- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's Labor Day, but honey bees aren't relaxing. They're out in force collecting nectar, pollen, water and propolis.
Ever seen them weighted down with huge pollen loads?
They seem to have "Herculean strength," don't you think? That's what Norman "Norm" Gary, emeritus professor of entomology at the University of California, Davis, writes in his book, Honey Bee Hobbyist: The Care and Keeping of Bees, considered the bible for hobby beekeepers.
"Ten pollen foraging trips a day is par for the typical pollen forager," Gary relates. "When pollen is abundant, a bee can gather a full load in as little as 10 minutes by visiting several dozen flowers...When all factors are favorable, bees from a strong colony can collect many thousands of loads a day. Incidentally, when.beekeepers describe their colonies as strong. they really mean populous--even though bees as individuals seem to have Herculean strength, flying with loads nearly as heavy as their body weight."
In an email, he wrote: "A worker honey bee weighs about 100 milligrams and are reported to be able to carry about 75 milligrams…approximately 75 percent of is body weight!"
Gary, now 90, served as a member of the UC Davis faculty from 1962-1994. He has kept bees for 75 years, starting at age 15.
As an aside, you may know him as not only a professor, scientist, musician, and author but one of the world's most incredible professional bee wranglers. He used to wear full-body bee suits and play the b-flat clarinet. (See Bug Squad blog of Nov. 30, 2016). He once trained bees to fly into his mouth to collect food from a small sponge saturated with his patented artificial nectar. He holds the Guinness World record (109 bees inside his closed mouth for 10 seconds) for the stunt.
Norm Gary knows bees.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Get ready...it's happening...the annual World Bee Day...
Monday, May 20 is World Bee Day, as declared by the United Nations "to raise awareness of the importance of pollinators, the threats they face, and their contribution to sustainable development."
"The goal is to strengthen measures aimed at protecting bees and other pollinators, which would significantly contribute to solving problems related to the global food supply and eliminate hunger in developing countries," the website points out. "We all depend on pollinators and it is, therefore, crucial to monitor their decline and halt the loss of biodiversity."
Lately we've been noticing multiple species of bumble bees in our pollinator garden in Vacaville. One of them appears to be Bombus bifarius.
The bumbles we've seen over the years in our pollinator garden--B. californicus, B. melanopygus, B.vosnesenskii and B. bifarius--especially like Coreopsis, a genus of flowering plants in the aster family, Asteraceae. It's also called tickseed.
Now that's not a good name for such a showy flower!
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
"More than beautiful, monarch butterflies contribute to the health of our planet. While feeding on nectar, they pollinate many types of wildflowers.--National Park Service.
Have you ever seen pollen on a monarch butterfly?
This morning a male migrating monarch, probably on its way to coastal California to an overwintering site, stopped at a Vacaville garden to sip some nectar on a Mexican sunflower (Tithonia rotundifola).
If you look closely, you can see the gold pollen.
Monarchs are not just iconic species facing a population decline, they're pollinators.
"Pollinator species, such as bees, other insects, birds and bats play a critical role in producing more than 100 crops grown in the United States," according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "Honey bee pollination alone adds more than $18 billion in value to agricultural crops annually."
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
It's Labor Day but "The Girls" continue to work.
"The Girls" are the honey bees, a great example of a matriarchal society. How many workers (girls) do you see foraging on your flowers? But inside the hive, "The Girls" are nurse maids, nannies, royal attendants, builders, architects, dancers, honey tenders, pollen packers, propolis or "glue" specialists, air conditioning and heating technicians, guards, and undertakers. And the males? Their responsibility is to mate with a virgin queen--and then they die.
In his newly published book, Honey Bee Biology (2023 Princeton University), UC Davis bee scientist Brian Johnson of the Department of Entomology and Nematology, covers everything from molecular genetics, development, and physiology to neurobiology, behavior, and pollination biology. It's meant for bee scientists, social insect biologists, beekeepers, and those who are just eager to learn more about honey bees.
Honey bees "evolved from the hunting wasp, a group of four clades of wasps that typically provision their offspring with insects or spiders," Johnson writes in his opening chapter, 'Natural History, Systematics and Phylogenetics.' Probably the most well known of the hunting wasps (to the nonentomologist) are the mud daubers that build their nests on the sides of people's homes."
"The split between these wasps and what evolved into the bees occurred about 120 million years ago," Johnson writes.
Basically, wasps continue to be meat-eaters, but honey bees "have gone vegetarian," as Johnson points out.
When you see honey bees foraging on flowers, gathering nectar and pollen, just remember that they are vegetarians. And especially, on Labor Day, remember how "The Girls" tend to the needs of the queen, their sisters and their brothers.
As a society, we could learn a lot from honey bees.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
Ever seen a honey bee packing red pollen?
Rock purslane (Calandrinia grandiflora) is one flower that yields red pollen.
It's a drought-tolerant perennial, a succulent. But the most striking part is its color: a neon pink that could stop traffic.
Other flowers that yield red pollen include henbit (Lamium amplexicaule) and horse chestnut (Aesulus hippocastanum).
Bees collect pollen as a protein source to rear their brood. If you're a beekeeper, you've probably seen the red pollen in your frames and asked "Where did that red come from?"
Some of it may have come from a nearby rock purslane.
