QR code up. It is a link to the insect mascots. All of these things that you’re seeing here were created just for the census by the very talented Megan McCoy.
You can make T-shirts with them. You can print them on your flyers. You can make hats with them. I have a really cool hat I made with the moth.
So, um, you can go to the website and download those and use them for anything you want to. You don’t need any of my permission for that. I’ve seen them on signs at schools. Uh, I think there’s a school in Walton County, and they call themselves the Walton Wasps Counters, and they have actually, um, downloaded that wasp and used that cute thing.
State Coordinators
Becky Griffin: If you have a specific question about what’s going on in your state, um, these are your state coordinators. I’m the national coordinator, but Georgia’s my home state, and I’m really pulling hard that Georgia’s participate again this year.
So your coordinators can talk to you about events in your state, specific questions about habitat in your state, insects you may see in your state. Um, so please maybe take a screenshot of this. If you don’t, if you’re not already familiar with your coordinator, get familiar with them. They’re wonderful people, and they love pollinators just like you do, and they’re, um, excited to talk to you about them.
Hosting a Census Event
Becky Griffin: Um, hosting a census event.
We did a newsletter on hosting this, a census event, and I have the MailChimp, uh, link there. So if you didn’t— if you’re not on our mailing list, you should be, and you can get on it through the website. Um, if you miss this one, I give you a lot of helpful hints on successfully hosting an event, uh, a way to showcase your garden, a way to showcase what you’re doing, as well as providing a group atmosphere for people to count. So I recommend that if you haven’t seen that, please go and look at that.
This is our eighth year as the census, and so I’ve done and participated in a lot of events and wanna save you guys, um, any kind of heartache or that’s a strong word. Any kinda— I wanna make sure you have the best possible time and get the most out of hosting an event.
Counting and Uploading
Becky Griffin: All right. Yes, this is our updated census form. And yes, Joe, there is a beetle down here, so I feel, feel a little vindicated.
Uh, one of the things that I really emphasize that I learned from watching others do events is if you have a census event and you are printing out the count sheets like this, and you’re having people, uh, you’re teaching them a little bit about counting. They go out and count, and they’re bringing you the count sheets. You do not wanna upload fifty count sheets, and chances are good that you’re just gonna not do it. So there are two things you can do here.
One is you can, as they bring their count sheets back to you, they’re gonna have their cell phones. You can have them take their cell phones, go with the QR code, and have them upload their own counts. That way, you’re not responsible for doing it. We get the counts, it takes them two minutes, and it saves you a lot of trouble.
Counting on Your Phone
Becky Griffin: Now, something that we haven’t talked a lot about, but I’m very excited about, is you all who have participated in the census before know that the day of the census, that morning, like at twelve oh one a.m., we will open up the website for uploading your counts.
One of the really neat features that Rich has worked really hard on for years that we have wanted to make sure we have is this year you will now be able to count on your phone. So we have like an app. It’s still gonna give us all of the information we need, like what flower you counted on, what’s the temperature, uh, what are the weather conditions. Things that we need for the researchers that places like iNaturalist just were not allowing us to ask you.
So if you are feeling comfortable, y-maybe you don’t even need a count sheet. Maybe you’ve done this before, and you just feel confident counting on your phone. So that’s a new feature. You’ll be able to try it out this year. We’re extremely excited about it.
It is a long time in coming. And man, I’m so excited, and I know Rich is too, ‘cause I’ve been bugging him about… Bugging him. I’ve been bugging him about it for quite a while.
Two Facebook Pages
Becky Griffin: All right, uh, some more information that will be helpful to you. We have two Facebook pages. The first one over here, the Great Southeast Pollinator Census community page, is the one that is original.
We have over ten thousand members. It is fun. All right? We show pictures. We share excitement about our pollinator gardens. Right now, we are in the middle of wasp week, so there’s a lot of information this week on wasps.
I will give you quizzes. We talk about building gardens, all that type of thing. One of the things we found out is that it’s such a big popular page that when people started posting events, they got lost in the shuffle. So we have the Great Southeast Pollinator Census page, which is for our events. So let’s say you are hosting an event.
You can send your event flyer to your state coordinator or me, and I can put it on the events page. If you are looking for an event that you wanna join in your area, instead of sifting through the many, many posts that we have on the community page, you can go straight to this census page. I know that’s a little confusing, and you’ll be able to find just listed nicely in a row all of the many, many events. Last year we had well over hun- we had hundreds of events, and I wanna make sure the best I can, that you are able to find those if you wanna participate.
Counting at Home, at School, and in Groups
Becky Griffin: And it’s fun to participate in events one day and then count at home with your family the next day. I love the camaraderie of counting at an event. I have been to so many of them, and everyone’s excited and, uh, they learn from each other. If you’re not a totally confident counter, you get some help there.
Uh, it is so much fun to count at this event, but it is also fun to count at home with your family in your own garden. And I have several people who have counted for… this will be their eighth year. And they actually do a really neat thing, and they keep their own counts and see how it varies in their own garden. If you have a school that’s counting, maybe you can volunteer at the school. There are so many ways to participate.
If you are in Georgia, we are asking this year for you to invite a friend. Uh, we want to keep spreading the word, and I think everyone who is already passionate about pollinators knows about the census and participates. So maybe grab a friend who lives in your neighborhood, or a friend that goes to school with your children, or is on the soccer team and invite them over. Maybe, maybe you supply the sweet tea, uh, and then allow others to count and fall in love with these insects.
So I appreciate your patience with these, the social media, but again, we just wanna make sure that you can find the events close to you, and there’s a way that we can promote events that you are doing. All right. Mostly, we just want you guys to have a lot of fun.
Send and post pictures. Um, the schools across the state, across the southeast, we had five hund- ninety-four schools participate last year for the no-cost STEM event, as you can see pictures here. Teachers, of course, if they, uh, they train their students. If they don’t feel their students are giving a good reflection in their counts, they just don’t upload them. Okay?
I have schools like a K through six school. It’s Pollinator Day at that school. They play our pollinator music. The kids are out. They have worked on that pollinator garden. The kindergartners are not gonna give you an accurate count.
They’re mostly gonna get outside and run around and say, “It’s a bee. Look at me.” So we just don’t make a big deal about that. Those counts just are not uploaded. So I want you to keep that in mind. And again, having loads of fun.
Just look at the groups around you. Join a group. Host a group. Scouting.
I had somebody today say they are working with their Scout, Girl Scout group. I was a Girl Scout leader for twelve years. Go Scouts. And I know that those girls love this type of thing. Our state parks are involved. Just it is a big, big deal. So just make sure that you are part of that deal when the time comes.
Census Dedication and Regional Reports
Becky Griffin: I also wanted to make sure that everybody knew that this year’s census is dedicated to the Walter Reeves. He is known throughout the southeast for his radio show, uh, and his love of the environment.
He was funny, and I knew him long before he became famous, and he is a good friend. So it was just appropriate to make sure that we think about him as we’re counting pollinators this year.
The Grand Marshal
Becky Griffin: Couple other things to share with you. Uh, we do have a Grand Marshal this year, but I’m not spilling the tea.
Uh, you’re gonna have to wait and see. I think that will be announced maybe Monday morning. Uh, as you all know, the Grand Marshal is someone who is representing the census. They are opening the census officially, so it is very— it’s very cute to watch them get all excited. So I’m working behind the scenes with Amanda, so that should give you a hint that we are looking at a North Carolinian this year to open up the census. That’s coming.
Uh, wanna make sure that if you have any questions, again, you can email your state coordinator or myself. Uh, I have some notes I wanted to make sure that you guys all knew. Uh, make sure that you do upload your counts. Um, it’s great to use the resources and participate. It doesn’t help our researchers if we don’t upload those counts.
So Rich is making it easy this year, counting on your phone using the QR code. We should be in really good shape. Rich, what are you, um… Do you have some information about how the count’s gonna go this year?
The Count Page and the QR Codes
Rich Braman: I sure do. And just like Becky said, you should be able to go right to our count page this year.
So if you’re someone who bookmarks that already, go right ahead ‘cause you’ll be able to go there and do the whole thing on your phone, uh, if you want to. Of course, I know for lots of folks, myself included, just because I have my own spot that we love right out there, right smack dab in the middle of where I know for a fact we don’t get cell service, and that’s okay.
I am taking my newer sheet out there with me. I just printed off a, a big old stack of them, Becky. All right.
And, uh, I know a few folks had mentioned in the chat too that they were needing a QR code to the count page ‘cause they had been asked to stick it on flyers. So I just, uh, dropped one in the chat for you.
So if you do need that f-to do promotion for your own event or to promote the census with a flyer of your own, you can grab that QR code. It’s in the chat now. You should have a little download button there to download it too.
Becky Griffin: Right.
Rich Braman: And I see some question about the mascots, Becky.
Okay. We’re saying maybe the QR code. Maybe it got forked a little bit in the-
Becky Griffin: Oh, got tw-
Rich Braman: In the slide.
Becky Griffin: Okay.
Rich Braman: So we will provide that to folks. We can stick that right up there with, um, with the recording as well.
And I think we can stick… You know what? We’ll stick all these QR codes in the mail that we send out when we announce the recording for this week.
Chat Links and the Post-Webinar Poll
Becky Griffin: Okay. All right. I’m going to, just in the, um, chat, I’m going to type the, um, website for the insect mascots. And I’m sorry about that. I, um, I generated that one right before we started, and I bet I just went too fast. Um, while we’re finishing talking, I’m gonna launch our post-webinar poll.
Uh, one of the things that we are asking, let’s see, you to do this time is usually there’s just two questions. Today at the beginning, we would like you to tell us one thing you’ll remember about the t- our time together in the pollinator course. It is a short answer. Just be brief, but we just wanna make sure that we hit the mark for you, and that you come away, uh, learning a little bit more, appreciating these insects, and getting you ready for learning in your own garden, that type of thing. So yeah. I’m gonna just set that aside.
Counts Around the Region
Becky Griffin: And, uh, I know that I’m counting with some FFA students on that Friday. I’ve got three classes I’m going to visit this year. I know that they’re planning a big countdown at Georgia Tech as well.
I was speaking with my friend Dr. Levy earlier. Many of our state gardens across the state are counting, and they’re giving, um, discounts for admission if you’re, uh, doing some counting. So that’s always a lot of fun.
There will be counting, I believe, at the Governor’s Mansion again this year. Our, uh, governor’s wife is just very… loves this project. And as you know, we have a proclamation from the governor about it, so she’s- she counts every year. It’s gonna be fun. It is a pollinator party for two days.
Uh, all, all the states are having a big pollinator parties. Uh, our new state this year is Mississippi. Uh, they are— This is their first year, so if you are from Mississippi, definitely do your counts, uh, and talk to your local Extension personnel about getting even more involved. Florida is very big.
I’ve got Amanda on here. I know she is very excited about, um, what’s going on in North Carolina. Last year, South Carolina had a hurricane. (chuckles) So, uh, we are hoping that we do not have a hurricane this year for the counts, and so that we can, um, make sure everybody has a good time. We did pick that August date because it was sup-supposedly one of the driest weekends (chuckles) in the calendar. Uh, but occasionally, that doesn’t work out for us. Amanda, do you have, um, anything you’d like to address to the, uh, North Carolinians who are on the call today?
North Carolina’s Goal for 2026
Amanda Bratcher: Oh, yeah. (laughs) We are gonna beat Florida this year. I wish Jeremy was here so he could hear me say that.
Um, so in North Carolina, we, we have been doubling our participation since we joined in twenty twenty-three. And so this year we have a goal of ten thousand counts across the state and a count in every county. So there’s a hundred counties in North Carolina, and last year we had ninety-two of one hundred counties represented, so that was really cool.
Becky Griffin: Great.
Amanda Bratcher: So I’m really confident that we can get all one hundred counties, um, in North Carolina represented.
And so Becky, I just echo you. Folks who are on here, count yourselves, but then also grab a friend or a family member and have them count as well. I did drop, um, a note in the chat, and North Carolina has some North Carolina-centered resources. So if you are joining from North Carolina, you’re hosting some stuff in North Carolina, I have a whole…
I have a lot of marketing stuff already made for folks in North Carolina that’s got like NC State branding, um, as well as the Georgia and Great Southeast Pollinator Census branding. So it kind of like just lowers the barrier to entry for hosting an event, whether you do it at your house or your local community center. And then I do a— I am keeping track of events that are happening in North Carolina.
And just before I, um, just, um, just before I joined, was…
There was a, um, there were thirty-two events already scheduled in North Carolina. So my goal for by the end of the week is to have a map of all the events that folks can see to join in North Carolina.
Becky Griffin: That’s awesome.
Amanda Bratcher: So if you’re in North Carolina during the census, there is lots of pl- ways to get involved.
The Census Forecast and the Playlist
Becky Griffin: And as you can see, Amanda is a very, um, enthusiastic coordinator, so she’s planned a lot of really fun things. Some other fun things that happened is if you’re around the Atlanta area, you may know that the Atlanta forecast, weather forecasters give a forecast for the census. So that’s something fun to look forward to, to get ready, uh, get everybody psyched and ready to go.
We have a Spotify playlist that you guys have been hearing most weeks that is public, that, um, you’re welcome to use to get people pumped and ready to go. I personally will have no problem getting pumped and ready without the music. But you do whatever you need to do to be ready to, to count pollinators. All right, just a few more minutes, seconds on the poll here. And there we go.
Closing
Becky Griffin: All right, I just wanna take a minute to thank everybody for joining us for this fun adventure. As Rich and I were talking earlier today, this has been over a year in the planning. Uh, he and I first started making definite plans about this about a year ago. Uh, I’ve been very fortunate and very blessed that we have had some of the best presenters in the United States dealing with our topics.
I was not told no one time, and I so appreciate that. And that just goes to show you how important that these researchers and scientists feel that the census and the work that we do, uh, really does matter. So that’s, uh, you know, that’s great. I know I took a lot of notes.
I learned a lot of things. I’m gonna be looking for beetles this week in my yard. And I wanna thank Rich for being an amazing co-host. High five to you, Rich. We do a good job together.
Uh, and Beth for handling all of our background admin stuff. None of this would ever work without her. She’s our unsung hero. I’m going to be visiting Griffin next week so that we all three will be together, and we’re gonna go out and do some celebrating.
(outro music)
Transcript processed for UGA Center for Urban Agriculture / Great Southeast Pollinator Course · gsepc.org
Source: Corrected SRT (Stage 1), file GTBOP_Transcript_2026-07-28_Beetles.srt (989 blocks)