Autumn Note: The Pollinators that Remain

mist flowers, my favorite fall blooms: They fill the ditches in Louisiana.

"If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the climate would collapse into chaos."  E. O. Wilson

There were a couple of fairly cool days during the government shutdown, one in which Tom the federal worker and I went kayaking on a local bayou, but shortly after that, as if in sympathy with the inflamed rhetoric on Capitol Hill, warm weather returned. Then clouds rolled in as federal employees returned to work, and rain followed on Friday evening and Saturday morning. However, by noon today, blue sky began to show through the clouds and cool weather prevailed. Highs have been in the 70s, and I am beginning to get over the malaise that usually visits me (in the South) off and on from mid-July until the first really cool day of fall. The work that paid the bills might have been on hiatus, but the work around our house continued during the shutdown, and I noticed that many pollinators were still buzzing around the herbs still flowering in my herb beds.

I had noticed that these beautiful blue-bodied skipper butterflies began showing up, attracted particularly to the purple hyacinth bean flowers in one of my herb beds. The bumblebees, while still present, seemed fewer in number, and slower, as if they were at the end of their lifespan and were saving energy to keep going a little longer. I would see them clinging to basil and salvia flowers, inert for long minutes at a time.

bumble bee on basil: The bumble bees seem tired, slow to respond at the end of what might be their life spans.

When I startled these bumble bees, they would eventually fly off, illustrating that they still had it in them to keep going for a while longer. Others seemed a little more energetic, collecting pollen and nectar from the one tithonia that had survived from the seeds I planted in late spring. In his book, A Sting in the Tale, Dave Goulson writes that while queen bees hibernate for the winter, males "are doomed to be short-lived, for with summer's end approaching, they have no way of surviving the winter."

bumble bee on tithonia

Honeybees are still very energetically visiting the blooms that remain in the garden: a few portulacas, basil, tarragon, purple hyacinth beans, tomatillos, blue and red salvias, and some lilies with very deep throats, too deep for the ordinary honey bee snout to reach. From Dave Goulson's book about bees and from research online, I have learned that bees will compensate for their lack of long snouts by biting deep-throated flowers at the base (or stem) of the flower, going directly to the nectar and bypassing the whole gathering-pollen bit: not so great for the flowers depending upon pollinators to help them multiply, but pretty canny of the bees. Thus, I was quite excited to see this bee behavior in action in my herb garden. The thick necks of some lily blooms, too tough for puncturing, however, seemed to perplex the honeybees. Several spent hours buzzing around these lilies, trying to get at the nectar deep within the the throats of the lilies.

Honey bee gouging the base of a blue salvia flower, going straight to the nectar.

The honeybee's snout is really no match for the deep throat of this lily.

However,the bee was very determined. After watching for several minutes, I pulled the petals apart a bit to see how he would respond.

Here is a side view of that determination.

Face-off 1

Face-off 2

As the days get cooler, I plan to keep close watch in my gardens to determine just when the last pollinators bid farewell to the final flowers of fall. Until I began paying attention to the smallest creatures in my yard, I had never really thought of how much of life continues around us, affected by how we treat the environment but not much concerned about us, otherwise, in the daily struggles (and, perhaps, even joys) of existence.