On Bumble Bees

Bombus terricola (left), Bombus pensylvanicus (center) and Bombus auricomus (right), courtesy of the Xerces Society. 

The wild bee identification class I took at the Organic Growers School earlier this month got me all fired up about bumble bees. I've always loved their presence in the garden, but I've just been a casual observer. I had no idea that there were hundreds of species of bumble bees in the perfectly named genus Bombus.  It turns out that the bumbling Bombus is hairy, clumsy, loud, and extremely efficient as a pollinator. Bumble bees' size, fuzzy texture, and loud buzz all add to their pollinating prowess - the buzzing actually helps shake loose pollen, which then attaches to their big hairy bodies as they bumble and lurch all over the bloom.

Sadly, as I've delved deeper into bumble bees, I've learned that a number of formerly common Bombus species are in rapid decline due to habitat destruction, pesticides, invasive species, and climate change.

I was astonished to learn that bumble bees are used commercially like honeybees as pollinators for large-scale agribusiness operations. According to one study I found (Plight of the bumble bee: Pathogen spillover from commercial to wild populations, Sheila R. Colla, Michael C. Otterstatter *, Robert J. Gegear, James D. Thomson, Department of Zoology, University of Toronto, available at www.sciencedirect.com): "Since the early 1990’s, private companies have mass-produced and distributed colonies of native bumble bees (Bombus impatiens Cresson in the east and B. occidentalis Greene in the west, although more recently B. impatiens has also been shipped to the west) to large-scale commercial greenhouses for year-round pollination of tomato and sweet pepper. A pollinating force of commercial Bombus can reach 23,000 bees per greenhouse."  These large scale commercial bumblebee colonies are apparently one of several factors contributing to native bumblebee decline.  

Bombus pensylvanicus female courtesy of DiscoverLife.org

The Xerces Society has a ton of great information about how to protect and conserve bumblebees including this useful publication: Guidelines for Creating and Managing Habitat for America’s Declining Pollinators.

Besides the obvious (stop using pesticides and herbicides) there is some really interesting information about how to create habitat. For instance: most bumblebees nest underground, often in abandoned homes of other animals, including rodents and birds. So by killing mice and other rodents, land owners are indirectly decreasing bumblebee habitat.  They also like to overwinter in brushy and unmowed areas, woodpiles, grass clumps, hollow logs, dead trees, and debris piles - which means a little bit of mess is great for the bumblebees, yay!

Bombus pensylvanicus courtesy of DiscoverLife.org

Xerces Society is conducting a Citizen Science Project to track the status of five declining Bombus species - of course I will be participating, since the idea of a "Citizen Science Project" gets me all fired up and ready to get out my field guides and magnifying glass and Neil deGrasse Tyson T-shirt.  One of this summer's goals will be learning to identify different Bombus species. Nerding out with the Bombus in the garden!  Because they're big and slow and harmless, I'm hoping they'll be easier to identify than some of the other beneficial insects I've hunted in years past.

More bumblebee information can be found at Bumblebee Watch and you can see some gorgeous bumblebee photos on the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab's flickr page. 

Here are a few Bombus greatest hits photos from my garden over the past few years.

Some Bombus getting busy on a sunflower

Bombus on Bee Balm 

Echinacea in last year's garden with a bodacious Bombus visitor

Rock on, Bombus. Long may you thrive and pollinate.

On Bees, Beauty, and Science

Osmia lignaria (Blue Orchard Bee), a native megachilid  bee that nests in holes and reeds

Growing up, I experienced science classes as irrelevant tedium, something to just try to get through with as little pain as possible. I remember being bored with science classes in elementary school, doing a lot of rote memorization in my high school chemistry, biology, and physics classes, and never having any interest in learning any more than I had to about science.

Something strange happened in college. To meet my minimum science requirements, sure that I would be suffering through more tedious memorization of numbers, rules, and formulas, I looked for the least boring, most "liberal artsy" of the science classes in the course catalog.  I signed up for Evolutionary Ecology and Cosmology and fell in love with both. 

Suddenly, science was fascinating, relevant, and useful.  It was tinged with mysticism and magic, and full of beauty and wonder. My two science professors, passionate about their fields of expertise, brought to life for me the science of life and of the cosmos. Evolution and ecology and the mysteries of the origins of the universe fascinated me.

But it was too late - I was already deep into my major and committed to thinking of science as something arcane, confusing, and dry -- something that belonged to science and math people, not to English majors like me. Those classes, I thought, were just odd diversions, strange aberrations, lucky breaks in my quest to knock out the core courses required for a liberal arts major to graduate.

Rachel Carson paying attention

Many years later, as a gardener and lover of the natural world, I came to feel ripped off.  Science is amazing. The universe and the planet are amazing, and science is one of the ways we witness and comprehend all of the wonder of the universe and the Earth. I wish that science classes in elementary school and high school had consisted of bird watching, making compost and studying worm bins, walks in the woods, animal tracking, night field trips with telescopes, and wading in the stream with a magnifying glass.

I especially regret not studying botany earlier in life, along with all of the life sciences - the studies of the amazing community of life on the planet--entymology, ornithology, zoology‎, microbiology, and so on.

So in small ways I've been trying to remedy my ignorance of science for years, and I've made more headway with plants than with other living things, but still feel woefully un-learned.  Carl Sagan and Rachel Carson have helped, and field guides, and smart friends, and just spending a lot of time outside in the natural world paying attention.

So when I get to look at a sweat bee under a microscope and see her back glittering iridescent green, a tiny, magical, shimmering, bejeweled surface invisible to the naked eye, it's an exciting day for me.

At the Organic Growers School last weekend I had a chance to do just that - at a class called "Meet the Bees," taught by Dr. Jill Sidebottom.  I sat next to my new blogger friend Rachel in Dr. Sidebottom's bee class, and we totally nerded out.  

Inspecting bees under the microscope

Agapostemon sericeus (Sweat Bee), courtesy of Bee Tribes of the World (bugsrus, York University)
-- similar to the emerald green sweat bee I studied under the microscope in "Meet the Bees."

Dr. Jill has been studying bees and insects sometimes mistaken for bees in Christmas tree fields, thanks to NC Extension (yay, my tax dollars at work!). She showed us a lot of specimens and put us through the paces with bee, wasp, and fly identification (I have a lot to learn, suffice to say).

The class deepened my love of the bumbling Bombus genus (Bumblebees!).  Bombus species, I learned from Dr. Jill, are excellent pollinators because they are big, hairy, clumsy, and loud.  The volume of their buzzing as they perch on the edge or hang out inside of a flower actually helps shake loose pollen, which then collects on their hairy bodies.

 Bombus terrestris (a Bumblebee species) courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

And I have a new appreciation for Sweat Bees. I love that they are shockingly, excessively beautiful in a way that is invisible to the naked eye. Certain Sweat Bees are downright "blingy" in the words of our instructor - iridescent, sparkly, exquisite, and glamorous up close. Seeing some of the members of the genus Agapostemon (Metallic Green Bees) under the microscope, you would think you must be looking at some rare and exotic insect. But it's just a pesky, common, tiny Sweat Bee.  Having seen their beauty up close, I know I'll think twice about swatting them this summer.

Rachel inspecting bees with a hand lens

Dr. Jill also shared some great sources of gorgeous photos of birds, bugs, and other natural wonders -- here are a few that live in Facebook world:

• The Digital Museum of Natural History 
• Small Wonders
• Flower Visitors
• Encyclopedia of Life

Thanks to Dr. Jill Sidebottom for a great introduction to all of the different kinds of bees in this part of the world, and thanks to the Organic Growers School for the chance to play at science!

PS/update 3/13: Thanks to Christina for sending me another amazing wild bee photo collection: the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab's Flickr stream which includes hundreds of beautiful photos of bees. 

Swarming

After day three of the three busiest days in our farm's life (selling more than 2,500 plants at the biggest grower-to-gardener sale in the region, with an estimated turnout of 25,000 people) I was ready for a slow and easy evening with a glass of wine and my couch. Christopher and I had finally collapsed in a limp pile of plant-selling exhaustion and were preparing to lie still for as long as possible when Christopher looked out the window and said, "WHAT IS THAT?!?!?!"

A beautiful swarm of honeybees had settled in a small hawthorn tree in the garden, about three feet off the ground! (If you click on the image above, you can see a larger version in which you can see the individual bees.) From the depths of my foggy, exhausted brain, I somehow located a dusty memory of learning about swarms at Bee School. I remembered that it is a rare and special occasion when a swarm crosses your path, and I felt certain it was beyond my beginning beekeeping skills to capture it. But I knew you have to act fast with a swarm, or risk the bees moving on.

I called two super-knowledgable local beekeepers, Joan Chesick and Calvin Robinson. Joan wasn't home, and Calvin was in another state, but answered his phone and talked me through the process, encouraging me and telling me I could do it, giving me step-by-step instructions and the confidence to peel my tired self off the couch and get out there and give that swarm a home!

Thanks to Calvin's calm and clear instructions and my best efforts, the new bee colony is housed in an empty hive body I had. The hardest part was robbing a frame of drawn comb and honey from my existing hive to keep the swarm interested in their new home. Normally our bees are easygoing and don't seem to mind my intrusion, but this time they were riled up, and I got stung a few times through my clothes and even through my rubber gloves.

Dealing with the swarm was much easier, and really magical. Here's a poor-quality video Christopher shot on my phone - it was dusk, so it's a bit hard to see, but captures the process.

What a blessing from the universe on a busy Beltane. I am so grateful for the overflowing abundance - the overwhelming turnout at the plant sale, the hundreds of gardeners who bought plants from us and the few who even brought us gifts of special and rare plants, the other vendors who created a lively barter and gift economy at the sale, and the BEES who decided to make Red Wing Farm their home!

Signs of Spring

Witch Hazel blooming in the garden today

It was a beautiful sunny day today (high of 62!) and I spent a good chunk of the day in the garden before I had to shower and get into professional mode and drive in to town for a meeting.

It felt so much like Spring outside today. I had to keep reminding myself that there's likely plenty more cold in store for us. We still have two more

months before the average last frost date here, but I couldn't help it, I just let the Spring fever flow and planted some seeds.

Crocuses!

In my defense, I did plant the seeds in a cold frame and in another raised bed we have covered with a mini-hoophouse type structure, so it really is possible they will germinate, grow, and produce food. I planted several spinaches (Bordeaux, Space, Winter Bloomsdale), Ruby Streaks Mustard from the OGS Seed Swap, carrots (Oxheart, Scarlet Nantes, Napoli), radishes (French Breakfast, Easter Egg), a little lettuce (Pinetree Winter Mix), and beets (Early Wonder, Golden Detroit, Chioggia).

While I was getting the beds ready for planting, I encountered this little critter: one more reason I am glad we do not use a tiller. She was a little disoriented when I uncovered her with the fork I was using to work in manure, but she would have been dead meat with a rototiller.

You can see how she's barely visible in the soil. This was a moment when I felt really good about using hand tools, which are slow and gentle enough to allow life to go on in the garden beds despite our disruptions.

Another highlight of my time in the garden today was watching

the honeybees forage. I was kneeling in the herb garden to enjoy the crocuses up close when one of our honeybees landed on a tightly closed crocus bud and proceeded to open it up and get inside. It was really amazing to watch. She opened three buds this way, with

efficiency and enthusiasm. A good reminder, too, of the importance of early food sources in the garden for beneficial insects. This meal will help her and her hive sisters get

through the rest of the winter! (They're all sisters at the moment; the females kick the males out of the hive to freeze to death when resources

get scarce in the winter, and make more in the Spring.)

I was lucky to have my camera with me, and at some point remembered that it has a video feature. So here's a little photo

sequence of bee/crocus Spring

celebration, followed by my first HOME VIDEO posted to the Milkweed Diaries! It's just 14

seconds, but you can really get a sense of the crocus/bee lovefest in action....enjoy!

Checking on the Bees

We started our adventures in beekeeping this spring with two hives--about 40,000 bees!

We picked them up

from

Wild

Mountain Apiaries in Madison County, strapped the hives into the back of our pickup truck, and drove them home.

They've been doing their honeybee thing ever since.

We've been suspecting that the bees needed more room in their hives, so we checked on them today and it turned out that they had almost completely filled the frames in their brood box, so it was time for more space. We added supers to give each of our two hives a second story to keep expanding the colonies.

So here are some shots of the bee proceedings!

A big thank-you to Christopher's Uncle Larry and Aunt Betty for their generous support in sponsoring a hive, which helped us get started with beekeeping this year!

Bee School

We just finished Bee School , an annual intensive sponsored by our local bee club.  It was a veritable jamboree of all things apian.

This Spring we'll set up our first hives, facing southeast toward a beautiful red maple tree a short distance from our kitchen garden.  We won't be using any chemicals in the hives, and after the first year we plan to feed the bees only with their own honey (rather than the white sugar or corn syrup that are often used).  

Rather than attempt to summarize the many hours of bee-knowledge that we took in, here are some great links for bee information and inspiration:

Every Third Bite:  A really wonderful 9-minute documentary about bees, food, and life.  I love this little film for a bunch of reasons, but one thing that's great about it is that it showcases not just country bees, but urban and suburban beekeeping operations-- including the Chicago Honey Co-op and a New York City beekeeper who has hives on rooftops all over Manhattan.  

WNC Bees dot org:  The fabulous Buncombe County Bee Club's excellent portal to a wealth of bee-knowledge. 

Wild Mountain Apiaries:  We are buying "nucs" this Spring from this local supplier.  "Nuc" is short for "nuclear colony" -- a small honeybee colony created from a larger colony, and the easiest way to get started in beekeeping.

The Honeybee Project:  A locally-based initiative to raise awareness about the importance of honeybees.

Bee Guardian: Committed to working to help honeybees survive and thrive.

Long live the honeybees!

Bees & Other Beneficial Insects

Honeybees at work.....





After some inspiring bug and bee classes at this year's Organic Growers School (www.organicgrowersschool.org), CF and I are fired up to become beekeepers and more committed than ever to encouraging swarms of beneficial insects to make their homes on our land.

I took a great "honeybee stewardship" class from Diana Almond, where I learned a ton of facts, including these:

1. Honeybees and flowering plants co-evolved, starting about 100 million years ago.
2. Feral bees are virtually nonexistent now in North America.
3. The number of domestic honeybee colonies in the US declined from 5.9 million in the 1940s to 2.7 million in 1995.
4. 2/3 of the remaining 2.7 hives are "migratory" -- meaning that they are mounted on the backs of 18-wheeler trucks and driven around all over the country to pollinate various commercial crops. 1 million hives are needed for the California almond crop alone.
5. 1/3 of what we eat and drink, and some of what we wear, comes from plants needing pollination and 80% of that pollination is done by honeybees.
   
6. Non-insect pollinators (mammals and birds) are also becoming extinct or threatened at an alarming rate.

So, we were already planning to keep bees, and already knew that it was an important thing for people to be doing, but Diana's class was an affirmation and a kick in the seat of the pants to get started right away.

Here's an image that really shocked me - this photo was part of Diana's slideshow:

So all of the talk about Colony Collapse Disorder that I've heard just among non-bee people has never really been in the context of the reality that most of the bees in the US are riding around on the backs of trucks being "worked," in addition to being given antibiotics, exposed to pesticides, and etc. But apparently, most of the CCD problems with bees have been with hives that are on these big bee trucks.

We are looking forward to providing some good, stable, non-mobile homes to a bunch of bees, and learning all about organic beekeeping (we got a very cursory overview last weekend from Eric Brown of Milk & Honey Farm). Bee School here we come.

More inspiration was to be had in "Bug Church" - the intro to beneficial insects class taught by Patryk Battle and Richard McDonald (aka Dr. McBug).

Here's a maxim from Pat: "Maximize diversity. Hold your fire. Observe. Nature will do it all." Those directives were offered as the "20 second version" of the beneficial insects class, but they are pretty good words to live by.

Below: A "C7" ladybug on a yarrow flower....from Dr. McBug's extensive and very informative website.



More information on Beneficial Insects:

Meet the Beneficial Insects (Organic Gardening Mag article)

Beneficial Insects 101

Viva la buzz!