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Exploring Floral Networks

For Bees, Beetles, Flies, Wasps, Ants & Bugs

Discover how photo and audio recordings reveal the hidden world of pollinators in west-central Illinois, showing how bees, beetles, flies, and bugs shape our flowers and ecosystems. Please Register

Photo documentation and voice recordings were used to document flower visiting insects at 12 nature preserves in west-central Illinois from 2023-2024. Bipartite network graphs were created to determine connections between groups of insects and flowers visited. While bees made up the majority of visitations (40%) other taxa including beetles, flies and even true bugs also made up a large percentage of the total visitations. By analyzing all of the pollinator groups together it may be possible to determine the importance of bee versus non-bee insects on flower reproduction and maintaining vegetative communities.

The presenter, Angella Moorehouse, has worked for 29 years as a field representative for the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission in west-central Illinois where she prepares conservation easements to protect high quality natural areas and assists in the management and monitoring of these sites. She has been conducting photography surveys of flower visiting insects on 30 protected preserves in west-central Illinois since 2018. Angella has published several Rapid Field Guides on wasps, bees, flies, and moths with the Field Museum. “Flower Bugs” is her first book publication (2023) and is intended as a field guide for identification of flower visiting Heteroptera in the Midwest.

This program is in partnership with the Wild Ones of Greater Kane County

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