Most people do
not realize that there were no honey bees in America when European settlers
brought hives from Europe. These resourceful animals promptly managed to escape
from domestication. Even in today’s vastly altered landscapes, they continue to
do the yeomen’s share of pollination, especially when it comes to native
plants. The honeybee, remarkable as it is, does not know how to pollinate
tomato or eggplant flowers.
It does very poorly compare to native bees when pollinating many
native plants, such as pumpkins, watermelons, blueberries, and cranberries.
They are also varied in their lifestyles, the places they frequent, the nests
they build, the flowers they visit, and their season of activity. They remain
ignored or unknown by most of us. Yet, they provide an invaluable ecosystem
service, pollination, to 80 percent of flowering plants.
A “wild patch” allows brambles,
wild raspberries, foxgloves, and vetches to thrive, while rank grass can
provide nest sites. Yellow Jacket wasps and bumblebees are very social to
have an annual colony. Overall, both, an overwintering queen emerge in the
spring. She builds a nest, gathers pollen and nectar, and lays eggs.
The female workers hatch and work together to feed
and care for the colony until fall when the colony dies out and a new queen
emerges. She mates and hibernates until the following spring when the cycle
begins anew. Bumblee bee name derives from the sound they made by their wings.
The remarkable arctic bumblebee, which lives within
the Arctic Circle? The queens begin raising their first brood while there is
still frost on the ground, sometimes spending hours shivering their flight
muscles while pressed against their brood cells, covering and providing heat
for her young. This physical activity and the heat it produced warm the waxen
brood cells, speeding the development of their larvae.
Bumblebees (bumble-bee, or humble-bee) and a few
other insects are warm-blooded animals. They can be powerhouses producing
energy by rapidly flexing their flight muscles. When queens emerge in late
winter to early spring, they spend long hours in their nests shivering to
generate the heat to rear early broods.
This intense effort requires a lot of fuel, so they
depend upon the early-flowering willows and maples to provide plentiful amounts
of nectar. Finally, after taking care of her initial brood, the queen is
relieved of her external foraging duties by her new daughters. The old queen
never leaves the nest again.
There are more than 50 species bumblebees are found
in North America. However, they are a group of about 250 species, now
placed in a single genus, Bombus although; many human beings are
familiar with bumblebees. Therefore, they’re large, furry, and typically black
with stripes of yellow, white, or even bright orange.
Bumblebees
have some things in common with honey bees. They are friendlier than most other
native bees, forming colonies with one queen and several workers. However,
bumblebee colonies are not big or as long-lived as those of honey bees.
Bumblebees are ground nesters with most making
their nests in an underground cavity created by small animals. The cavities
they need for their nests are larger than those of solitary bees, so the first
thing that a young queen does in the spring is to find an abandoned mouse nest
or a similar burrow. Then she starts preparing it for her brood.
She builds a few wax cells that she fills up with
pollen and honey. Once provisioned the queen lays her eggs, laying no more than
half a dozen at first.
These eldest offspring are all sterile female
workers. Once this brood is fully grown, the queen rarely leaves the nest again
and spends all her time laying more eggs while the workers take care of all the
activities in and out of the nest. A female Morrison's bumblebee (Bombus
morrisoni) is from tine western states.
The colony grows rapidly, and it can reach a
population of a few hundred workers. The workers are usually smaller than the
queen. It is after her first brood emerges that you will occasionally see large
bumble bees foraging. Near the end of the summer, the queen lays male eggs in
addition to female ones. The females born at this time become queens, not
sterile workers, and they soon mate with the males after emerging from the
nest.
All workers, male bumblebees, and the old queen die
at the end of summer. The only survivors are the new queens, which have already
mated. They find a secluded hideaway to spend the winter and go to sleep (a
type of insect hibernation known as diapause). Then as winter gives way to
spring and the willows begin to flower, the queens emerge, and each will find a
new colony.
Bumblebees and honeybees both have pollen baskets,
called corbiculae, on their hind legs. Hence, they’re more specialized than the
pollen baskets of other bees, which are often called scopae. In honey bees and
bumblebees, the tibia segment of the hind leg is flattened, with rows of long,
strong hairs along the edges.
The shape of these baskets allows them to pack
pollen, mixed with some nectar and saliva, into a tight mass called a
corbicular pellet rather than the loose dusting of pollen grains clinging to
the hairs of the scopae of other bee species. Bumblebees are so effective at
pollinating tomatoes that their buzz pollination services are put to good use
in large greenhouses that grow tomatoes year-round.
All that is needed is a queen, a box for the nest,
and a supply of sugar water because tomatoes produce abundant pollen but no
nectar. The bumblebees are free to come and go but remain inside the greenhouse
most of the time. Bumblebees and their pollination services are a key component
in agriculture.
They are important pollinators of some clovers, a
forage crop for cattle. Bumblebees use buzz pollination when pollinating tomato
flowers. Other flowering plants that require buzz pollination include cranberries
and blueberries, eggplants, and other plant species in the family Solanaceae.
If you want to attract bumble bee then the following plants may
help you a lot.
Spring and Early Summer
Winter heath, flowering currant, willow, lungwort, Pieris, gean
(wild cherry), rhododendron, sycamore, maple leaf, yellow orchangel, bugle,
perennial cornflower, bistort, broom.
Summer
Raspberry, bramble, wild rose, thyme, sage, marjoram, lavender,
catmint, purple loosestrife, clovers, vetches, broad bean, foxglove, stonecrop,
honeysuckle, buddleia, thistles, scabious, chives, columbine,
Late Summer and Autumn
Borage, ice-plant, woundwart,
monk’s-hood, snowberry, bistort, tutsan,
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