Floral Reproduction and Cuckoo Bees at Tupper

One of the advantages of having the science classroom so close to the art room at Tupper is we can take advantage of the tools in Ms. Krickan's class. We love this 3D model of the inside of a flower. Biologist Erin Udal introduces the concepts of plant reproduction: plant sex!!!!

It's important to understand the anatomy of the bee's face and tongue in order to understand how the flower fits the bee and the bee fits the flower.

Erin brings a collection of her locally sourced bees, flies, and wasps to study under the dissecting microscopes. Each student has a field book to record observations during this project.

This active classroom is also used for planting in the Tupper Greenway right outside the door.

How NOT to put a pinned insect under a microscope! You should hold it in your fingers or put it in a glob of silly putty, otherwise the yellow jacket will lose its delicate appendages.

This poster comes in handy to show the biodiversity of North American Bees. We also use their book Bees in Your Backyard: A Guide to North America's Bees by Wilson and Carril. Plus we use another handy dandy book called Victory Gardens for Bees. (-;

Learning about the gender of plants and bees helps create insights into that complex and murky area of human gender and sexuality.

Just as finches developed morphology to feed in an evolutionary niche, bees also have different shapes of heads and tongues to fit into different guilds of flowers.

 Artist and gardener Catherine Shapiro gave a demo on creating paint from natural pigments.

Students personalized their field journals with collage.

 

These are the rich colors made with natural pigments.

Catherine shows a highly coveted  research book: Natural Colorants for Dyeing and Lake Pigments: Practical Recipes and their Historical Sources by Jo Kirby.

Bees on the line! Watercolor and fineliner paintings in progress.

The next day we looked at flowers under the scopes.

Ms. Krickan explains the dissecting tools to grade 8 art students. These are all flowers from my garden: rhododendrons, forget-me-nots, bluebells, dandelions, and bleeding hearts.

Students draw outside in the greenway, and inside as they look at flowers under the scopes.

I took them out to show the nesting sites and practise netting and releasing bees.

After class I spotted to species of cuckoo bees at another nesting site  which we'll have to check out next class. This is a nomada species.

This is a sphecodes cuckoo bee.  Now that the sweat bees have started their nests, these parasitic "wannabees" sneak in and lay their eggs in a true bee's nest.

Here's the narwhal of the fly world: Bombilidae spp.

Watch for these honey-bee sized andrena mining bees in the apple blossoms.

The dogwoods are blooming, but I hardly ever see insects in the blossoms. Let me know if you do!

And here's my first seasonal sighting of an escaped Eastern Bumblebee--a farmed bee from the greenhouse industry that is implicated in the collapse of Western Bumblebee populations.

Looking forward to three days of lessons next week!

Mountainview Cemetery July Bee Safari

My bee safari buddy Jasna accompanied me on a trip to Mountainview Cemetery where we had a few good sightings. In the east meadow we found this andrena mining bee with velvety facial hair, velvet jodphurs and velvety bands of pale hair on her abdomen. She's a beauty. The flower she's sunning herself on is wild brown-eyed Susan.

Jasna spotted another bee (possibly the same species) curled around the stamens of a red geum flower. This is am example of a red flower that bees will visit, in spite of seeing red petals as black.

On a return trip to the same garden I captured a couple of blurry shots of a coelioxys cuckoo bee. Note the prongs on the back of the abdomen. She looked very similar to colletes in the nearby nodding onions, but it has those large green compound eyes. Also, note the way it tilts up its abdomen at the back, like the leafcutter it parasitizes.

There were two patches of nodding onion monopolized by plasterer bees (Colletes). They are hard to photograph because the onions are so low to the ground, and they disappear into the flowers while foraging.

But you can see her tongue here in this shot.

 And note the "prison stripes" on her tear-drop shaped abdomen. The males are smaller, slimmer, with longer antennae. They were impossible to photograph because they were defensively patrolling the nodding onions. Apart from wool carder bees, this is the only other male bee that I have seen using defensive behavior, knocking honeybees right out of the flowers! These bees obviously have a preference for nodding onions, so I am on a mission to get more of the plants and the bees in gardens.

I'm also on a mission to upgrade my bumblebee ID skills, and yes, even including the males, which are very difficult to pin down to species. And I'm beginning to appreciate the subtle beauty of the silvery blonde male bees.

The melissodes digger bees love the abundant Coreopsis grandiflora in the meadow right now. I do wish they would replicate this meadow all along the verge where it is planted.

I love this photo: the long horns of the male melissodes and the dramatic petals of the coreopsis make me a happy camper. Don't the petals look like the strokes of a paintbrush?

Okay, so here we have one of those difficult bee ID's. I posted the photos on Bugguide and Dr. Ascher thinks it's Bombus rufocinctus. This bee has many variations. So many, that bee nerds have a joke: "It's always Bombus rufocinctus." Well, I thought it was funny.

She was the side of a queen, and almost chocolatey in some places.  If she wasn't so large I would have clocked the bee as male. Anyway, I love a surprise.

Poached Egg Flower Brings in the Wee Bees

 These clove currants have beautiful flowers with deep nectaries.

The grade one worker bees find a centipede, but it's very hard to photograph. You can just see it slipping around the edge of the shovel.

The poached egg flowers are bringing in the bees. This is the third year this cover crop has seeded itself. Fantastic! Let's plant more of this flower: Limnanthes douglasii. Honey from this plant tastes like marshmallows.

And I spotted a small red cuckoo bee really tucking in to the nectar. These bees do not collect pollen because they trick other bees into feeding their babies. Can you see the nectar guides in the flower? I'd love to see a photo of this flower in UV light. I bet the nectar guides are even more prominent and the center of the flower appears quite dark in comparison to the outer edges of the petals.

Beespotting at City Farmer

My physiotherapist is close to City Farmer, so I have a good excuse to go on a few bee safaris these days. The heliopsis is the current star bee plant, bringing in little leafcutter bees, like the one above and a few more species with cute striped butts.

 Here's the pointy butt of a cuckoo bee. She was also foraging in one of the many patches if thyme that are flowering in the garden right now.

And then that glamorous sweat bee showed up. Even though those the legs appear as if they have pollen, I think it's a male because of the long antennae.

 The cosmos were also popular with the striped butt crowd. Here is a larger species of leafcutter bee.

 Finally, a wee bee, maybe a Halictid species. Stripes are definitely the fashion at City Farmer Garden this summer!