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.

Must we get ready for a bee-free diet?

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, natural history, bees, native bees, pollinators, pollination

Do you like melons, including watermelon? Do you use pumpkin, zucchini, or other squashes? Maybe you like to eat more exotic produce, such as kiwi fruit or passion fruit, or nuts such as Brazil nuts and macadamias. For all of these, pollination by bees is essential. If there were no bees, the yield per acre of these crops, if they could be commercially grown at all, would be 1/10 or even only 1/100 of what it is at present.

Maybe you like apricots, blueberries, loquats, peaches, plums or cherries; or how about almonds or cashews; maybe pears, apples, or raspberries. My wife, along with many, adores cucumbers and eggplant. All of these also need bees to bear well. These crops and many others are listed as having "great" need for bees to pollinate them in resources such as this Wikipedia page. Overall, bee pollination is responsible for about one-third of our food supply.

I have not yet specifically mentioned honeybees. Honeybees can and do pollinate all these crops and many more. For some of them, only honeybees seem to do an economical job of it. But there are 20,000 species of bees so far known worldwide, and 4,000 of them are found in North America. Most of them are pollinators also.

The honeybee is a little larger than average. This one is shown sharing a flower with a sugar bee (AKA bush bee) in Australia; they are smaller than average (Picture credit centralcoastbees.org, in NSW, Australia). When I watch the bees that come to my chives in late summer, I typically see a few honeybees, and many more small ones that are similar to a bush bee. Here in the U.S. many of the littler bees are mason bees, which live in holes in the ground or in wood. In fact, other than honey bees (which are a European import) or several species of bumble bees and carpenter bees, most bees are "little dark things" about the size of a grain of rice.

I won't go into Colony Collapse Disorder or other ills that are presently wiping out so many colonies of honeybees. Rather, with such problems as a background, we need to be thinking about what we will do if the principal species of honeybee soon become extinct. Knowing that there are so many thousands of species of native bees, and knowing that most native bees are also pollinators, we need to ask, can they do the job if honeybees fail?

In Our Native Bees: North America's Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them, Paige Embry takes aim at this question. As the title makes clear, many of the native bees are suffering declines along with honeybees, for a variety of reasons. Some of them are prone to the same diseases and mite infestations that are part of the problems honeybees are having. Others are being wiped out just because they are "little dark things" that we don't notice when we decide to monocrop a field that was once part of a more traditional (multi cropped) farm; or to spray a new (or old!) insecticide that hasn't been tested for native bee safety; or to either drain a pond or create a new one.

Bee diversity is a big theme of the book. The book is richly illustrated, with photos of many bee species. Many of those photos were taken by Sam Droege of USGS, who produced this montage (I got his photo from the Jones lab at Bowdoin). The great diversity of bees and other insects prone to pollinating has led to an equal diversity of flowers that need pollination. So much so that not all flowers can even be pollinated by honeybees.

One such is the tomato. Ms Embry got interested in bees when she discovered that only bumble bees can do "buzz pollination" that tomato flowers need to release their pollen. Honeybees aren't strong enough. Other flowers are too long or deep. In the picture above, the two bees at the left of the second row are shown with their mouth parts extended. They can pollinate flowers that honeybees cannot reach into. The green one is a kind of sweat bee, so-called because it will also extend that long "tongue" to lick sweat off your body on a hot day. The sweat bees I knew as a child were brownish yellow and looked more like a half-size honeybee. But the ones here on the Atlantic coast of the U.S. are shiny green or green-and-yellow. Sweat bees can sting, not nearly as painfully as a honeybee, but most bees smaller than that don't sting.

A significant few chapters of the book are about BOB's, the Blue Orchard Bees. They are one kind of mason bee that scientists are experimenting with, to see if they can be produced and cultivated to compete with honeybees in, for example, the huge almond and cherry orchards of central California. One benefit of BOB's is that they are much more efficient workers than honeybees, by a factor of about 10! Thus, if you need a hive of 30,000 honeybees to pollinate an orchard (that would be a small orchard), a box of "tube cards" containing only 3,000 BOB's could do as well.

One great problem of beekeeping, whatever sort of bees one keeps, is keeping them alive when the flowers aren't blooming. BOB's don't make honey to tide themselves over the winter the way honeybees do.

As an aside, when I lived next door to a commercial beekeeper, he told me that he and his employees would make sugar syrup, which is much cheaper than honey, to feed his bees over the winter. I wonder how healthy those bees were come spring. The syrup doesn't have all the micronutrients that honey has.

BOB's store pollen instead of honey, and their young winter over in the tubes the mother bee fills with pollen pellets (I am oversimplifying). When they emerge in the spring, they need to find sources of pollen right away. Thus in other portions of the book we read of places such as golf courses that work with initiatives such as Operation Pollinator. Instead of managing the "rough" in a golf course as just another grassy field, the groundskeepers can mix in a variety of blooming plants. Not only do bees do better, but many golfers like the "wilder" (though still managed) appearance of the rough alongside the fairways.

This can also work in our yards. Many suburban yards have flower beds and borders. Most bees are not too picky, so even if we like to plant a lot of non-native flowers, they'll draw bees of many species. But we can also make sure to have something blooming all through the spring, summer and autumn. Even the grassy areas can have some flowers: my yard, for example, has a lot of white clover, which is beloved of many bees. I have a front yard and side yard (the back yard is too shady to support clover). I mow then on different schedules so that there is always some clover in flower somewhere in my yard all summer long. But I have a variety of non-grass areas where I can add more bee favorites.

The author tells us a little of the Great Sunflower Project, which has a few parallel initiatives to collect information about native bees (and honeybees if they are seen). I grew Lemon Queen sunflowers for three summers and reported my sightings to the Project. However, summer is hot and sticky here, and standing around for 15-30 minutes at a time during a heat wave was more than I wanted to bear any more. But I did learn a little about the local native bees. I also got to see goldfinches, which love the sunflower seeds.

This is one of my pictures of a bee on the bloom (the central part of the flower is about 2 inches across). I understand this green-and-yellow bee is also a sweat bee (I am no expert). The most common visiting bees were bumble bees.

I am optimistic that, even if there are many fewer honeybees on the job in the future, native bees can pick up a lot of the slack. All of it? Probably not. It may be that our diets will change somewhat. Meantime, understanding bees better can only help, and this book is a big help.