Vacancy for Non-Social Bees

 

 

It wasn’t just another Sabbath. This past Sunday was  “Pollinator Day” at a Twin Cities garden center. Did you miss it? So did I.

Did you forget to give thanks to the legions of bees, butterflies and other insects that pollinate much of the food we depend on?

More than $15 billion a year in U.S. crops are pollinated by honey bees alone, including apples, berries, cantaloupes, cucumbers, alfalfa, and almonds. And that doesn’t include the provided value delivered by other non-semidomesticated native bees, butterflies, moths and other insects. It’s one more example of how we puny primates are intricately dependent on natural systems for our survival.

How is it that not one presidential politician will make mention of this undeniable maxim?

On Sunday afternoon, I strolled confidently out to an artificial  bee nesting box to make my biweekly observations. Confidently is the operative word since most folks associate bees with stingers. But in this case I’m looking for mostly non-stinging bees, those that tend to be solitary and non-social. There was no need to don my old beekeeping protective garb to tend to this innocuous task.

One of the adaptations of social bees and wasps is that they must protect their hordes of vulnerable young (larvae). Consequently, they have evolved to defend the nest with a stinger that can inject a painful venom. Not all bees have venom.

As a volunteer bee nesting box observer for the University of Minnesota Bee Atlas project, I have agreed to regularly go out to a nearby bee box that I erected back in the spring and see if any bees have decided to move in. No efforts to census the bees of Minnesota has been undertaken since 1919. And then 67 species were tabulated. Entomologists feel that the real number of bees could number around 400 in Minnesota with over 4,000 species in North America.

The intent of the project is to help University entomologists figure out how many native bee species there are living in Minnesota. While most folks have a simple image of a bee, there are over 20,000 species of bees in the world and many of them are solitary and reclusive. They come in different sizes, colorations and patterns. Many are not social in working to create a social unit of hundreds or thousands of individuals.

Earlier this spring, I mounted the wood block of wood, deemed the bee box, onto a common wood post that hosts an old bluebird nesting box. The block of wood has a grid of various sized holes drilled into it. The idea is that scouting bees of various species will find the holes irresistible nesting cavities. Rather than see the bees that take choose these quarters,  I will likely see the fruits of their labor.

The bees lay their eggs inside the cavity. This is called a brood cell. After the egg is deposited, the adult female  will stock the chamber with nectar and  pollen. Then she will plug the entrance to the hole with natural materials such as sand and mud or grasses and small plant fibers. Unbeknownst to the motherly instincts of procuring nectar and pollen from nearby flowers, she is a keen agent of pollination.

Bee atlas volunteers submit our observations  online to the University of Minnesota. The bee blocks will be collected and sent to the university in the fall where entomologists will raise the larvae to adulthood for easy identification.

The intent of the project is to decipher the information and hopefully learn more about  species distribution and bee diversity. This will provide a base as to how to track how bee populations are changing and how those changes might affect land management decisions.

Over the past month nearly all the largest diameter holes, under the number one column, have been plugged with shaggy plugs of dried grasses. I have no clue which species but it appears to be valued real estate. And only the bottom three or so smallest of holes in column 3 are cemented by dense plugs of what looks like sand.

I wonder will August bring on the hordes for the mid-sized holes?

 

Timely rains, combined with a prairie burning program has resulted in an amazing prairie flower bloom this summer. Bumblebees seem to care less about my strolling through thick lavender patches of bee balm or clumps of orange butterfly weed. They are too busy collecting nectar.

The dazzling  celebrities of pollinators are the butterflies. They are far more popular to the public because not only are they beautiful and graceful andthey don’t sting.

The popularity of the monarch butterfly has skyrocketed over the past two years and recently the 1,500 mile Interstate 35 corridor from Texas to Minnesota has been titled the “Monarch Highway.”

Last month, the Minneapolis StarTribune reported, “The Monarch Highway is part of a program backed by President Obama, who formed a Pollinator Health Task Force in 2014. The group, which consists of representatives from government agencies in six participating states and private entities, is crafting a plan to protect pollinator habitats nationwide, including I-35.”

The reward for the day came when I lay down amongst the stand of black-eyed susans and light purple bee balm. Looking up into the sky through the filagree of stem and bloom pollinators were stitching their hurried selves back and forth in a parade of pollinators.

 

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