Resting and Robbing

Posted on June 30, 2022 by Tina

Bees are busy pollinating the summer garden, but like the rest of us, they need rest. Foraging is hard work! This Horsefly-like Carpenter bee, Xylocopa tabaniformis, chose a pretty pink bougainvillea bract as its preferred napping spot.

I watched it for some time as I puttered in the garden and it didn’t move. I’ve seen bees “sleep” on flowers in the past, usually on petals or atop leaves. I’m sure they rest in other places too, but it’s likely that those spots are more private, less noticed by the perspiring gardener. I checked the plant after puttering and the bee had moved on.

This Southern Carpenter bee, Xylocopa micans, participating in nectar robbing, is poised to poke its proboscis into the bloom of a Big Red Sage, Salvia penstemonoides.

Nectar robbing or nectar stealing is a way that various insects, bats, birds, and mammals consume nectar without the benefit to the plant of pollination. In the case of bees, they typically bite or poke a hole in the petal tissue, then sip the nectar, bypassing the parts of the flower where pollination happens. Flowers can be damaged by the robbing, thus preventing further visits from pollinators. As well, some pollinators also recognize when a bloom has been robbed of its nectar, so they move on to other nectar-filled flowers, the robbed flower missing out on pollination. For for various reasons, nectar robbing isn’t generally considered harmful for plants or an ecosystem as a whole, but is simply part of the functional tapestry of a diverse natural space.

Carpenter bees nectar rob because they’re such big bees they can’t fit into certain blooms. Generally, the blooms that bigger bees rob have slender, tubular corollas. This same Southern Carpenter bee is head-and-proboscis-deep into the base of the Big Red sage bloom, sipping the sweet stuff available. There’s no way that big body could nestle in the bloom.

Sometimes, a robber is sprinkled with pollen, perhaps due to buzz pollination. Buzz pollination happens when certain bees vibrate their strong thoracic muscles, vibrating, or sonicating, the pollen grains from flowers’ anthers. During foraging, this Horsefly-like Carpenter bee might have buzzed pollinated on a different flower, its back carrying sprinkles from the loosened pollen onward through the garden. The bee is too big to crawl into this bloom, a Henry Duelberg sage, Salvia farinacea, so stealing is the way to go.

Of course, there are those who pollinate the old-fashioned way, crawling all over a bloom, collecting pollen as they go! This native bee, perhaps a Mining bee, Andrenidae, or a Plasterer bee, Colletidae, enthusiastically worked the flower of a Texas thistle, Cirsium texanum.

Pollinating or robbing, it’s a busy time in the summer garden, especially for those who live in and rely on its bounty. After a hard day in the garden, sleep is bliss.

The New Woody

Posted on May 20, 2022 by Tina

In honor of the World Bee Day 2022 I thought I’d post about our most recent addition of honeybees: meet “new” Woody!

Last summer our honeybee colony, Woody, weakened (for unknown reasons) and was invaded by wax moths, which you can read about here. Since it was late in the season and too late to hive a new colony, we dismantled the physical hive and were left with only one hive, Bo-Peep. Over the course of winter, Bee Daddy cleaned and refurbished damaged hive parts and built some necessary new ones in preparation for a new colony of honeybees which arrived in late April.

Here’s our newest honeybee colony, packaged up, strapped in the car, and ready for the trip to their new home.

In this scary-to-most-people package are 10,000 worker bees and a mated, clipped-winged queen. Actually, the crew of honeybees aren’t frightening at all and are quite gentle. Even if a bee escapes the package, it hangs around its sisters and queen.

Pheromones are powerful things.

Since we began beekeeping, we name our hives after Disney/Pixar characters and the last couple of hives were Woody and Buzz and following those, Woody and Bo-Peep. If you know the Toy Story movies, you understand that Bo-Peep and Woody belong together. Am I right??

Here’s the new hive for Woody: a brood box ready with sugar water for feeding bees and building comb. The bees will forage for nectar and pollen immediately, but the sugar water helps the colony get a strong start. We’ll feed them for a couple of months, maybe longer, depending upon weather conditions.

The round metal circle at the top of the package is a can with sugar water; there are holes in the bottom to feed the bees while they await their new hive. About 2/3 of the sugar water was gone by the time we hived Woody. The queen is in a “queen cage’, in the package, but separated from the workers. She is constantly spewing out her pheromone vibes, assuring the colony’s devotion to her and to one another. The cage has two holes on either end of the little box, both of which are plugged with small corks. In this photo, the hole on the bottom is also covered by a strip of yellow tape, which I removed. I then removed the cork, revealing a plug of candy, which the workers and queen will eat through, physically releasing the queen within a few days into the hive to begin her life’s work.

We stapled the queen cage to a frame fitted with commercial wax, called foundation; this is where the bees will build their comb.

Bees don’t need foundation to build comb; they build comb because they’re driven to build comb. But giving them a base onto which they comb makes it easier for bees and the tidy frames allow for efficient checks of the hives. Extracting honey is also simplified with well-combed frames.

The gals are checking out the queen cage.

The photo isn’t clear, but if you look closely, you can see the elongated abdomen of the queen in the cage; she’s about 1/3 longer than the worker bees.

To hive a colony, we placed four brood frames with foundation in the brood box. The queen cage is attached to the center-most frame and the package of workers is placed in the open area of the box. That’s it, the colony is hived and we close it up!

We checked Woody about five days later and the queen was out of the cage and in the larger population of bees and they had already combed some of the frames and there was honey in some of the comb cells. When we checked, we removed the package and added more frames. Honeybees are in the hive doing all the things required to build their colony: caring for the queen, cleaning the hive, removing sick/dead bees, caring for eggs and larvae when they appear, foraging for nectar and pollen. As of a check earlier this week, half of the frames were combed, with plenty of capped and uncapped brood in that gorgeous new comb.

While beekeeping is complicated, it’s hard for me to imagine having a garden without honeybees, and for that matter, plenty of native bees, who are more than worthy of their own special day. Pollinators of all sorts are vital to the beauty and value of a garden and of the wider ecosystem.

Go bees!

Part of the Story

Posted on May 18, 2022 by Tina

A plant near the pond, this Purple Coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, opens its lavender petals for welcomed business.

Then a pollinator lands. Busy and beautiful, this Eastern Tiger Swallowtail, Papilio glaucus, sips nectar from the blooms before moving on to other plants also offering sustenance.