Getting to know bees

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, natural history, entomology, native bees, bees

Starting in 2009 I joined The Great Sunflower Project and participated for three summers. At the time we had to get seeds for a sunflower called Lemon Queen, which bears plenty of pollen, but has no nectar. The aim of the project is to take a weekly census through a summer of the pollinating bees that would visit the blooms, once they opened.

Data collection meant standing in the sun in July and August for 15 minutes and recording what kinds of bees visited the flowers. Most of them would be native bees, since honeybees are looking for nectar along with their pollen.

This image shows a sweat bee, one of many species of ground-nesting bees that live in this area. When I lived west of the Mississippi, the sweat bees I remember are tan or brown, not metallic green with a striped abdomen like this one.

After 2012 life got busier as I prepared to enter retirement—and has remained busy—so I didn't continue with the project. But I retained an interest in native bees. Here are a few others, on other flowers around my yard:

The two on the left are on apple blossoms. Upper: a bee, probably a mason bee, with very full pollen baskets. Lower: an Eastern Bumblebee. At right, on garlic chive flowers, a honeybee and a smaller bee I haven't identified to its left.

It was a thrill to find Dancing with Bees: A Journey Back to Nature by Brigit Strawbridge Howard. Ms Howard lives in North Dorset, England. The book's illustrations were drawn or painted by John Walters. Considering that the author mentions photography in nearly every chapter, I was disappointed that there are no photos. However, good plates, even in monochrome, greatly increase the production cost of a book.

The author tells of her girlhood love of nature, a two-decade hiatus amid the busyness of life, and her re-discovery of nature and bees in particular. This is scattered among nineteen chapters that tell us of many sorts of bees, and some wasps and other creatures.

There are about 20,000 species of bee, so far described. Possibly as many, or twice as many, species remain to be discovered and described. That compares well with the 30,000 to 60,000 individual bees in a single hive of honeybees! If you are ever near a honeybee hive, watching the workers zip out and in by the thousands, think, "For each bee I see, there is a whole species of bee somewhere, perhaps known, perhaps not yet known."

In the book we learn of bees that sting, those that don't, and those that can sting repeatedly the way wasps can (honeybees usually die after stinging once). We learn of male bees, which usually can't sting; most die soon after mating. Of bumblebee queens that begin the spring by foraging for food to start a nest. Some species' queens continue to forage through the summer but others get down to egg-laying only. I have seen bumblebees of various sizes in my yard, and thought they were different species. It turns out, the queen who emerges from hibernation (or diapause) in the spring is very large, but the quality of the foraging (pollen and nectar available) determines how much food she offers each offspring. Her workers are smaller than she, and sometimes a lot smaller, even as small as honeybees.

It took me a while looking at the insect pictured here, to determine it is a bee. The rear wings were in motion and hard to see, so I thought at first it was a hoverfly. The author writes of hoverflies also, and I can tell you they are hard to photograph. They seldom sit to sip.

We learn of cuckoo bees, which either add an egg or two to a victim's nest, or lay enough eggs that their own larvae will take over the nest and kill the larvae of the "owner". We learn of carder bees. At first I didn't know what was meant: we learn that carding by bees refers to processing plant fibers—the hairs on stems and leaves—into little felt pouches into which the bee lays an egg each and puts pollen and other food inside. A luxurious birthplace for the baby bee!

Here is one of my favorite bee photos. This big bumblebee on a coneflower is typical of the pollinators in this area. I see many more of these than honeybees. This one is a brown-belted bumblebee, perhaps as common as the Eastern bumblebee.

A first stage of learning about native bees is just getting to know the ones that frequent an area. Then, one may learn of their life cycle. Do they live in the ground, or in old mouse nests? Do they nest alone (most do), or in small social nests (like bumblebees), or in huge aggregations like honeybees and other eusocial bees and wasps?

At a later stage we may notice, as the author tells on her own behalf, that some bees may be getting out of sync with their preferred flowers. This can be a signal of climate change. For spring to arrive early or late a few times in a row is one thing. For the change to continue into a trend is another. The author tells of several such changes, such as a certain species of large bumblebee that has abandoned its southern range, but is only expanding slowly northward. She fears it will be pinched out of existence.

This is one of the most lyrically written books I've ever read. Even the bittersweet stories are a pleasure to read. We humans, so full of pride and hubris, need to get used to the fact that we share this planet with a few million species of animal, and an almost-equally huge number of plants. They can get by without us. We cannot get by without them.