A Reflection on the First Bees of the Season

one of the first bees I've seen this season--several buzzing around peach blooms

For the past few years I have been stalking bees and other pollinators in my gardens, first in Louisiana and now in Arizona. Taking photos of pollinators has opened up a whole new world to me, a world that we usually pass with little thought. I have identified creatures that I didn't even know existed and have watched dramas unfold in flowers. Paying attention to bees, wasps, moths, butterflies, and other pollinators has also made me more aware of the importance of sharing this world responsibly. It's an awareness that's gaining ground with a lot of people, including some corporations. 

The breakfast cereal Cheerios recently highlighted the plight of bees, some species of which are disappearing from our landscapes in record numbers, in a campaign the company called #BringBacktheBees. Every package of Honey Nut Cheerios provided information that encouraged customers to go online to order free packages of wildflower seeds (over 1.5 billion seeds, according to the Cheerios website). In addition, General Mills left a blank space on its packaging where the cereal's mascot Buzz the Bee usually appeared. The ad certainly had an important message, but like a lot of advertising, it over-simplified the problems of reduced habitat and threatened and endangered species. Some of the flower seeds included in the packets are native to some areas in the United States, but not others. This might not be a problem, necessarily, but the flowers might not be ones that native bees of an area usually pollinate.

The other issue is that while honeybees have had some serious problems in hive die-off and those problems have transferred to feral populations of honeybees, it's the native bees that are most seriously endangered. Honeybees are exotic to this country, introduced from Europe by white settlers. Because honeybees are used commercially in agriculture, from those bees transferred from farm to farm to pollinate fruit trees to those bred for honey production, European honeybees will always have moneyed support to fund research when a serious issue arises. Native bees and other pollinators, however, are extremely important in pollinating native plants, and these pollinators are often overlooked in popular Save-the-Bees campaigns. 

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, pollinators face threats from habitat loss and degradation as well as over-use of pesticides:

As native vegetation is replaced by roadways, manicured lawns, crops and non-native gardens, pollinators lose the food and nesting sites that are necessary for their survival.  Migratory pollinators face special challenges.  If the distance between the suitable habitat patches along their migration route is too great, smaller, weaker individuals may die during their journey.

According to research, native bees do a tremendous amount of work pollinating fruit and vegetables, with honeybees supplementing that pollination. In the words of one researcher, "honeybees can't do it alone." Native bees are most efficient in pollinating watermelons, tomatoes, blueberries, and squash, among other fruits. I have witnessed squash bees pollinating our squash plants here in Arizona. 

bee in squash flower (I took this photo in our garden in 2016)

And every year I listen for the arrival of bumblebees in our tomato patch. They seem less prolific than other bees. Yesterday while trying to take photos of bees visiting the blooms on one of our peach trees (blooms which will probably be hurt by freezing temperatures expected this week), I heard and then saw one lonely bumblebee buzzing around the blooms at the top of the tree. 

This was the best photo I could get of the first bumblebee I have seen this season.
Bombus huntii?

I have never understood the urge to create large, uniform swathes of green lawn and roadsides, and knowing what I know now about the degradation of pollinator habitats, I am even more adverse to those boring expanses of green, often made even more desolate by pesticides. In Louisiana, I let a large patch of daisy fleabane grow in a corner of our yard and was rewarded with being able to view and photograph the hundreds of pollinators that visited that patch. 

Here in Arizona, I am encouraging patches of native flowers as well as allowing dandelions to grow in the small grassy lawn that a previous owner planted in front of our house.

dandelions in our lawn

Yesterday I counted four different species of bees pollinating the peach blossoms in one tree (with the coming freeze, at least the bees got some pollen; we're not likely to get peaches.) Each species had a different buzzy hum. The natural world is full of music, if we only stop to listen.

bee landing on a dandelion in our front yard

bee landed and at work gathering pollen

deep in pollen

The Drama of Pollinators

When we last lived in Louisiana , I began to pay attention to pollinators, taking photos of what tiny creatures inhabited or visited my mountain mint or aster patch. I really enjoyed stalking bees and butterflies in my garden, and the pollinators were prolific. Here in Arizona, I have noticed fewer pollinators, maybe because I have been paying more attention to planting than to those visiting the plants, as the yard and gardens of the place we bought had been neglected. But soon after we moved into our home--before I got busy with picking up trash, re-purposing what was left behind by the previous owners, and weeding the flower beds and garden area that had been abandoned--I took some photos of pollinators that visited the surviving plants of a gardener two owners back, someone who had lovingly planted daisies, echinacea, daylilies, hollyhocks, roses, Russian sage, lamb's ear, garlic chives. 

The following are photos I took last year, not long after we moved into our new home at 7200 feet above sea level near the White Mountains of Arizona. This year I have been too busy cleaning up the yard and garden, experimenting with what will grow in a climate that gets about 10 inches of rain annually (as compared to the annual average of 60 inches of rain in Louisiana, where we lived 35 ft. above sea level) to pay as much attention to the visitors to my plants. Next year, with a new camera and macro lens, perhaps I'll have more time to return to watching the pollinators I have come to love.

It's easy, though, to overlook the tiny creatures that visit flowers, but when the flowers of our vegetables and fruit fail to produce, we start paying attention. We need these little creatures. And so I am hoping that some pollinator will find attractive the flowers of the Armenian cucumber plants that I planted in our Arizona garden this year. 

This crab spider and fly faced off on a daisy (July 2015, Apache County, AZ)

The encounter didn't end well.

And a bee encounter with a crab spider doesn't end well, either.

I haven't forgotten the wonder and drama of the lives of pollinators.

The Bees are Back

In mid-February the camellia at the northwest corner of our house began to bloom, and as soon as the last polar vortex swept through and the weather began to warm, honey bees were on the flowers. Yesterday I saw bumblebees for the first time this year; two or three bumblebees having joined the honeybees in gathering pollen from the mustard flowers in our large vegetable garden. They should be enjoying the white clover that is beginning to bloom, too. Clover has spread in large patches throughout the east and north sides of our property, and I usually mow around most of it, leaving flowers for bees and the tender leaves for rabbits. This weekend I found two four-leaf clovers, plucked them, and placed them to dry in a paperback copy of Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire. Last year I found twenty or so four-leaf clovers over the course of the spring and early summer.

With highs in the 70s (Fahrenheit) this past week, I was tempted to begin spring gardening, so I took out a couple of packets of nasturtium seed. The directions advise to wait until all danger of frost is past...and another cold front is heading across the country, with a low in the thirties predicted here for Monday night. Will it frost? I don't know. But I planted some nasturtium seeds anyway in flower pots on my patio. I suspect that they will be fine.

The red salvia and blue-gray salvia have sprouted and are leafing out, violets are blooming, johnny jump-ups that reseeded from last year are blooming, and the tender green shoots of bulbs are beginning to poke above ground. We are waiting to see how devastating the freezes have been to our citrus trees, banana trees, lemongrass, and variegated ginger. None of these plants are showing signs of life yet. The white-flowering althea in our back yard is shyly showing a bit of green, unaware of the cold weather still in store for us.

We are still pulling carrots and turnips from the winter vegetable garden; green shallots are flourishing, but the purple mustard greens and other winter greens have been afflicted with tiny bugs. Tom transplanted leeks in the vegetable garden; they seem to be very slow-growing plants. All his habanero, serano, ghost peppers, and tomatillos have sprouted in their temporary containers. He thinned tomato sprouts yesterday, moving some of the extra sprouts to another container for a friend.

The ground remains too wet to do much weed-clearing in the flower beds. Tom dug a hole yesterday in which to plant a live oak sprout, and the clay bottom of the hole quickly gathered water. He emptied the rain gauge and noted that it measured 2.85 inches of water from the last week-and-a-half, and we're expecting more rain this week. Soon, however, temperatures will begin to rise quickly. I hope we'll get a few dry days in a row so that I can have everything ready for some serious planting.

Time to finalize my summer garden plans.

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.

Day's End: Photography Surprises

My Canon PowerShot Digital Elph camera likes to reserve photos for a later downloading so that I can be amazed that I actually DID get a decent shot of that red dragonfly that I chased around the yard. The background of dead leaves on tomato plants does not show the dragonfly to advantage, but since this skittish dragonfly tried its best to elude me, I'm glad to have gotten this photo at least.

In this day of frequent upgrades, my camera is old, and it's acting up in its senescence. When I download photos, not all the photos actually download. I discover the remaining ones when I download photos after the next set of shots. Digital cameras have provided people like me, with only self-taught (and little at that) photographic skill and no technical knowledge of cameras, to shoot an occasionally decent photo despite our ignorance. I took a photography class in high school, but that was in the Dark Ages, when we had to mix up noxious chemicals in a dark room before our photos could see the light of day.

In this second download of the day, a photo popped up that I had taken earlier of my patient dragonfly:

He seems as curious about me as I am about him.

I discovered these photos after downloading photos I took this evening of a rabbit. The wild rabbits in this area come out with impunity during the day, but we see them even more frequently during the morning and evening. I carefully approached, foot by foot, one little bunny eating grass in our yard as the afternoon waned. I got within about seven feet of him before he hopped into the leaf-strewn shade of an azalea bush.

Peter Rabbit, a little too close to our garden but eating grass this time instead of the cucumbers

As I walked into the back yard near the mountain mint, I startled two more rabbits, the largest hopping frantically into woods at the edge of our property, the smallest one stopping just short of the trees. And in the mountain mint patch, I found a tired bee. 

Busy day in the garden.

What Patience Finds in the Garden

Scarlet-bodied wasp moth

On two occasions in the past week, I have caught glimpses of unidentified, brightly colored winged creatures in our mountain mint patch. On one of those occasions I managed to capture one slightly out of focus photo of one of the pollinators; on the second occasion I took several not very good photos of another pollinator. And so I waited, returning again and again to the mountain mint patch at various times of the day, taking photos of other butterflies and bugs until I was finally rewarded: the mysterious pollinators returned, and this time I was prepared. I moved quietly. I observed. I stealthily took photo after photo. Then I would take a break, walking around the yard or going inside for a cup of tea or to read the latest news or to finish a craft project or other task. After a while, I would return to the garden with my camera.

The first brightly colored pollinator I identified as a Scarlet-bodied wasp moth, a very beautiful and vividly-colored pollinator, with a bright red thorax and abdomen and metallic blue dots. (See: Butterflies and Moths of North America: Attributes of Cosmosoma myrodora.)

Scarlet-bodied wasp moth (Cosmosoma myrodora)

Scarlet-bodied wasp moth

What a beautiful surprise this creature was among the gray-green leaves of the mountain mint. After a few minutes of stalking this colorful pollinator, I was excited to see another Scarlet-bodied wasp moth settling on a mint flower. I turned my attention to this second moth, and was so intent that  I almost overlooked a second surprise, a close encounter between one of the moths and a green spider, which I think is a kind of crab spider.

close encounter

The photo above captures the beginning of the encounter, as the wasp approached the leaf on which the spider was sitting. The two creatures actually made contact, but that photo didn't turn out so well--there was fluttering, reacting, retreating, and a blur of tiny limbs. The spider won the encounter; the moth flew to another flower.

The next day, I got a closer look at the second unidentified, brightly-colored pollinator.  It looked like a wasp, but also had characteristics of a moth. I think that this one, too, is in the wasp moth category. The bright colors are probably a kind of camouflage to warn away predators.

another wasp moth

Patience has yet to reward me with the successful attainment of another goal: to get a good photo of every pollinator that visits the mountain mint patch. The smaller waspy-type bees fly very quickly, in a zig-zag pattern. They are easily startled, and I'm working with a point and shoot camera with an automatic focus. The little bee below is an example of these flighty pollinators. In my many attempts to get an in-focus photograph of this bee, I managed just this one.

Am I anthropomorphizing if I suggest that some bugs just seem to have more settled or less-fearful personalities than others? I can get lots of shots of one butterfly and none of another. After two days of trying to get a good photo of a yellow and black swallowtail, I finally managed to do so, while succeeding in shot after shot of a blue and black swallowtail.

This morning I chased (very quietly and as sneakily as possible) a red dragonfly all over the back yard and failed to get one good photograph, while a green and yellow-tan dragonfly posed peacefully on a bamboo stake as I depressed the snapshot button again and again. If I startled him, he (or she) would fly away and then come right back to perch on the bamboo stake. I spoke to him. He moved his little mouth in return.

The mountain mint patch buzzes with bees at mid-day. Most of those are large bumblebees and smaller honey bees, but among those more familiar bees, the large black bee stands out. This is, I think, a species of carpenter bee: Xylocopa tabaniformis
.

black bee-- Xylocopa

black bee--Xylocopa

But occasionally, in the middle of all that activity, I will catch sight of a bee, perhaps half-hidden under a leaf, taking a break from its duties of collecting pollen. All the other bees seem so frantic, buzzing from flower to flower, sometimes almost flying into one another, that a resting bee at first appears ill, out of sorts. But after a few minutes, it will fly away, restored.  I have come to care about the lives of bees.

resting bee