Praise Bee was originally published in the BFEC Newsletter, Vol. 16/No. 3, Summer 2012.
Imagine approaching a crab apple tree overflowing with pink spring flowers. You close your eyes and lean in towards a blossom to inhale its fragrance, but are startled as your flower starts to buzz. You see a bee fly off, and then notice half-a-dozen flying in and out to neighboring branches. You become aware that you can hear a lot of bees creating a subtle roar like the snapping of a high-tension power line, and that you are in fact enveloped in their frenetically alive, vibrating sphere.
Often the work being done here is by the familiar honey bee. But look more closely, and you may notice tiny, metallic green bees, blonde bees, fuzzy bumble bees or bees that look like wasps.
The honey bee is, by far, the most celebrated of the insects present, due in no small part to the sticky, sweet by-product of its labors. Although a key pollinator for many trees and plants, it is an import from Eurasia. It surprisingly doesn't know how to pollinate a tomato or pumpkin quite as well as the busy, if somewhat under-appreciated pollinators that are native to North America.
The honey bee's American counterparts range from diminutive to alarmingly stout, reclusive to gregarious, stingless to potentially painful. Some make nests in pithy twigs, while others dig intricate tunnels and line them with cut leaves, only to be parasitized by yet other bee species.
This diversity is not surprising considering that there are approximately 500 species native to Ohio alone. While less obvious than the honey bee, we need them too, in ways large and small.
Honey bees are unique in their habit of forming large colonies. Indeed, their collective numbers and intricate social behaviors are what make them prized commodities in the agricultural world, enabling them to efficiently pollinate large fields of crops like almonds and blueberries. Thousands of hives migrate by the semi-truck load across the U.S. every year to do just that.
The endearing bumble bee lives in a much smaller hive, though its lifecycle and social structure are just as fascinating. In early spring, the young queen looks for an abandoned mouse tunnel or similar cavity to raise her brood. She fortifies it with insulation and builds wax honeypots to feed her young, and then lays half-a-dozen eggs that hatch into sterile female workers. Smaller than the queen, these workers care for the rest of the brood while the queen lays more eggs.
As summer wanes, the queen lays both male (drone) and female eggs. The females are all new queens that mate soon after they reach adulthood. At the end of the season, the old queen, sterile workers, and males die, leaving only the freshly mated young queens. They find a secure place over winter and then emerge in the spring to start their own colony.
Members of the Halictidae bee family, minute and metallic green or copper in color, are solitary. Some species will share an entrance into a nest (usually a sandy tunnel or rotten log) but rarely colonize together. They have earned the name "sweat bee" because of their proclivity towards lapping up salts and minerals from your skin, and their sting is a minor one, issued with tiny stingers and mild venom. Most members are "polylectic," or generalists that collect pollen from a variety of plants.
Andrenid bees, on the other hand, are specialists, only emerging when their favorite spring flowers are in full bloom. The observant naturalist can spot these non-descript little bees in the springtime, visiting violets and other flowers. Members of this family are responsible for pollinating rhododendrons, azaleas, and laurels, all flowers that cannot be pollinated by honey bees.
There are other crops that honey bees work less effectively than some of our native bee species. Alfalfa, for instance, an important food crop for livestock, presents a particular challenge to honey bees due to the shape of the flower. And while honey bees can pollinate squash plants, the specialized squash bee (pictured below) beats them to the punch, gorging early in the day and then napping in the flower by noon.
Most bees have specialized hairs or hind-leg "baskets" in which they collect pollen, which is usually fed to young larval bees. Not so for cuckoo bees, which parasitize nests of other bee species. In the early spring, these cunning, wasp-like bees fly low to the ground in search of a nest left unattended by the rightful owner. Once a suitable nest is located, the cuckoo bee sneaks in and deposits an egg. The egg develops more quickly than the host's eggs, and the voracious larva devours the host brood and remaining food supply.
Aside from our sheet admiration and love of azaleas and zucchini, we celebrate our diversity of bees because they provide us with a bit of insurance. Indeed, this is one reason why diversity is important in so many arenas: it provides an alternative should you lose that one basket that contains all of your eggs.
The honey bee, figuratively speaking, carries a huge basket when it comes to our country's food supply, responsible for one out of every three bites of food that you take. A world without honey bees might mean one with drastically fewer apples, avocados, and peaches, to name just a few products. Sadly, this prospect is not so far-fetched due to colony collapse disorder.
Honey bee colonies have been dying, or collapsing, at random, all over the globe, puzzling the scientific community and beekeepers alike. In 2007, commercial beekeepers alike. In 2007, commercial bee keepers reported losses ranging from 30 to 90 percent, and the USDA has reported persistent losses in the 30 percent range in subsequent years. A wide host of factors has been called into the investigation room for questioning, including viruses, parasites, poor food due to loss of habitat, cell phone radiation, genetically modified crops, pesticides or some combination of these factors.
A promising new study published in the June 2012 Bulletin of Insectology points to a nicotine-derived pesticide called imidacloprid. Introduced in the early 1990s, this class of pesticides is now widely used on corn, grains, and vegetables. Even though colonies in the study fared well after three months of low-level exposure, 94 percent had died-off by the six month mark, indicting long-term build-up as a possible culprit. Outcomes from other studies have also found that the pesticides renders bees more susceptible to fungal infection.
While performing the lion's share of the work pollinating our food and flowers, bees are certainly not the only pollinators out there. Joining the army of bee species are flies, beetles, wasp, birds and butterflies. Here at the BFEC, we promote pollinators or all stripes and their various preferences for room and board through conservation of diverse habits like prairie, farm field edges, forest, and wetland habitats.
The BFEC is also helping by participating in NASA's HoneyBeeNet research project, thanks to the help of local volunteer project coordinator Jason Bennett. Jason and other volunteers weigh the BFEC bee hives daily to measure honey production, which corresponds very closely with blooming and "nectar flow" of local plants. Researchers can use this data to determine if bloom dates are changing due to urbanization or climate change.
Data collected so far from this project, combined with historical data, have shown that spring bloom dates of major honey bee nectar plants such as honey locust and maple trees have been slowly itching up. In Maryland, researchers report that since the 1970s, spring bloom dates are arriving about one month earlier. Their concern is that relationships between plants and animals, including bees and all manner of other wildlife, could be thrown out of sync.
Luckily, honey bees don't object to monitoring because it's conducted at dusk after they have settled down to rest in the hive. The droves of bees and other pollinators of the BFEC Wildlife Garden are also amenable to observation. The garden is a great place to see them at work thanks to our focus on native plants, which often provide them with better food sources than imported varieties. Pick up a butterfly guide at our kiosk on your way into the garden.
Better yet, try attracting pollinators at home by bringing a pen and paper to jot down plants that catch your fancy from the labels that accompany our plants, or ask for a native plant list for attracting butterflies.