You’ve probably heard “Save The Bees!” but do you know which bees need saving? Over 4000 species of bees inhabit North America, and most don’t live in hives or make honey. Wild bees come in every size, shape, and color you can imagine, and they live all around us, hiding in plain sight. In this lecture, ecologist Dr. Nick Dorian will introduce you to the wild bees of New England. You will explore their varied lifestyles, habitat needs, and intricate relationships they have with native flowering plants and other insects. You’ll come away with clear action items for how to explicitly incorporate the needs of these important pollinators into land management.
Dr. Nick Dorian is an ecologist, an educator, and a naturalist. While studying the ecology and conservation of wild bees at Tufts University, Nick co-founded and ran the Tufts Pollinator Initiative (sites.tufts.edu/pollinators), which worked to build capacity for community-based pollinator conservation through habitat creation, place-based education, and ecological research. Currently, Nick is a post-doctoral researcher at the Chicago Botanic Garden where he studies how to integrate and optimize pollinator gardens for biodiversity conservation.
Alrighty, so good evening everybody. Welcome and thank you so much for joining us tonight. My name is Jane R. I’m the events manager at 6 County Green Belt. I’m really pleased to be here helping out with West Newbury Wild and Native for their fantastic events every year.
For those of you who don’t know Green Belt, We are a land trust that serves the 34 cities and towns of Essex County, Massachusetts.
Our mission is about protecting natural land across the county, helping conserve healthy ecosystems, wildlife corridors, clean water, local food supplies, and free accessible places for all to benefit from nature. So tonight’s program includes closed captioning, which is optional. You can toggle it on and off at the bottom of your screen.
If you have any questions that you think of at any point during the presentation, please use the Q&A button also at the bottom of your screen that lets us keep track of all your questions.
And we’ll get to as many as we can towards the end of the presentation. And before we begin the program tonight, even though we’re online, I’d like to offer a land acknowledgement.
The properties that Green Belt conserves and that are in West Newbury. Are on the ancestral lands of the Pentecook and the Pawtucket, which are groups of Abenaki speaking people. For thousands of years, these inhabitants and their families fished, hunted, farmed. Conducted ceremonies and developed deep stewardship connections to these unseated lands and waterways.
We invite you to join us in honoring the elders who lived here before the indigenous descendants today and the generations to come. With that, I would like to pass it over to my colleague, Nancy Pow. Thank you. Thank you, Jane. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for joining us.
I just wanted to take a moment and let you know a little bit about the West near Bariwa Native, which is a local group that is beyond West New Bay now, what kind of several communities on the North Shore, but we’re a group of residents that are passionate about promoting native plants, pollinators, and wildlife family gardening.
We do that through controlling of invasive plants as well as planning natives in our own backyard and adjacent townland. We believe that the preservation of a wow in native lands is best down one yard at a time. And that every gardener and landowner should be empowered to build and restore healthy ecosystems.
And we all know how important this is. With the changes that’s coming with the change in climate that we have. And we’re excited for our speaker and I will pass you off to Carol Decker who’s gonna introduce Nick.
Thanks, Nancy. Well, I have to say we are so happy to have Dr. Nick Dorian here tonight for this important program on the Secret Lives of Wild Bees. Nick is an ecologist, an educator, a naturalist. I was first led myself to Nick’s work when I was looking for more information.
On on pollinators and how we can better support them. And Nick was working on his PhD at Tufts University at the time.
And he ran the Tufts pollinator initiative which he also co-founded. The site if you haven’t seen it contains some really educational materials on pollinators and native plants that are needed to support them.
But it was also so impressive of the many hands on projects that the students and Nick and others were doing to get this information. To the community. Now Nick is a post-doctoral research researcher at the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Where he studies how to integrate and optimize pollinator gardens from a biodiversity conservation. I can’t wait to be hearing more about his continuing work in the near future. Nick has so much to share with us. Welcome, Nick. Thanks so much, Carol.
And thank you all for being here. This is quite the turnout and I really appreciate you taking time. Deep in the middle of winter to learn about bees. With me and whether you are brand new to insects or a seasoned Be Watcher.
I hope there’s something new in the story that I have to share for you tonight. When we think about bees, I think many of us think about these guys, the European honey bees or should I say these ladies?
European honeybees are a species that was introduced to North America in the 16 hundreds with the colonists. And they’ve really sort of emerged in front and center in the public’s mind’s eye about about bees.
Honeybees live in big hives headed by a single queen with 10 to 30,000. Individual bees, all of which are female.
And they have this, you know, strong pension for hexagons and ordered ordered hives. And we think about honeybees also in the context of pollination, about 90% of wild plants require animal pollination and and those plants make up a lot of the color we see in our landscapes and on our roadsides throughout the year.
And about 75% of top global crops, everything from coffee that we drink in the morning to the pumpkins we carve at Halloween time to the blueberries in our bowls in summer require pollination by an animal most of the time as an insect and most of the time is a bee.
Bees are excellent at pollinating. Flowers and they solve this this conundrum that plants face which is that they can’t move. And so flowers produce petals and sweet fragrances and sweet nectar, not because they’re hoping that we stop to gawk at them, but because they are advertising a resource for insects like bees.
Bees come in, drink, nectar, get a meal out of it, they’ll gather some pollen, and then they’ll go off to another flower. And in doing so, They ferry pollen between these stationary flowers and aid plant reproduction.
And because pollination is such an important ecological and agricultural process reports of declines in honeybee populations sort of sparked panic in the public. Even celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman and companies like General Mills sort of proclaimed the need to save the honeybee.
Unfortunately, that’s not the bees we need to be worried about. Honeybees are not at risk of extinction. Although they do face their own series of threats, including a mite that increases mortality over the winter.
Honeybees are best thought of as livestock. And I think that please to save the honeybee for saving the environment is akin to saying, let’s save wild birds by raising backyard chickens.
I imagine many of you in the audience. Our bird watchers. And you can sort of understand sort of why that would be a preposterous proposition. However, there are bees that do need saving. It’s, it’s our native bees, our, our bees that live without the attention and the stewarding of beekeepers.
Our native bees are highly diverse. There’s over 4,000 species in North America. Over 500 in New England and they come in every size shape and color you can imagine. There are green bees and blue bees and orange bees. There are bees bigger than rigatoni.
There are bees smaller than or so. There are bees that sing at middle C in order to release pollen from flowers. There are bees with antennae longer than their bodies. They and there are bees that dig tunnels underground.
As long as if I were to dig a tunnel underground the length of the Empire State Building. These bees are incredibly diverse and yet they’re fairly, poorly understood as far as bees go, especially compared to honeybees.
One B in particular has exhibited sharp declines in recent years. This is the rusty patch bumblebee, which is now federally listed. However, 25 years ago it used to be one of the most abundant cranberry pollinators in the northeast.
And almost certainly occurred on, you know, at Cranberry Bogs in places like Crane Beach in Ipswich or along the Barry Island in at Plum Island and certainly on the Cranberry Boggs down in Plymouth and in Cape Cod.
So in the late 1990, s if you enjoyed ocean spray cranberry juice, you were enjoying a product made possible by Bombas Aphonis. If you drank the same product 15 years later, that B was not no longer in Massachusetts, but it was no longer in the Northeast.
It’s range is now restricted to the Midwest. I am lucky to live in Chicago now where the Bombas Aphness lives right down the street in places like in Minneapolis. And oddly enough, restricted mountain ranges in West Virginia. But in a matter of just 5, 6 years, its range collapsed over 90%.
I think it’s easy to sort of be alarmist about pollinator declines and although some species are tracking the the precipitous declines of Bombus affinus that’s not the case with every B. So on the x-axis here, we have a, so a metric of abundance. We have different bumblebee species names.
You can see there’s actually quite a bit of bumblebee diversity in New England. Now you see the black arrow here points to bomb its affness, our rusty patch bumblebee, and it has a red dot indicating that it’s declined significantly in recent years.
But you also see that many of them have blue dots. Which indicate that there are increases happening. So some bees are benefiting from land use change, other bees are not faring so well.
And so my job as a scientist in part is to figure out why some bees perform better than others and what traits make bees more or less susceptible to land use change and climate change?
Although we’ve documented severe patterns of decline in Bamas affness, we’re actually not quite sure what the reason is and in fact it might not be one threat in particular but rather this sort of synergistic cocktail.
Scientists call it death by a thousand cuts. The combination of pollution and climate change. Agriculture and monocultures of lawns, pesticides, habitat loss. The big 3 to look out for are habitat loss, you know, increasing in development. And reduction of natural lands.
The unbridled use of pesticides not only in agricultural lands, but on our own properties. Climate change. Heat waves and warmer winters can spell disaster for insects. However, one threat to insects that’s not accurately captured in this.
And which I want to focus on for the rest of the talk. Is what we don’t know about insects.
It’s their big secret. It’s how they manage to live in these landscapes. Some of them only active above ground for a few weeks every year, linking generations by surviving long periods underground of one or more years at a time.
How did they find flowers? How did they know when to emerge to encounter those flowers? These are things that are important to know for conservation plans and similar information is available for birds and bammals, which is why they’re often sort of the on the cornerstones of conservation, at least in the United States.
And so I hope that, you know, in the next 1020, 30 years of my career, I can contribute. Knowledge that will help inform conservation of invertebrates like bees. And I want to share with you today some of the secrets that we know about Bees thus far.
So to save the native bees, we need to know the native piece. I think it’s a good place to start by figure out what is a B. We know bees like flowers. But did you catch this isn’t a B? This is actually a drone fly, a very convincing B mimic.
But some things about this insect tell me it’s not a B. For one, it has just 2 wings, whereas Bs have 4. This insect also has really big eyes that bulge into each other and bees have slender eyes on the sides of their head.
And perhaps the most Damning piece of evidence is that these antennae are really short. Sort of club-like bees have long antennae. Or maybe some of you have swatted away the bees that land on your Fourth of July picnic.
But these actually aren’t bees at all, even though they have so on so that know the characteristic black and yellow coloring. These are our yellow jackets, social wasps. Their wings are folded and they’re not particularly hairy.
In contrast, bees are almost always hairy. They have to carry pollen and so the hair sort of functions like a nice big mop. Bees have long antennae. They have slanted their eyes on the sides of their head. At least for the females, they’re often always carrying palm.
If I had to put a definition on what a B is, I have to call a vegetarian wasp. And this is because before they were flower on planet Earth, there were no bees. Bees, diet is exclusively plant based.
They eat pollen for protein and nectar, which is sort of like Gatorade for B’s, for energy. But a hundred 30 million years ago, flowers were a relatively recent innovation on planet Earth. And they were insects called thrips that hung out in these these early flowers, and there were wasps.
That specialized in hunting these thrips. And scientists nowadays sort of hypothesize that this small group of thrips hunting wasps would gather the insects. But these insects were also dusted in pollen. And so there was already a spatial linkage to going to flowers and the wasps got an added protein benefit.
From consuming insects that were coated in pollen. And so from this relatively small group of wasps, only about 20 species. We had this incredibly intense radiation. Of species of species of bees across the planet. To 20,000 species today.
Now mind you it took a hundred 30 million years. But insects, including bees, are thought to be responsible for the rapid diversification of flowering plants and that it’s no wonder why our meadows and our you know, alpine meadows and our roadsides and our barrier islands and all the in our forest understories are so rich with floral diversity.
And that they’re also rich with B diversity. One thing that all bees have in common even the ones that are not as hairy is that they have branched hairs somewhere on their body.
And by branched hair, I just mean like it’s a single strand of hair that has little sort of laterals coming off of its side shoots. And this effectively increases the surface area of the bees hair and the bees body and it allows them to carry more pollen.
And a B is ever so slightly statically charged and so that when a B lands on a flower the pollen leaps off the flower onto the bee in a way that a balloon sticks to a child’s head when you rub it on it.
So now that we’re sort of all on the same page about what a B is, what do our bees do and how might knowledge of what they do help us help inform how we manage our landscapes to help them.
So we’re going to review that bees build nests. That bees visit flowers and that bees hibernate. Relatively straightforward. But the timing of these things is pretty important. Perhaps our best known wild B are the Bumblebees, the genus Bombas. And bumblebees all emerge in spring as queens.
The queens have spent the winter hibernating. They mated the previous fall, and so they’re ready to start a nest. She comes out and she visits early spring flowers like red maples and blueberry flowers. And she builds up nectar to replenish her energy stores.
She was underground for like 6, 7 months. And then she finds a place that to build her nest. She seeks out. Hosey cavities like an old rodents burrow. Or, you know, a space beneath someone shed or beneath a log.
And she gathers pollen and nectar and fashions it into a loaf akin to the consistency of Plato, which scientists call bee bread. And inside this loaf of bee bread, she’ll lay some eggs, all female. And those are the daughters that will help her grow the colony.
When the daughters hatch a few weeks later, the queen remains inside the nest. To build the colony and the workers go out and gather pollen from flowers.
Bumblebees all have different preferences for flowers and some of them prefer open blooms like cherries and rows and others prefer sort of closed flowers like those in clovers or or beach pee. And still others prefer ones with really long corollas like you might see a hummingbird visit like B.
One thing that all bumblebees can do in which I encourage you to notice this coming season is that they can buzz. Yes, all these can buzz and they make noise when they fly, but B Bumblebees in particular can make a very particular frequency.
It’s called Buzz Pollination. And certain flowers like those in the Blueberry family and the tomato or Nightshade family.
Require a secret password for their pollen to be released. It’s expensive making pollen in these flowers want to make sure that it’s only going to a bee that is likely going to pass it on to a good flower.
And so bees grab these anthers and they vigorously vibrate. Sort of like a tuning fork. And in fact, It’s the frequency is very musical. Some bees vibrate at an E, other B’s vibrate at middle C. And it’s these frequencies that allow bumblebees to be such effective pollinators. And you can notice a difference.
It goes from sort of a low resonant hum to this high priest like, And so I encourage you to listen for that in your garden this summer. And when a B does it just right, the pollen comes cascading out, as you can see in this video.
Now, many of the crops, the plants that I named, blueberries, cranberries, tomatoes, peppers, are pretty important agricultural crops and they add a lot of color to our diets. Now, Bumblebees can buzz, but honeybees can’t. So here’s a reason why we need b diversity.
Is that it enables us to have a more sustainable food system. By, capitalizing on these unique behaviors. In the fall after the colony has reached its zenith. New queens and males are produced.
The queens and males mate with different col, those from different colonies. And they fuel up on this bouquet of golden rods and asters. The queens gather nectar for themselves and they mate, they find a nice cozy place to hibernate while the male, the old colony, the old queen.
All dies out. The cycle is annual, linked together over the winter by queens. Here’s another visualization of the story I just told you where it links from the Queen and Spring, the colony over the summer, where we see lots of worker activity.
And then the queens hibernate over the winter. And the way you can tell a queen from a worker is by size. A queen is 2 to 3 times as big as some workers. And they make, they’re very, very conspicuous.
And you only see them in 2 times a year. You see them early in spring when they’re zooming over the ground looking for places to build their nest. And in the fall when they’re flying around fields of golden rods looking for males to make with.
On the importance of understanding the life cycle when we’re thinking about conserving insects, I want you to think about a string of Christmas lights.
And when I was a kid. We, we had the, parallel circuit where a light went out, the whole string didn’t disappear, but my parents would tell me about how if one light went out on the string of lights that they grew up with.
You didn’t know which light it was and the whole string of lights. Was extinguished. Think about the Bumblebee lifecycle like a series circuit. We’re seeing declines in some species like bomb its affinus. And we’re not quite sure why. There’s fewer B’s, there’s fewer lights on the string, but which part is it?
Is it that queens aren’t surviving the winter? Is it that there’s not getting enough food during the summer? Is that there’s not enough places to find nests? Any any change in these life stages just one life stage could unravel the whole cycle.
And so as a scientist, I am particularly fascinated in taking approaches to be conservation and be ecology. That link the entire life cycle together, taking a holistic approach. Because I think that without that holistic approach, it’s really easy to miss something.
We often think of bees as very social organisms, but in fact that couldn’t be more from the norm. Only a handful of percent of bees are social. The bumblebees and the honey bees are best known examples, but in fact most bees are on the other side of the continuum.
Most bees, in fact, live solitary lives. And a solitary B means that there is no hive. There’s no queen and because there’s no need to survive the winter as a colony they don’t produce honey.
And without this big store of resources to defend, there isn’t really a need to sting. And so our solitary bees are actually quite docile. The B that I got to know best during my graduate work is a B effectually known as cellophane B’s in the genus Kalides.
And, KI think, has an archetypal life cycle for a solitary bee. In Mid-March, spring often seems quite far away. This was taken at the Mystic Lakes right near Tufts University where I went to undergrad in grad school.
I was eager to find the cellophane bees that nest here at the lakeshore. It’s very sandy, which is their preferred nesting habitat. So I would ride my bike down the few miles to the the lake. And this was mid March and I got a little over eager.
Clearly there are people swimming. It can’t be that cold of the day, but it’s a little too cold for the beasts. The next day we had an equally warm forecast. So I came down again and I was met face to face with this a little adorable B.
This is a male cellophane B, complete with a really hairy mustache, long antennae. He would land on leaves sunning himself because it is quite cold and bees are solar powered. They need the energy of the sun to fly.
And so on, when the sun came out from behind the clouds, he as well as hundreds of other male bees would zoom low along the ground. If you look this at this video, there’s little dots and each of these dots is a male B.
And notice how they’re hanging really low close to the ground. This is the right around the boundary layer where they can smell the pheromones of females. That are sitting in their nest entrances. And the males are zooming around looking for females to mate with.
A lucky guy finds a female that is willing to mate and gets his opportunity. But in general, males do not help around the house in the insect world.
And so emails will make once, kick them away and have no need for them after that. So the males are out very early on the season and the females take over. After that. And you can see that the females are a bit more robust. They’ve got a lot more duties to do.
The first thing that she does is she digs a nice long tunnel. To to lay her eggs in. And so she’s sitting in her nest entrance sunning herself. And her tunnel will extend, you know, one to 2 feet in the sand and she digs this tunnel primarily at night.
She’ll often pick to choose to dig her tunnel in the close proximity of others, although these bees are solitary, meaning one B goes to one nest. I can consider them social butterflies. They like the company of other bees of the same kind.
And so you see each of these little mounds of tan colored sand. Each of these belongs to one female, but looking at an area maybe the size of a card table here.
And so there’s, you know, a couple dozen nests. Now, I often get the question, how do you know it’s not an ant nest? Well, ant nests do look similar, but their entrances are only about the width of a PIN or a piece of spaghetti.
Bees have entrances that are about the width of a pencil. And so that’s one way you can tell whether you’re looking at an ant nest or a be nest or be or wasp nest.
And so these these females have to figure out how to differentiate their nest among their neighbors. And while, you know, we might, you know, decorate the front of our houses or put a wreath or have a unique number on our mailbox.
Bees mark their nests with unique sense, fragrances or pheromones. And so bees literally smell their way home when they’re out of the nest. And you can watch this as the bee leaves her nest. She zigzags. She, sort of walks around, then she zigzags, memorizing the location and the scent of her nest.
She’ll memorize how many other nests are nearby, that there’s a route near to herds. Maybe she’ll memorize the location of the tree in proximity to the lake. Shore. And then she’ll zoom off. Hi into the canopy. These are spring B, so there’s not many wild flowers on the ground.
These bees visit trees like red maple and black cherry and apple. For their pollen and nectar. You can see this B has Paulen all over her body. She’s drinking nectar. She’s gathering pollen and packing it into her hind legs is very dense yellow on her legs.
But she’s also covered all over her face, her antennae, her thorax, her abdomen, even her wings, and her eye. Covered in pollen. And this underscores that pollination is very accidental. These are not, don’t know their pollinators.
They know their bees and this bee in particular is trying to get enough pollen to raise her babies. But in doing so, she becomes completely dusted in pollen, and the next maple flower she goes to. Some of that pollen’s gonna get knocked off and get where it needs to go.
And it’s this tight covolution between B’s and the plants they visit, which I find absolutely fascinating. When she goes back to her nest, she, she crawls down the tunnel and she goes to a brood cell that she’s prepared.
A brood cell is a chamber that one offspring will live in. And it’s about the size of a jelly bean. She’s fashioned it out of, it’s waterproof and she’s fashioned it out of her saliva.
She’s mixed her saliva with a secretion from her abdomen and she’s literally painted it on the inside of the soil of the tunnel to create that nursery. Chill place nectar and scrape pollen off of her legs and she’ll churn it together.
Not quite to the consistency of bee bread, but a little bit looser like a soup. And she’ll hang an egg on the top of the brood cell and then she’ll close it off.
And inside this the cell is everything that offspring needs. It has an ample provision of pollen and nectar and it has a nice waterproof environment safe from underground predators.
After a few days, that egg will hatch. And the egg will land on the the surface and Because it’s so liquidy, the B would drown if it were to completely plunge in.
And so it actually floats on top and sort of side strokes around eating on one side and breathing out of the other. And it does this until it can, it can sort of somersault in the, in the nest and have enough food.
Have enough space to move around. But sometimes the B is not alone in the nest. In the brood cell, sometimes there is an intruder. Blister beetles. Not these guys, but the offspring of these guys. This is the female blister beetle.
She is she slightless and she has no desire to eat when she emerges in spring. She emerges around the time that the female and the male bees emerge, but she’s not flying around. She’s walking around looking for a mate. And upon mating, she lays a big cluster of eggs in the sand.
These eggs hatch into highly mobile larvae called triangles. And the triangulans have to have a vector. They need help getting into the nest, which is their ultimate goal. As a matter of fact, the triangle and smell quite like a female B.
And so these eager male bees zooming around mistake this ball of triangulence for a female bump into it and the triangle and scramble on the long hairs of the male bee. Days and confused, the male bee zooms off looks for another female, and upon finding a female, Those triangles hop.
From the male B to the female B and now they’re right where they need to be. The female B is walking down into the nest full of pollen, nectar. Also carrying these little Beatled RV. She goes into the Nest cell to finish putting the provisions down.
She lays an egg and the beetle larvae hop off. He seals the B inside and the intruders. And the Beatles get to work. They kill the host B. They often kill each other until just one remains and inside that cell.
A beetle, not a B, is going to emerge. Now when I tell this story, it’s really easy to malign the beetle.
But imagine if I had told this story from the Beatles perspective about how it’s so hard to find a place to successfully raise her offspring, how there’s such a game of chance involved that maybe one out of 700 eggs makes it into a brood cell.
We all love nature documentaries because of, you know, watching the gazelle evade the lion, but we also love nature documentaries that show the lion that’s hungry finding the gazelle. The same sort of predator prey interactions are playing out at the small scale in our own backyards.
And so I think it’s really important not to. Ascribe connotation or intent or good or bad to bees or beetles rather Bees are important for the important links in the pollination of plants, but also the lives of their associates like this beetle.
And this sort of, this is gonna be a theme throughout the rest of the talk where we talk about bees, but also the species they interact with.
And having that sort of ecosystem or food web level thinking. Helps us appreciate the role of bees not only as pollinators, but as sort of links in the web of biodiversity around us.
So we love the Beatles. And in fact, right? Lots of beetles. By definition, means lots of beats because these beetles depend entirely on the beasts for reproduction.
Okay, so by the end of May, the whole Be Beetle saga has ended. Until the following year, underground, while I’m sitting on the picnic bench eating my sandwich, bees one to 2 feet below me. Are munching on their pollen provisions. Growing into adult bees. Just like Butterfly’s bees start out as grubs.
And then they spin cocoons. And metamorphose from a larva to an adult with wings. They do this before winter sets in and they’ll hang out as an adult underground waiting all winter long until the temperatures rise. Then they’ll emerge and burst forth the following spring. Carrying, literally carrying spring on their wings.
So just it’s just a matter of a couple of months now before these bees are out in Massachusetts. But not all bees live below ground. There are bees that live above ground that live in a variety of cavities.
Some of them rent pre-existing holes, others excavate cavities in pithy stems like those in sumac. And still others cement together little pebbles with tree resin to make their own cavities. We’ll talk about the renters in the excavators because those are the ones that are the most common in New England.
One of the renters is the named the mason beat. Maybe you’ve heard of Osmia or the Orchard B. These bees are incredibly effective pollinators of their favorite plants, which incidentally are also those that grow in orchards, apples, cherries, almonds.
They love the rosacey plants. So these females emerge are just a few weeks after the cellophane bees do, but they’re they’re living in cavities above ground not below ground.
And so you can see this female here, she’s. Visiting and drinking this nectar from this apple bloom she has apple pollen all over her face you know another example of pollination in action. But their name, Mason B, is fairly descriptive and it talks about the the materials they need for building their nests.
So whereas cellophane bees make this natural lining to the inside of their nest, mason bees gather mud.
And I took this photo in New Hampshire a couple of years ago because I was walking on the street and I noticed Blue bees flying into this like muddy seep with a plastic tube jutting out from it.
And I was like, what is this? Is this a nest to hive? I’m like, these bees are solitary. They shouldn’t all be going to the same place. There were no flowers in the vicinity to speak of.
And it took 5, 10 min before I realized that bees were going into this muddy bank to gather mud. You read about this in textbooks. But this is a really cool to see Bees gathering wet mud to build an S.
This is the Mason B. You can see how she’s completely extended her mandibles. And is carrying this little BB sized slick pellet of mud to carry back to her nest.
And so in this bottom row here, you see what she’ll do with this. She’ll carry it back to her to her nest and we’re looking at a linear 2 pier and she’ll start at the back.
And she’ll put down a layer of mud and she’ll line the top and the bottom with this mud wall paper. Then she’ll gather some pollen and nectar, lay an egg. And then make a division with more mud.
All in a day’s work. Then the next day she’ll gather more mud to wallpaper the next brood cell. Gather more pollen and nectar and lay another egg and so on and so forth, this sequential line of of cells from the back to the front.
And one really neat thing about bees, which is they can actually determine the sex of their offspring before laying an egg. And so if the egg is fertilized, it’s a female, and if it’s an unfertilized egg, with just one copy of chromosomes, it’s destined to be a male.
And this is really important because you can imagine there’s a little bit of pushing and shoving. When it comes time to get out of this linear nest, the bees at the front will be able to get out before the bees at the back.
Now, remember how I talked about the cellophane bees and how the males come out early so that they’re ready to meet with the females and they zoom around.
The same thing happens in Mason bees. And as a matter of fact, the females lay the females at the back and the males at the front. So the males are already in the position they need to be to get out early in spring and the females can come out a few days later.
Other bees, that live in cavities will make their nests out of resin, tree sap, and leaves. They’re called leaf cutter beasts. And I was walking down the street. A few years ago and I noticed this red bud leaf.
With these like curious little discs cut out from the end of it. Now the whole plant wasn’t Swiss cheese, it was just the the edges and I knew immediately that this was the work of a leaf cutter bee.
And I was I was not thinking about bees. I was not doing research. I was just going to a party at my advisors house and carrying some cheese in a bag and I noticed this on the edges of the leaf.
And so it goes. To show you that there’s clues about bees all around us, even if they’re flying really fast, they leave these marks. And so although I didn’t know where her nest was, I knew that she was in the vicinity.
And I knew she might be coming back to the same leaf the next day. Many of you have may have heard of bee hotels. I’ll mention them a little later, just about the merits and the drawbacks of Be hotels for B’s.
Long story short, there are better ways than adding these sorts of cavities to the landscape to help our cavity nesting bees. And in fact, if the goal is education, I have a recommendation for something that you might enjoy even more.
At the end of the talk. I’ll mention it and if you have questions about sort of how to manage your B hotel, happy to take those after. I told you was a theme cavities nesting bees are also threatened and vulnerable to parasites of their own.
They don’t have blister beetles in the same way, but there are sneaky wasps that try to get their eggs in the nest of cavity nesting bees.
Now, you can imagine the difficulty. This is the cavity can extend several inches and so how does a wasp that doesn’t crawl into the nest manage to lay an egg in a brood cell several inches back. Well, I’ll tell you, there’s a really long egg laying organ.
So here we have a linear nest at the back. We have, you know, probably the female cell towards the front. We’re starting to get towards the males. And you can see the 3 different pollen provisions.
Now I want you to see on the far right of the screen there is a WASP body and extending from her body is this really really long ovipositor. It actually bypasses this first cell. Slips into the second cell. And watch what happens.
Oh my god, like, IA magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. The egg disappeared out of nowhere. This is incredible. Not only has this Wasp manage to lay an egg in the bee nest. But it’s managed to lay an egg in a brood cell that the female can’t check on.
Because the cell has already been sealed. And so this WASP has ensured the survival of her offspring by, sort of. One upping the B and making sure the B couldn’t sort of police any activity in her nest.
Is absolutely wild. And, and, and these are, these are particular examples, but this sort of stuff is happening all over the place. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look. It’s gonna play forever. See, okay. The other kinds of bees that live above grounds are the excavators are carpenter bees.
There’s sort of 2 flavors of carpenter bees. There’s the big carpenter bees that love eating our decks and our wooden structures that are untreated and then there’s the tiny carpenter beats the ones that are the size of a grain of rice and our beautiful metallic blue and don’t bother us at all and live in our raspberry canes and
Our SUMAC stems and our and our elderberry. The tiny small carpenter bees, you can see how they build their nests with these little sawdust partitions. So whereas some bees use cellophane, other bees use leaves, I’ll use the mud.
Carpenter bees build their nests with wooden divisions. And I know many of you may have decks that are plagued by carpenter bees. Unfortunately, these bees, it’s hard work. Chewing into these wooden decks and so they don’t like to leave.
They extend these galleries from year to year. And so the best thing to do would be to paint over the wood or plug the entrance with steel wool or cock. And if it’s jeopardizing the safety of your deck, like I’m never advocating for.
For that. There are ways of doing targeted pesticide applications that that basically take care of the, the problem without causing harm to the rest of the environment. Again, that’s should be a last resort only by professional. But, definitely know that those carbon beats aren’t going to go away on their own.
They, they’ve sort of found a cozy place. And so if you can deter them from starting, that’s the best. Okay, those are sort of a rapid fire. How do bees build Nests? But bees also visit flowers.
And this is probably the most likely where we’re gonna see them. As I mentioned earlier, bees are vegetarians, vegans. Their diet is flower based. It is a nectar is the carbohydrates and pollen is the protein.
And although most of that pollen goes to the offspring in the nest, adult bees will snack on pollen. In order to sort of maintain reproductive. Status.
But what flowers bees visit is not random. There are bees that have co-evolved with particular flowers and those are the ones that they’re going to be attracted to.
So one way of sort of easily partitioning bees is based on tongue length. Some bees like Bumblebees have relatively long tongues and can be found on flowers with deep corollas. That is the measurement from the opening of the flower to the base of the flower where the nectar is.
Other bees like this relatively hairless mask be has a very short tongue. It’s sort of like a sponge. And it can’t drink from very deep flowers. And so you’ll often find these bees on flowers like golden Alexander’s or Queen Anne’s lace that almost look like dinner plates.
Some bees like these carpenter beads sort of try to circumvent what flowers have in mind completely and they actually cut holes in the base of these flowers to access the nectar and in in doing so sort of our bad pollinators.
So this is a salvia, a non-native salvia flower. And there’s a, this Carbon B has sliced a hole in the base of the flower and is drinking nectar and all these other tiny bees will will will then benefit from the carpenter bees incision here.
And so you can look on tubular flowers like Menarda, your B-bomb in your garden. For these little wounds at the base of the fire or hostas or things like that, long tubular flowers.
And there will be these little sort of vertical wounds that start to turn off off color as the day goes on. And, and you can see an activity of, of nectar robbing, as it’s called. But in addition to Nectar, bees visit flowers for pollen. This is their chief source of protein.
And it can be quite protein rich and from flower to flower, it often varies. When B’s are gathering pollen, they store it in different parts of their body. So that it doesn’t get knocked off during travel and you’re like, well, bees are pollinators, doesn’t it? Don’t they want it to get knocked off?
Again, bees are not trying to pollinate. Bees are trying to bring back to their nest as much pollen as possible. And so some bees like these leaf cutter bees or our mason bees will carry the pollen dry underneath their abdomen, like on their bellies.
Others like this green sweat bee will carry it dry on her legs. And our Bumblebees take it one step further and they mix nectar and pollen together. To make this wet pellet that sort of glistens in the sun. And this pollen is completely inaccessible to a flower.
It can’t get knocked off because it’s basically glued onto the bees leg until she can pry it off. Back in the nest. Now, although some bees, many bumblebees, those green sweat bees, they visit a variety of flowers.
Other bees are very, very picky and they only visit flowers for pollen from a very restricted suite of plants. So some are sunflower bees. Others are blueberry bees, other are golden rotten astrobees.
And each of these plants makes up the large proportion of their pollen diet. And knowing these relationships is really important when we’re designing landscapes, for bees. One of my favorite, specialist Be relationships happens early morning in the vegetable garden. This was a vegetable garden I worked at in Medford.
As a grad student and if i were to go out early 6 7 8 am and i wandered on over to the zucchini patch I would find squash bees. Squash bees are, are adorable vegetable pollinators that live and complete their entire life cycle around the squash plant.
Even in a cicurbita peepo is the squash and it’s even in their name, Pepinapis is the squash B.
Early in the morning, the males and females are zooming around the garden, the males trying to find a mate, the females trying to dodge these zealous males and trying to get a squash pollen for their nests.
So they’re zooming around. And, the, the males, you know, maybe get a mate, maybe not, the females gather pollen, and they return to their nests in the heat of the day. If you’ve grown squash, you’ll know that by noon or one o’clock the squash blooms.
Clothes for the day. They’re only open for one day and they close in the heat of the day. And so the females go back to their nests, but the males have no place to go.
Except they take a siesta inside the flower. They slip inside and they snooze in the heat of the day inside these closed flowers.
And so a really fun activity. Is to go out into the garden in a one or 2 in the afternoon and peel open a closed squash flower, late July, early August.
And you’ll find yourself based to face with these male squash beasts. Now don’t worry, this is a completely safe endeavor because male bees, no male bees can sting. The stinger is a modified egg laying organ and so female bees possess one but nails don’t.
So you can take your kids, your grandkids out into the garden, peel open the squash flower and find yourself face to face.
You can you can predict that this is going to happen. You know, try a few flowers. But every so often you hit the jackpot and be like 3 or 4 males hanging out inside.
But of course, there is an insect whose life entirely revolves around the life of the squash bee in the vegetable patch. And that is not only another insect, but it’s actually another B. This is the squash cuckoo B.
And the squash cuckoo bee is a bee who doesn’t build her own nest, doesn’t gather her own pollen, but instead mooches off the nest of the squash bee. In many in very similar to the way a cowbird lays eggs in the nest of a songbird.
So this cuckoo bee smells her way to the entrance of a squash be nest, this hole in the ground here, and she waits for mama squashby to leave. Mom Squash B leaves and the cuckoo beast is her chance. She slips in. Finds the brood cell, lays an egg, and slips out undetected.
Mom Squash B returns having no idea what’s just transpired. She lays an egg, seals up the cell. And inside she’s locked, killer. The squash be egg hatches. And with huge pincer jaws.
Makes quick work. The squash B. Larva. Now, these these are vegans so they would never eat another B, but instead this kuckoo bee larva munches on the tasty squash provisions. And from that brood cell next year, a squash B will emerge. Now again, I know what you’re saying.
We love the squash bee, they make pumpkins for us, like. Why do we like this cuckoo be? Can’t malign the kuckoo be. The Kookabee has its own, series of threats to contend with, like this camouflaged crab spider.
This is a crab spire on a flower nearby. That doesn’t spin a web, but sits and waits in ambush. And the cuckoo be landed and unknowingly. Got nabbed by this crab spider.
And so think, just think about it for a sec, like when we plant squash. Not only are we feeding squash beats and incidentally feeding ourselves, But we’re feeding cuckoo bees. And we’re feeding crab spiders that eat those kuckoo bees. And we’re feeding mocking birds that eat the crab spiders.
Maybe Cooper’s hawks that eat the the mockingbirds and this relatively simple act and perhaps a very selfish act of you know, we want squash. Results in this the sustaining of this intricate web of interactions and it all happens in our own backyard.
It’s all to say you can make a difference. And I want to leave you with some actionable items that you can do. To work towards helping our native bees and the species that they interact with. You can use an acronym that I call seeds. SEED S. To save native peace.
S stands for spread native flowers. These are the flowers that our native bees have co-evolved with, the ones that have been living in. Eastern North America for and in New England and on the coast of New England for tens of thousands of years.
The nutritional profiles of these flowers are just what the bees need. And the chemical, the volatile profiles, the fragrance of these flowers are attractive to these insects. As I talked about, we said there are blueberry specialists and sunflower specialists and willow specialists.
These specialized interactions didn’t happen overnight. They happened as a result of co-evolution. And so you can plant these flowers in your in a garden. It can be a patch in your front yard.
It can be a pot on a balcony. It can be a project you work with your neighbors to create in a road median. Any area that you’ve intentionally designed and planted with the needs of insect pollinators in mind. Counts as a pollinator garden.
Now there’s lots of sort of rules you can follow, but the main fundamental is to aim for sequential blooms across the growing season. Try to get things blooming at least one thing blooming every week of the year, from April through October. It’s a hard task.
You miss week it’s okay. There’s other resources on the landscape. But that should be a primary aim to think about the needs of our insects from from spring to fall. Think of our bumblebees. They need continuous resources from the time the queen emerges to the time the new queen enters hibernation.
That’s every week of the growing season, basically. So in April in the gardens that I stewarded at Tufts University, our wild flower gardens, not much is blooming in April, but instead the bees are up in the trees. They’re in the cherry trees, they’re in the maple trees. Not many in this ornamental magnolia.
In May, some of our irises were blooming, but the real party was on these Hawthorne trees. Hundreds of mining of Hawthorne mining bees and you know, nude mining bees and bumblebees and flower flies covering these kind of stinky.
Blooms and the bloom was a real intense pulse for about 2 weeks. And then in June as the hawthorn trees faded the penstamin picked up and the pentamin was now supporting the established colonies of our 2 spotted bumblebees.
Workers were visiting those flowers. Tiny sweat bees were walking into the flowers not being very good pollinators but getting a meal. By July other wildflowers that had spent a few months building leaves. Now we’re ready to bloom our Culver’s route, our Joe P weed our bee bomb.
By August, it was just an absolute pollinator bonanza, you know, and this one day I think we had 30 or 35 different species of pollinators.
This is in the middle of a city. You know, to my right in this photograph is a train track behind where I’m taking this photograph is a 3 lane road and a gas station to my left is buildings.
And so in this relatively small pocket of vegetation, we’re attracting Really remarkable biodiversity and we’re not just seeing individual species. We’re seeing interactions. Wasps hunting caterpillars. You know, bees pollinating flowers.
Pay attention to the different shapes of flowers that attract diversity. So some are long and like candles, others are flat like dinner plates. Others are They spray out like fountains. Some are purple, some are white, some are yellow. In general, purples, whites, yellows, blues, pinks are good for bees.
Red flowers are great for hummingbirds. Bees have a hard time seeing red. And so those flowers you won’t get a lot of B visitors. And then in the fall, the garden begins to tire, but our asters and our golden rods keep pushing with those resources.
Our New England masters not only feed late season Bs that are completing their entire life cycle in just a few weeks. Our Golden Rod and Astro Specialists, but they’re feeding migrating monarch butterflies and migrating hoverflies as they’re on their journey.
And our garden is an important stopover for these insects. And then our garden continues to provide such abundance. Even after the insects have died down for the year. Our garden provides food for migrating sparrows. Palm Warblers, birds that need seeds. These beads, these birds are in our garden.
Not just because we planted the plants, but because bees helped make seeds and those birds are there because of the bees.
Right now it’s sort of the middle of winter, but it’s still time to think about your pioneer garden and there’s really a lot of amazing sources of native plants and native seas you can get local to to Massachusetts.
One of my favorite places is out in coming to Massachusetts. It’s a nursery wing in a prayer nursery run by Amy Pully. You know, garden in the woods in Framingham has a wonderful selection, just wonderful demonstration, garden of how you can you can plant and landscape with natives.
And Wild Sea Project is in Maine is a really great local source of native eco-type seeds. And I encourage you to place it in the chat if you know of places that weren’t on that list and you want to share that information with other folks attending.
Definitely do that. These opportunities are are great for for networking like that. It wouldn’t be a talk. Without a list of plants for your all to consider. These are Knicks picks. 8 different plants that provide season long blooms for bees.
Based on my observations of bees native to eastern Massachusetts. So it starts in May and June with land sleeve choreopsis which which feeds our early Astor specialists that won’t be around when the golden rods are blooming in the fall.
And we have in in the early season, we have flowers that have discs and others that look like bells like Fox love beard tongue to make sure we’re providing food for bees that have different tongue lengths.
June and in July the first male bumblebees are starting to be produced and Wild Bergamot or Menardo Fischalosa is just a bumblebee powerhouse and it’s a real source of nectar.
We can complement nectar plants with pollen plants, things like asters, purple, cone flower, and iron weed, and partridge pea that provide pollen for those bumblebees that are are visiting those other plans for nectar.
We can continue the sequence with early sunflower and New England astering golden rods and these 8 plants effectively link several months of the growing season. Together and can be planted in containers or in a garden and are all pretty widely available at nurseries in the region.
You thought that was it? Of course not. There’s more plans. What if you don’t have son? What if you have a shade garden? There’s wild geraniums and golden Alexanders each support their own specialist bees.
The Golden Alexander’s B, the Wild Geranium B. There are red twig dogwoods, not our shade understory trees, the cornice Florida, but these are shrubby dogwoods that have their own specialist bees that visit these blooms. Black cohash if you’ve never seen this plan it’s just sort of astounding the leaves maybe only extend.
Foot or so off the ground, but then the inflorescences, the flower stalks, just sort of bend in the wind several feet up and they really illuminate and add structure to an, understory planting.
Great blue, elia cut leaf cone flower takes us through the end of July into the end of August and then our wood asters, Calcoasters is just one choice of many wood asters to choose from. And you can complement that with a shade tolerant golden rod.
That’s not it! There’s more! What about the early season when our wild flowers haven’t bloomed yet. There are shrubs and trees that are good for our native bees. Red maple, shrubby willows, not weeping willow, but shrubby was like pussy willow.
Or Prairie Willow are great. Eastern Red Bud, the tulip trees, the tulip poplar that grow really tall and straight, those flowers are just loaded with nectar. Cherries and, cherry trees, high bush blueberry, spirias, and even oaks.
I know many of you know the value of oaks for lepidoptera and although oaks don’t produce nectar. B seemed quite fond of collecting oaks. And so your oak, you can be rest assured that your oak tree is also adding food for some of our more generalized native bees.
When you’re at the nursery, I encourage you to sort of. Observe, if the flowers in bloom, are there bees on it? That can be one of the best litmus testes. Are there bees on the flower that I’m about to add into my garden or bees.
One thing you got to be careful of is that there’s often cultivars. And cultivars are denoted by these single quotation marks. So for example, sunflower teddy bear. That means that humans have messed with it.
And we’ve bred it to appeal to us. Not insects. And by changing messing what the flower looks like, we can actually change the resources that are available for bees, either making it physically impossible to access the resources by adding, you know, 10 times number of petals.
Or the flowers actually produce less pollen and nectar because of the energy costs associated with producing more petals. So when in doubt, choose a wild type. Flower and all those sources that I offered are going to specialize in providing those those wild types for you.
The other thing is to really, really, really, if you want, you want to see the large area, you’re like, I want to do a seed mix. Be really skeptical of great for pollinators advertising. I don’t tell you what pollinators this is good for.
They put some, you know, Photoshop images of these butterflies and a fly on these flowers. Many of them are not native to North America and many of them are actually not great for pollinators.
I’ve seen these these mixes planted out and they often have very homogeneous. Communities of insects that are attracted to it. So if you want to maximize your impact for our native bees, avoid these sort of cheap mixes you can find at big box stores.
Okay, that was Si promise I’m almost done. The second letter in seeds is E, employ a life cycle approach. That means not just the flowers, but also consider what the bee needs as its nesting.
Bear patches in in the yard or in a park can actually serve as nesting habitat and then this area the size of a Volkswagen I had 8 different species of native bees completing their life cycles in a one month period.
This is on my college campus. There’s the library to the right and the chapel behind. And it was amazing to see how many different species could be supported simply because grass couldn’t grow on this muddy slope.
This is one of the bees that showed up, the Dunning’s mining bee. If you’re a lazy gardener, you don’t like mowing your lawn, rest assured Dunning’s mining be really likes your yard.
They sort of like nesting in lawns that aren’t so well kept. And you can see this is just turf grass that it’s nesting around. Other people might want to put in a bee hotel. In the interesting time, I’ll just say that Be hotels are not great for conservation.
They they can do more harm than good and especially if they’re not managed properly My one exception to that is that there are these bee hotels that have plexiglass and are hinged, sort of like a book.
And this is amazing tool for education. So if you, cause you can open it up and you can see the bees lining it with mud or leaves and you can, you can develop a relationship.
With the bees that live in your garden. So if you really want to be hotel, do it because you want to learn more about our native bees. And I encourage you to think about maybe getting one with plexiglass. And using as an opportunity to get a glimpse into the lives of these bees.
The best choice would be simply not to clean up your garden as much. Leave stems standing. Leave bunch grasses, leave stem standing throughout the winter.
And this can actually provide homes for bees the following year. So the only way to actually make this work for bees is to leave your stem standing for 2 full years. In the first year the plant grows and you cut the stems back to about 8 inches, 8 to inches to a foot.
You leave them in the winter. You can leave them right now. Next year, the growing season happens and bees are going to be building nests in those cut stems.
And you’re not going to see them because the next round of vegetation is going to cover them, but bees will be able to find them.
Then you leave those stem standing for another winter. Cause there’s now bees in those stems and if you cut them, you’re going to destroy the nest that was just built.
So the following summer, the bees are going to emerge from those cut stems. Things like milk weeds or wild bergamot or Joe Piweed all have good suitable stems. And if you’re thinking like, how the heck am I going to remember? Which stems I’ve cut which ones I don’t.
I encourage you or you’re worried that you don’t want to leave the whole garden messy. I encourage you just to sort of cordon off a small area. Make it a trial and consider that your trial garden that you don’t ever, you don’t cut back.
You don’t touch. Maybe cut it back once a year just to 12 inches, but it’s not an area of the garden you’re messing with. You let the leaves fall, you leave the stem standing. And so it’s just a sort of perpetual cycle of stems standing. And B’s nesting in them.
I think I made this point and just. Don’t clean up your yard as much makes the the the garden a much better place for insects. So if you are, if you do want to leave the leaves or. You know, or you wanna break them.
Just don’t mulch them. Like, don’t take leaves and run them through. A chipper, right? The idea is that insects are living in these leaves or using intact leaves for cover to insulate the ground.
And so if you chop them up, Maybe it’s good mulch for a vegetable garden, but it’s really bad for the morning cloak butterfly or the bumblebee queen I was in those leaves and just got chopped up.
So you can rake them off to your lawn and in fact I encourage you to rake them off your lawn because it’ll kill the grass beneath it. So rake them off your lawn, spread it in a two-inch layer over garden beds.
And then, and then leave them there. But just don’t shred the leaves. Okay, E stands for Eliminate pesticides. This is really simple. I don’t need to spend too much time. What kills a mosquito. I don’t care what the company says. What kills a mosquito is gonna be really bad for bees.
And so if you have a property and you’re considering spraying or you have a routine or regiment of spraying, please consider rolling it back or eliminating it altogether. And if you don’t have a property, just go out and vote for stricter pesticide legislation.
This is a really simple measure we can all take and reducing the pessimid use on our properties can be really valuable. This is my absolute favorite part. D is discover what’s around you.
How do you know the bees are living in the stems? How do you know what the favorite flowers the bees are? Some of this information is written down, but a lot of this information I learned just by looking, I spend a few minutes every day.
Watching bees on flowers and Taking photographs and talking to people about it and trying to figure out make sense of what I was seeing For the first 20 years of my life, I was terrified of insects and in fact I remember running.
For the hills in the backyard playing pickup football and like a carpenter B bombed at my head. Now I’ve since learned that that was a male carpenter bee, probably curious of what I was doing, and a male can’t even sting.
So I had no reason to be afraid. And this is something I’ve found is that as I discover and notice and pay attention to what’s happening around me, My attitudes of fear about insects have changed and become more of empathy and and love for insects.
And it’s this proximity that breeds empathy and the distance between insects that breeds fear. As I’ve mentioned, watching bees on flowers is a really safe venture. These are distracted at the grocery store. They’re not interested in stinging you. So go out and Just watch for a few minutes every day.
And just start of talk about what you see. One thing that I really like is these 3 phrases. I notice I wonder and I’m reminded of. And this comes from a foundation out in California that that promotes nature observation.
But by naming and articulating out loud, even if it’s just to yourself. What do you notice? What do I wonder about what I’m noticing? And what am I reminded of? It can help build that that connection with the natural world.
And ultimately, I think it just, this Mary Oliver quote summed it all up, which is that attention, that act of noticing is the beginning of a deeper devotion.
So you’ll go be watching. Ground pair of binoculars. You can use a field guide that I wrote with my good friend and colleague Max McCarthy watching bees.
Calm we have 50 species that have been written up. And instead of it being what microscopic features do you need, it’s how do you identify this bee from photographs on flowers?
We have arrows pointing to features that you can see. Without a microscope. And these papilio pentax binoculars are just phenomenal for getting up close views of insects.
Some of the bees that you can go out and see are the cellophane bees that I talked about these bright green metallic race car bees and bumblebees things that I’ve talked about today are bees that you can see in your garden.
So for example, if you, you know, up in the North Shore, lots of sand near the coast and these cellophane bees absolutely love it.
So you can go out and, you know, on Plum Island, I went on to I naturalist, and I found that there are some sightings of cellophane bees in late April, early May.
And so you can go out and look for these bees on flowers at that time of year and maybe you’ll be you know, be able to find them. And go and explore other places around you. There are bees all over the place if there are flowers.
And if you’re really into this stuff, I’m teaching a course with my, with Max, up at Eagle Hill Institute, which is just north of Bar Harbor in Maine, the last week of June and you don’t have to be an expert, you know, just an interest in native bees and will take you through some of our identification tips for how to learn to identify bees on flowers.
It’s a week long program and you’ll come away, certainly able to identify Bumblebees and hopefully lots of other things. The last part of seeds is S. Share with others. Right? If we want to make differences to how our landscapes are managed, we have to make sure we spread the word.
And so in order to make a difference for our native bees, I like to say it takes a difference for our native bees, I like to say it takes a hive. Even though most of our people are solitary. And so take what you learned tonight and share it with other people.
Thanks, thanks for listening. I have one takeaway for you all. Which is that if you ever forget seeds where you want to remember what, how to make a difference, just go out and watch bees just a few minutes a day and you’ll learn so much from watching them.
You’ll learn they don’t need much. Things that I call small, intentional, repeatable actions. Like planting their favorite flowers throughout the year because you noticed what flowers they like and which ones they don’t. Or telling the pesticide company we’re not interested. Because now you want the B’s on your property.
And you want to show them with other people instead of getting them getting rid of them. Or telling a child that these should be revered and not feared because they make our favorite foods and they keep us healthy and strong.
Which means at the end of the day, each and every one of us has the agency to keep our forests full of Andrina A. Our old fields full of bomb disturbance. Our pine barrens full of Caledis, Dallas. Our NETO is full at Andrina Nubecula. Our headlines full of Haber Potala boreiosa.
Wetlands teeming with duforia noviangli. Our dunes rich with Khalidi’s speculiferous. And our gardens brimming with agapasse’s. Each of which if we let them have the ability to spark wonder in our lives. Cultivate empathy for non-humans. And help us grow a more livable future.
Thank you all for your attention tonight. I’m sorry I went a little long. Happy to take any questions. Oh Nick, I wish you could see we can’t clap but there has been this steady stream of hearts folks, yeah.
Oh, I see them. I see them popping up on my screen. I didn’t know what they were. Oh yeah, she makes me feel so wonderful. Thank you. Okay. Oh my goodness, yeah, lots of hands and, thank you. Oh, this was fantastic.
Thank you for sharing your incredible knowledge and making it so much fun. Thank you. Nancy, we got some questions. We do have a lot of questions. One of the first questions that came in was, a recommendation for apps for citizen science.
I know you mentioned I naturalist, which I use a lot to. Do you have any other recommendations? I think our naturalist is great and you’ll be pleased to know that I use it for, for science, right?
Those observations do mean something. And that especially for insects like bees that we know very little about, even like. When are they active in a year or which flowers are they visiting your photographs contribute a lot? And so those observations are really about. So I recommend I naturalist. Nice.
Sounds good. So we have a question from Judith who was what she noticed that when there was some severe flooding in early July some of her bombus and native small native bees disappear for a few weeks.
Was the honeybees seem to be still around. And she was wondering if that. Extreme precipitation events might have some impacts to our made of bees because of where they’re nesting.
Yeah, you know it can it and the impacts of floods your intense precipitation are still things we’re working out but you can imagine that honeybees are probably not as deterred by floods because they’re living in boxes that are kept by people.
Elevated off the ground. And often the numbers of insects in those hives are, you know, 10 to 30,000, like they’re not going to be in the same numbers as bumblebees which may be just getting their colony started.
There is a period of the year when Bumblebees sort of disappear from the landscape and that’s when the Queen has finished collecting pollen, but her first workers haven’t emerged yet. So it happens around the end of May, early June, and you’ll be like, I haven’t seen Bumblebees in a while.
And that’s a pretty a time when Bumblebee counties are fairly susceptible. To environmental stress because there isn’t a group of female worker bees that are gathering pollen. So when when you’re making observations about these, I encourage you to talk to other people. Have you have you also seen changes in the bee population?
Maybe the bees have moved to flowers elsewhere. And so look, look around it and make sure you get a good, a good sense of how’s that, how’s it happening across the landscape?
But in general, very hot conditions can really be bad for bees. You’ll see bees active very early in the morning and if it gets really hot like 90 degrees by 10 am.
Be activity just drops off precipitously. So also pay attention to how hot it is, because it makes it hard for bees to fly and plants don’t produce as much nectar when it’s hot. And so it’s a double whammy for bees.
Okay, so in your presentation you talked about. Bumblebees and, you know, how where they lay male, male and female offspring. How does a female bumblebee become a queen? It’s a great question. So for a Bumblebees, it’s all about the amount of food that that female egg is given.
So there isn’t any special food, like honeybees, they’re fed, something called royal jelly, but in bumblebees it’s simply the the eggs that are fed extra food at a particular time in their development. Become queens and the ones that are not fed that amount of food become workers.
And then we have another attendee that’s asked. So your C, seed. Acronym. I think we have sewing, whether it’s the first E Stanford, can you go over those again? Yeah, so it’s spread native flowers. Employ a life cycle approach. Eliminate pesticides, discover what’s around you, and share with others.
We have another person that is wondering if honeybees compete with NATO bees. It’s a great question and one that comes up often and you’re right for being concerned, right? So just that phase value, right? A honeybee hive has, you know, 10 to 30,000 B’s.
That’s quite a bit more bees. You have to have 10,000 solitary be nests to sort of match that. There isn’t a lot of good, a lot of science out there. It’s really hard to test competition, sort of competition for what we know bees share flowers, but our honey bees, you know.
Blocking bees from flowers or taking all the resources away. In general, I don’t recommend the installation of honey bee hives, period, unlike conservation land.
Leave those lands for people. That for wildlife and the environment. If you’re really keen on keeping honeybees and you want honey, I’m not going to tell you not, not to be a beekeeper.
And in fact, beekeepers are responsible for a lot of the food that we eat. But don’t put a honey beehive on a place on a land for conservation.
It’s that’s not though those are not it’s not an environmental issue. And that’s one way of sort of making sure there’s not as much competition, by just not place putting honeybees there, we can sort of remove the impact.
But it’s a hot topic among scientists right now, and so I expect in the coming years for there to be more information out about. Yeah, that’s a really good question because I think a lot of people are wondering about that.
So we have 2 questions as related to Carpent to Bees. One is generally asking how do you evict them without killing them? And then another question asking if painting orange oil on on the spots that the carpenter bees are knowing at will prevent them. From invading the the wood.
Yeah, yeah. No, it’s. Good questions. I, I don’t have any personal experience deterring carpenter bees with orange oil, so I can’t speak to that.
And There isn’t a great time to evict carpenter beasts. The, I’d say if you had to do it the best time would be to sort of plug the nest early in spring when they’ve all left.
To go either made or find flowers and some of them will come back but there will be enough of them that have left the hive after the colony after winter that it would be a good time to do it.
The worst time would be like in the fall when they’re all tucking in for hibernation and you’re just gonna trap them all in there. Those are good tips. You can you suggest some early spring? Perennials, native perennials to provide nectar for queen bees as they are emerging.
Yeah, so if you’re looking for Let’s see, you’re looking for the best, the best bang for your buck is going to be a woody.
Perennial. One of these on the list, right? Like the amount the number of flowers that a shrub or a tree can produce vastly exceeds what an understory wild flower can produce. Like there’s like thousands of flowers on a red bud, you know, thousands of flowers on a blueberry bush.
However, there are often obviously space concerns. And there are some sort of understory wild flowers that are great. So one of them is Dutchman’s Breaches, Dicentra is great for Bumblebee Queens. And it’s, it’s, it’s a perceptious perennial. Bluebells, wild geranium. Trout Lilies are all sort of like understory forest plants that can feed.
Feed bees, but in general that time of year, most of the plants that are in bloom are going to be. Trees and Trumps because that’s who already has the biomass to produce the flower. That sounds great. And then, one of our last question is, can you make a bumblebee hive?
Is it possible to make a bumblebee hide? Yeah, so a bumblebee hive, right? What we’re looking for is looking for a cavity that’s pre pre-exavated cavity that’s slightly underground. So one thing you might try is take a terracotta flowerpot. And sink the lip.
2 to 3 inches below the ground. So most of the terracotta pot is above ground and the lip is 2 to 3 inches below ground.
You can sort of cover the base with some leaves. And you can leave the top open. That’s the, the drainage hole will be the entrance for the bees to come and go.
And you might consider placing it beneath the tree or beneath the shrub. And some people have had success deploying terracotta pots as homes for bumblebees. Now, I don’t often recommend it because the success rates are often very low. Even scientists that deploy 200 like pre-made wooden boxes.
And a variety of places. I hear stories of like 1% getting colonized. So like one out of 2 out of 200. Like it’s really a low chance. But I think it’s a fun activity and also gets you thinking about lifecycle needs, right?
You’re thinking not only about the flowers, but what the bees need. During the winter. During the, during this establishment period. That’s great. We have a question if you have any recommendations for recent college graduate looking to start a career in pollinator work.
Oh, that’s so great to hear. So it depends on what kind of work you’re looking for.
I think if you’re interested in getting out in the field. Now is actually a great time to start looking for there’s lots of seasonal positions all over the country with scientists that are studying pollinators and you know there’s there’s jobs in Minnesota in Wisconsin there’ll be jobs throughout New England.
There more and more jobs come every year. Focused on getting the sort of experience. If you’re interested in sort of a different kind of job or one that’s more conservation focused, there, see society is a national society focused on invertebrate conservation that’s XERC ES.
The ZHI society is sort of. The the go to pollinator conservation group. In North America and they do some really phenomenal work, especially working with grow growers, farmers and how they can make their lands more pioneer friendly.
The, the Institute for Bird Populations, although it’s bird populations, they also do bumblebee surveys in the Sierras and out West. And if you’re interested in that sort of stuff, I know they have like seasonal jobs. You can go count bumblebees in beautiful places.
And learned about these that way. But you can shoot me an email if you have other questions. I’m happy to happy to chat with you more. And also through us up here, if you ever interested in having me come back or you have another group, I have other talks.
Fundamental is a pollinator gardening. We can take a virtual pollinator safari. We can learn more about how to notice nature. Fantastic bumblebees and where to find them. So anyway, I love doing this stuff. Just putting that out there. Nick, I think we’ll definitely follow up with that. Oh, perfect.
That’s funny, we did, yeah. Just got a quite we just got somebody asking about that so that’s perfect Nick Yeah, definitely. Do you have a list of your other talks that you like currently are scheduled to? To give that you can share. Yeah.
Yeah, I’m actually currently only scheduled to give this talk. This spring and I had this moment where I was like, I’m scheduled to give this talk a lot. Like maybe I will give other talks. So I have I’ve branched out. I’ve developed several other talks.
And so the topic that you’re really interested in bringing. Me to talk about. I’m also happy to chat with you about like what that what that looks like. Wonderful. And so, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That sounds great. So we have, I think a lot of people are happy that you went over. There’s a lot of excellent information in your presentation. I have another question if native bees fee on Solomon. Native one.
Yeah, that’s that is a great choice. You know rabbits really like Solomon seal so I haven’t really grown them very much but yeah Solomon SEAL great choice Great choice. Especially those bumblebee queens. Great. Alright, Nick, thank you, thank you, thank you. It was wonderful. So much, great information and, I think we’ll be.
Hearing lots more about this wonderful talk. Thank you. Thank you so much, Carol. Thanks. Thank you, Jane. Thank you, Nancy. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. Thank you. Everybody. Thanks. Thank you. Okay. Thanks everyone. Lots of love. Yeah, I love it. Oh my gosh, the hearts are just flowing. How fun.
Okay, have a wonderful evening everybody. Thank you, Nick. Bye.