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Without honey bees, where would humans be?

Published 6:00am Saturday, September 6, 2008

We all know that the honey bee is in decline, but what about the bumble bee? Here are a few facts about our gentle, slow and clumsy native bee.

She is the most important pollinator of all. There are about 50 species of bumble bees known in North America. Most are solitary nesters, meaning they create and take care of their own nest without help from other bees.

Their nests are about the size of a half a grapefruit, and are underground in well drained soil. They do not swarm. New queens hibernate alone and emerge in the spring to form new colonies.

Like butterflies, they have a four stage life: eggs, larva, pupa and adult. The first three stages are in the nest. When they pupate, they emerge as full grown worker bees, all female.

The queen produces just enough honey to feed her young. This is why we need honey bees, too. She will lay eggs from late spring to summer until the nest has reached the right size for that species.

Then she will lay next season’s queens and drones. All female bumble bees come from fertilized eggs, drones from male unfertilized eggs.

The only job the drone has is to mate with the newly born queen bees. The drones hatch in midsummer and have no stingers.

Bumble bees are among the few known insects that can control their body temperature. That is why they can work in lower temps than other bees or insects. During the first hard frost, the old queen and all her workers die. Only the newly mated queens live to hibernate.

Without our native bees, all flowers, apples, blueberries, strawberries, almonds, melons, peaches, pumpkins and chocolate would be in trouble as their flowers depend on insect pollination.

Experts think the shortage of all kinds of bees may be because of spread of pests and diseases by the commercial bee industry. Or urban development, heavy pesticide use (home gardeners are the worst culprits here), loss of native flowering plants, and a changing climate.

So, what can the home gardener do to help our bumble bees? First and foremost, use pesticides responsibly. When you see a bug in the garden, don’t automatically grab the spray. Decide what the bug is, good or bad, and if bad, spray at night or when the flowers are not in bloom. Pollinators are not in the garden then.

Plant yellow or blue, sweet-smelling flowers. Here are a few target flowers: red columbine, black snakeroot, purple cornflower, sunflowers, Hyssop, Liatris, Bee balm, Salvia, Sedum and goldenrod for perennials. (There is a new small goldenrod out now.) Cosmos and zinnias are good annuals and basswood trees are loved by bees.

Take care of our bees and they will keep feeding us. After all, what would the world be without chocolate? Horrible thought.

This information from an article by Tricia Barron, Plant Health Care

Technician, from northern Illinois.