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 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.