Which are the Most Charismatic of the Minifauna? A Grade 5 Class Survey

 Yesterday I worked with a grade five class and we surveyed everyone's favourite bee and favourite food. Here are the results.

Bumblebees: 10

Honeybees: 7

Green sweat bee: 4

Blue mason bee: 1

Mining Bee: 1

Leaf cutter Bee: 1

The winner: Bumblebees come out on top: 10 people chose their beloved furry friends, and one voted specifically for a male bumblebee because they don't sting! There were some specific species of bumblebees that folks chose from the beautiful poster at their table: "The Bumblebees of the Western United States" (some of which are found in British Columbia). This educational poster was published by The Pollinator Partnership and I highly recommend it as a classroom resource illustrating bumblebee diversity.

There are also cuckoo bumblebees who look mimic true bumblebees, but they don't sting and they don't carry pollen. Just like the cuckoo bird, the mother lays her eggs in another nest and her babies freeload off of the food that was meant for the true bumblebees. Cuckoo bees are a sign of healthy biodiversity.

Second Place: Those adorable honeybees came second with a total of 7 votes, and once again someone voted for the male bees, the drones who cannot sting.

You don't see male honeybees on flowers because they hang around in different hives begging for honey. Drones are the only bees with a passport to visit as many hives as they like, but when fall comes around, some of them get evicted.

There are also flies which mimic honeybees and don't sting: They are called hoverflies or syrphid flies.

There are nine species of honeybees worldwide. Our European honeybees are called Apis melifera: melifera is Latin for honey-bearer, which is also the root of names like Melissa and Melaniea. Apis cerana is the honeybee used for apiculture in India.

Third Place: The green sweat bee (Agapostemon spp.): The folks sitting around the "Wild About Bees" poster published by Canadian Wildlife Federation were seduced by the beauty of the green sweat bee, in third place with 4 votes. what does the name Agapstemon is Greek: agape (love) and stemon (stamon) ie lover of stamens. What a great name for a bee! Did you know that sometimes wasps also come in beautiful metallic colours? Check out this Jewel Wasp I saw in the herb garden at the Moberly Community Centre and you'll see what I mean.

In fourth place, we find three bees with 1 vote each: mason bee, mining bee and leafcutter bee.

These are all solitary bees, meaning they don't have a queen or castes of worker bees. Some of solitary will live in groups (like a condo), but each female lays eggs in her own nest and provides them with nectar and pollen so they can grow into adult bees before they emerge. The trick is how do bees find their tunnel is a group of many? Mason beekeepers use colour patterns, or they toast the front of the mason bee condo to reveal the pattern in the wood which helps the bees orient themselves to their particular hole. Sometimes they get in the wrong nest and then the other female kicks them out.

Okay, now let's talk about the class's favourite foods:

pizza: 5

blueberries: 4

apple: 3

watermelon: 2

orange: 2 (most oranges are self-pollinated but bees pollinate mandarin oranges)

strawberry: 1

raspberries: 1

pomegranate: 1

coconut: 1

chocolate: 1

milk: 1 (cows eat alfalfa, pollinated by leafcutter bees)

subway sandwich: 1

spaghetti and tomato sauce: 1

potato salad: 1

McChicken meal: 1

Various ingredients:

meat: chicken, pork salami, ground beef or beef meatballs

wheat and other grains such as oats, quinoa, etc.: (wind pollinated)

potatoes: (self-pollianted, but tomato breeders need bumblebees to buzz pollinate the blossoms)

tomatoes and peppers: (buzz pollinted by bumblebees)

onions: (all kinds of bees)

herbs: (all kinds of bees) many herbs that add flavor to our foods and herbs are also good for the bees

examples:oregano, sage, rosemary

cheese and other dairy: (cows eat alfalfa which is pollinated by alfalfa leaf cutter bees)

mustard: (seeds are from yellow flowers are pollinated by bees) vinegar, oil

mayonnaise: (eggs, vinegar and oil)

eggs (chickens sometimes fed on alfalfa seed)

oils: olive, sunflower, and canola (sunflower and canola pollinated by teams of different bees)

Summary:

Pizza was a definite winner, but this class certainly loves its healthy fruits and vegetables. It would be interesting to figure out how much of your daily diet is actually pollinated by bees. If one of every three mouthfuls is generally estimated to be pollinated by bees that's 33 per cent. It's going to be different for every person. It's almost easier to figure out what percentage of your diet is not pollinated by bees, i.e. whole grains. (By the way, these are still part of a healthy diet, even if they aren't pollinated by bees.) In the next two weeks the class will be researching how their favorite foods are pollinated, blossom morphology and studying bees by drawing and making cartoon bee characters.

Madame Beespeaker's Challenge: Try tracking your food for one day and estimating what is and isn't pollinated by bees.

Here are some online resources that we explored in the classroom using the Smart Board.

A Pictorial Guide to Bees of the Humboldt Bay Dunes by Susan E. Nyoka

Bee Basics: An Introduction to OurNative Bees by Beatriz Moissette and Stephen Buchmann,

USDA Forest Serve and the Pollinator Partnership

Common Bee Groups of California by the UC Berkely Urban Bee Lab
 

The Social Lives of Bees from Beespotter
 

Sam Droege's slide show Native Bee Pollinators for Crops
 

Pollinators in the Garden: Forging Partnerships for Native Insect Conservation--Black, American 

PublicGardens Associate

Sam Droege's beautiful portraits of bees in National Geographic

Best Management Practises for Pollination in Ontario Crops

Mason Bee Clay Palette

 My father-in-law is a master gardener who has a way with mason bees. He makes his own condos and puts them up on the southeast side of the garage. On Sunday the females were incredibly busy laying eggs and plugging the holes. Look at all the colors of clay they have found in the neighborhood. Isn't it amazing! You can see a couple of bees in the tunnel ends as well. This year it took  a while before the females hatched because of the cool weather. The males have been out for weeks, but we had cold, windy weather and the blossoms of my FIL's crap apple tree were blown off before the females emerged. I really noticed how much larger the females are when I saw one land on the sidewalk the other day. I was so used to seeing the little males that I had to do a double take to realize it was a female mason bee.

 Luckily, we have had a reprieve in the weather and the females are pollinating their little hearts out!

 Here you can see the roof overhang protects the condos nicely.

As you can see, there are about 6 condos here and they are filling up fast. The ones closer to the east are filling up first.

More Pumpkin Love

I was thrilled to be able to take my mom and dad out to UBC Farm for the first time on Thanksgiving weekend. We bought some cookies, fall flowers, beets, salad greens, and a nice big Cinderella pumpkin to make into two pies.

Mom helped me gather a few more seeds for my teaching gig. I am making seed balls with grades one through seven, so we're going through a lot of seeds. I have resorted to buying flax, buckwheat and fennel seeds to supplement my collection. That way we can also make single source seed-balls to know exactly what we're planting.

The squash curing in these green house were so beautiful dad and I had to take a few photos. Let's be thankful for the bees who pollinated all these lovely cucurbits!



Here I am, choosing our pumpkin. I cut it up and baked it that evening. Since it was quite watery, I ended up draining the pulp quite a bit before making the pie the next day. I like to use chai spices in my pumpkin pie with lots of cardamom and some freshly grated ginger. I also use yogurt in my recipe.

Tonight I made a pumpkin lasagne too, with layers of the pumpkin seasoned with salt and pepper, some ricotta cheese mixed with yogurt and grated chevrette cheese on top. We make our lasagne in a little loaf pan for just the two of us because my son won't eat things that are layered with cheese.

Our bees are much happier since they have been combined (see below). They were still out bringing in pollen today, since things have dried out a bit again after our bout of heavy rain. I hope they get a bit more sunshine to get all those last bits of pollen into storage.

A Moon Garden for Moths

When You Don't Want a Bee Garden

There are people who are very allergic to bees and may not want to attract them to their garden. You could make your backyard into a prairie-inspired garden with the textures of many interesting grasses. Last year I grew some blue tinge wheat in a neglected spot in my garden just so I could have a few stalks for my fall flower arrangements. Grasses are very satisfying in the way they catch the sunlight and rustle in the breeze. Or if you are a night owl, you may want to try a moon garden to attract mysterious moths.

So how would a garden look like if you didn't want to attract bees? Well, the first thing would be to avoid colours bees are attracted to. I know that magazines tell you bees are attracted to certain colours like blue, mauve and yellow, but as long as flowers have nectar guides (visible to bees who see ultra violet light) they generally see flowers as neon signs saying "good eats" with an arrow pointing to the flower's nectary. I've noticed that bumble bees in particular are not choosy when it comes to flower colour and if their tongues aren't long enough to harvest nectar from plants evolved for hummingbird pollination they will cheat by biting a hole in the back of the blossom which leads other nectar-robbing insects to come in through the back door as well.

A garden designed with wind pollinated plants and plants without brightly coloured flowers might not attract as many bees. Flowers that evolved to attract moths are often white, lilac or pale pink so they can be seen at night and they have a heavier perfume that carries in the cooler air. Jasmine-scented nicotiana is a good example of this kind of flower. You may want to make a corner or your garden into a moon garden, so that if you invite a bee-phobic friend to tea, she can sit in a special spot next to the night garden. If you're looking for plants for a moon garden, a sensible place to start is with plants with night or evening in their name, evening primrose, night phlox, evening Lychnis, night stock, and night-blooming jasmine. There is also a variety of fragrant white flowers to choose from such as Aquilegia fragrans, mock orange, white lavender, Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica Halliana), Madame Alfred Carrière and Darlows Enigma roses as well as white bleeding hearts.

The black/grey/silver/white pallet could make for an elegant moon garden. You could go totally gothic and add gargoyles and dragons. The advantage to using grey-leafed herbs which reflect the moonlight is that they are often resistant to drought. You could choose artemisias, lavender cotton (santolina), wooly lamb's ear, sages (white salvias) and "moonshine" yarrow. I like the idea to plant white veggies and herbs: In a publication called Habichat, Marilyn Mause says you can plant herbs like silver thyme, white, basil, and oregano alongside white pumpkins and eggplants. Check out her articles for ideas on plants moths rely on for larval food. (Spring 2005 Habichat, Vol 11 No. 1) Finally, I turn to one of my favorite gardening books of all time: The Natural Gardener: The Way We All Want to Garden by Val Bourne. Her list of moth plants includes Phlox, Sweet Rocket, Lady's smock (Cardamine pratensis), Dianthus, Verbanas, and Soapwart. Trees such as willow, ash, poplar, land lime are important food sources for caterpillars.

Apparently there is a scientific reason that flowers with brighter colours tend to have less scent. In The Garden by Moonlight by Kim Smith notes:

"With a few notable exceptions, the most intensely fragrant roses are usually in shades of rose-pink to white. Pure white flowers release the strongest perfume, followed by creamy white, pale pink, pale yellow, yellow, purple-pink and purple. Plants with blue, orange, and red flowers have a high degree of pigmentation and usually generate little or no scent. The greater the amount of essential oil produced, the lesser degree of pigmentation in a flower. The oil is the result of the transformation of chlorophyll into tannoid compounds (or pigments), which is in inverse ratio to the amount of pigment in a flower. Scent is the oxidation of essential oils of flowers and leaves." She also says that the more fragrant flowers also have thick petals that prevent the essential oils from evaporating. This is certainly true of the Tuberose I bought from a flower shop last summer. The petals are very thick and extremely fragrant.

How does that affect the way we design a bee garden? You might want to choose white versions of plants and choose another part of your garden that will feature brightly coloured version of the same flower, a kind of a mirror image of each other. cleome, lavender, penstemon, and aquilegia would be good varieties to choose the white version and the coloured variety. It would be fun to compare the moon flowers (Ipomoea alba) with a bright blue morning glory, for instance.

You can do experiments in your garden: will the bees visit the more fragrant white lavender, or the lavender with the more desirable purple colour? Would white alyssum work just as well attracting bees as a pink variety? But then, we're not supposed to be attracting bees with our moon garden are we? I think what we'll learn that it's harder to keep bees away from flowers than deciding which flowers attract bees. Whether or not you're giving them a good source of nectar and pollen is another matter.

One of my favorite essays about pollination and ecology is on the website of the Smithsonian National Zoo. I think it's fascinating that the gilia can actually change its pollination adaptation strategy over the course of a summer.

"Plants and pollinators have been evolving together since at least the early Cretaceous period—that’s 144 million years and more than a billion bee generations—and their relationships have become increasingly specialized. Flower color, shape, fragrance, and position attract specific pollinators. For some flowers, timing is everything. Yellow lantana flowers turn red—a shade that is invisible to butterflies—once they are pollinated in order to concentrate butterfly activity on unpollinated yellow flowers. Scarlet gilia flowers attract hummingbirds with red flowers in early summer and switch to white during late summer in order to attract nocturnal hawkmoths. Pollinators, in turn, sometimes seek very specific commodities from plants. Males of one butterfly species visit flowers to collect certain alkaloids, a butterfly aphrodisiac of sorts that sends females of the species into a narcotic swoon. When the butterflies mate, the male transfers the chemical to the female’s reproductive tract and she coats her eggs with it to protect them from ant attacks, according to Adrian Forsyth, an entomologist with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History." ("Saving Pollinators" by Alison Emblidge and Emily Schuster)

In her lovely whimsical book called Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots: Activities To Do in the Garden, Sharon Lovejoy devotes a chapter on creating a moon garden for kids. She has a plan for setting up a moonflower-covered teepee in front of a crescent moon-shaped garden. She suggests making "Moth Broth" out of mushed up fruit, brown sugar and water to ferment for two days and then paint onto the truck of a tree for a moth-watching spot. What a great spot for a camp-out!

Happy Birthday Darwin!

Darwin's Moth and Columbines: Bee Gardening and Evolution

There's a debate going on in the scientific community about pollination and evolution. In 2007, Justen Whitall and Scott Hodges did a study on different varieties of the columbine genus Aquilegia. There are many varieties of Aquilegia that grow wild in North America, and the interesting thing is the variety in the length of their spurs, which is where their nectaries are located. Those with the shortest spurs are pollinated by bees, the medium spurs are pollinated by long-tongued bees and hummingbirds, and those with the longest spurs are pollinated by hawk moths. Whitall and Hodges observed that the nectar spurs tended to evolve into longer lengths in order to attract the most efficient pollinators. If the bees' tongues weren't long enough to reach the pollen, then the flowers grew longer spurs to entice hummingbirds, who were more efficient at pollinating the plant. There's a good photo of the differing columbines here at Biologyblog.com.

There is another theory for the increasing length of columbine spurs that is based on the work of Charles Darwin. Now some of you may know the story of Darwin's moth. Actually, there are two famous stories about Darwin and moths. The first story is about the peppered moth with had a salt and pepper pigmentation that helped it camouflage itself against speckled tree bark. During the industrial revolution, the trees in the "black country" were covered in factory soot. The peppered moth evolved to become black to blend in with its changed surroundings. Nowadays the black moths are more likely to be picked off by birds because the trees are no longer covered with soot. You can see a photo of the peppered moth on this BBC website.

The other moth story involves a case of cryptozoology. In 1862 Darwin observed an orchid in Madagascar called the Angraecum sesquipedale that had a nectary almost a foot deep. He conjectured that its pollinator was probably a large moth with a proboscus as long as the nectary. The moth did indeed exist. It was discovered 41 years later, in 1902 and named Xanthopan mogani ssp. praedicta, otherwise known as Darwin's moth. There is an excellent article on this story on this web site.

Darwin's theory of a coevolutionary "race" between pollinators and flowers help scientists conjecture that columbine nectaries may be getting longer because the pollinators are evolving with longer tongues in order to become more efficient at gathering nectar and pollen. I'm not a scientist, but I don't see why the theories have to be mutually exclusive. In any case, the point of writing about this in the context of creating a bee garden is that in order to attract bees you have to 1) decide what kinds of bees you'd like to attract, 2) learn how long their tongues are and 3) compare the lengths of the nectaries of the flowers you would like to grow.

In an article on Nature.com, R. A. Ennos, points out that bees do not coil their tongues as moths do, therefore the evolution of their straw-like tongue is limited to their body size.

"The maximum tongue length of a bee is unlikely to be significantly greater than its body size, since the tongue must fit lengthwise beneath the body in flight. Thus in an ancestral, bee pollinated Aquilegia, co-evolution will lead to a spur length close to the size of the bee's body.

Spurs of enormous length could ultimately evolve under co-evolution with the hawkmoth because the maximum size of a hawkmoth tongue is staggering (up to 220 mm), a fact made possible by their ability to coil the proboscis neatly beneath the head when not in use."

If you fancy doing some scientific experiments of your own, why not try to grow several types of columbines that attract different pollinators? You may be speeding up natural selection by putting plants next to each other that have evolved in geographic isolation. Apparently columbines can create fertile hybrids. If you save some seeds, you could become an amateur plant breeder. Birds love the seeds too, by the way. You can make notes on which colours attract the most bees. Apparently bees see red as black, so they will see the Aquilegia formosa flowers as white centres with black edges. In an abstract for an article on bird-pollinated flowers Quentin Cronk and Isidora Ojeda say that black is a bee-deterrent color. If the Aquliegia formosa depends on both bees and hummingbirds, then it makes sense that the flower is both red and white. I would think that the black would serve as a kind of nectar guide in itself, giving the flower a high contrast edge to read.

"Red coloration appears to play a major role in both bee-deterrence and bird-attraction. Other mechanisms of bird-attraction include the production of abundant dilute nectar and the provision of secondary perches (for non-hovering birds)." http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/59/4/715

In the book British Wildflowers--In their Natural Haunts Vo 2-4" A. R Horwood has an excellent detailed description of how bees pollinate wild columbine. I wish there were more examples of this kind of writing for bee gardeners.

"The five petals are large and conspicuous, each one hollowed from the claw upwards, to form a hollow spur or horn-shaped cavity, 15-22 mm. long, with a cup-like mouth, admitting a humble bee's head, and the narrow tubular part is curved inwards and downwards above, containing the honey secreted by a fleshy thickening in the spur. Bees with a long proboscis hold on to the flower below, clutching hold of the base of the spur with their fore legs, and with their mid and hind legs they clasp the stamens and pistil, which project obliquely downwards in the middle. They introduce the head into the aperture of the spur where the outer wall touches the end of the proboscis following the curve of the spur. In younger flowers the hind part of the bee's body touches the anthers, closely surrounding the carpels covered outside with pollen, and in older flowers the same parts touch the carpels which have become elongate, and spread the stigmas farther apart. So cross-pollination follows.

The visitors are Bombus hortorum, B. terrestris, B. agrorum, Halictus. B. terrestris cannot reach the honey and bites a hole at the base of the spur in order to obtain it. Holes may frequently be seen and are due to this cause."

Horwood also explains that the flower derives its Latin name from the talons of an eagle, which finally makes sense to me! The columbines that are native to BC (Aquilegia formosa) were used medicinally by First Nations, but be advised the Aquilegia plant has poisonous parts. So go ahead, order some columbine seeds and grow a bee garden that would make Darwin proud!

Bees on YouTube

Just a word of warning from Madame Beespeaker: I have screened this videos ahead of time to see if they are age appropriate. YouTube contains quite a bit of mature content, so I advise you if you are one of my art students, these videos are safe but do not surf YouTube unless you are with a parent or you have permission from your guardian!

1) Hinterland Who's WhoTube: An excellent Canadian video about pollination. 7.5 minutes

2) Le même video en Français: "La pollinisation, c'est extra-super! La pollinisation, effectuée par des insectes tels que les abeilles et les papillons et des oiseaux comme le colibri, est l'un des processus écologiques les plus importants de la planète.

Regardez l'épisode Web afin d'apprendre ce que vous pouvez faire pour aider ces petits êtres occupés."

3) A PSA by Burt's Bees on Colony Collapse Disorder. 1 minute

4) Silence of the Bees: A fragment of a PBS special. 2 min. 40 sec.

5) A very funny Haagen Dazs Bee Dance--Hip hop style! 2 min.

6) Same deal, but this time disco style! 1.5 min.

7) A very short operatic style video by Hagen Daas. 32 sec.

Pollination

8) A video explaining how bees pollinate vanilla orchids. Does this defy evolution? That's up to you to decide! 3 min. 42 sec.

The Bee Dance

1) A short video of real honeybees doing the waggle dance. 1min.

2) A more detailed video of the bee dance. Good content, but poor sound and fuzzy visuals. 3 min.

3) Bob and Byrne: A couple of silly bees. Good for a chuckle. 2.5 min.