Another story about this happy return, which I previously noted last July. Choice tidbit: 'Farmers value bumblebees because they use their tiny jaws to bite and shake each flower, a distinctive and efficient pollen-dislodging practice known as "buzz pollination." Humans can mimic buzz pollination with various gadgets, including electric toothbrushes ... '

Native bee species spotted for first time since ’90s

Funny thing is I don't remember ever seeing white-butted bumblebees, which this article says "were once among the most common bumblebees in the Western United States." Just goes to show how unobservant I've been all these years. To my eyes bumblebees were always just black and yellow. Is that because that's how they were drawn, so I saw what I was expected to see?

Honeybees in a poppy

[Previously posted to Facebook, but this is cropped differently.]

The Seattle Times ran an article yesterday about wild lupine and the part it plays in the local ecology. Amongst other things lupine was the first thing to spring up in the Mt St Helens pumice. The thing that caught my eye, however, was that lupine has evolved to react to the native bumblebee: "The blossoms include an ingenious spring-loaded mechanism, triggered when the bee's weight opens the flower. That trips a dusting of saffron-colored pollen popped loose from 15 tiny anthers."

I planted a lupine in my bee-friendly garden this year, but since it's apparently a June bloomer, I guess it won't flower until next year, because it certainly isn't blooming right now. I wish I had planted more than one now, but there's time enough for that. The bee-friendly garden is nothing if not a long-term project and process of self-education.

Disease dooming native bumblebees

They work in the cold when honeybees are still snug in their hives, and cloudy days don't stop them either.

Bumblebees are workhorse pollinators, depended on to pollinate everything from cranberries and blueberries to hothouse tomatoes.

But native bumblebees are in trouble, victims of diseases some scientists say are spread by commercial bumblebees shipped around North America to pollinate crops.

While much attention has been given to the plight of European honeybees, dying in droves in so-called colony collapse disorder, the sharp decline of some species of native bumblebees has been largely overlooked.

So much for my observation that local bumblebee populations have actually increased in the wake of the die-off of honeybees. Then again, it could be that native bumblebees are more threatened in agricultural areas where the commercial bees are more likely to be introduced. It could be that in non-agricultural urban areas like my neighborhood they're doing fine.

So we're probably all familiar with the idea of micro-climates, where my east-facing hillside near the lake may have an appreciably different climate from your your south-facing slope a half mile inland from the lake. Well, what about micro-ecologies? As I've written before, I haven't seen more than a stray pair of honeybees around my house in a number of years. We used to get them in the raspberries every year, but no longer. It's mostly just bumblebees now. I've attributed their disappearance to the two big die-offs of honeybees in the past decade. However, I just now spotted a flowering hedge at 42nd and 11th here in the U District that was full of honeybees. Now I'm wondering whether there was a hive in the old cherry tree across the alley from us, and whether the honeybees disappeared when the cherry tree was cut down to make way for townhouses.

So now I'm curious whether any Seattlites reading this have seen honeybees in their neighborhoods. (I know that akirlu and libertango see them at their place in Kent.)

The Economist says that the honeybees are recovering their numbers, at least in California. The theory put forth here is that Colony Collapse Disorder was the result of malnutrition that weakened their immune systems.

So I have a head cold, huzzah. Stayed home the last two days while it got worse, but I think it's as bad as it's going to get now. (Knock would.) Yesterday as I was heating some soup, I went out and looked at the bees in the ceanothus again. I noticed some bees that had a distinctive orangish section in the abdomen, and googling makes me think they might be red-tailed bumblebees. I looked at the bees in the raspberries too, and finally saw an orchard mason bee, which I'm sure in the past I would have thought was a fly. Would I have wondered why a fly was crawling around so purposefully on a flower? And I'm now wondering whether the other very hairy bees I'm seeing in the ceanothus are actually bumblebees of various types, because they're so much bigger than the orchard mason bee. As you can see in the red-tailed bumblebee, there can be a lot of variation in coloration of bumblebees.

This morning I was thinking about Marija Gimbutas' books about the neolithic great goddess. Her theories may well be bogus, but she at least is looking at primary evidence, such as the decorations on pottery. I seem to recall that she wrote about bee imagery and bee-headed goddesses. Symbols of reproduction, no doubt. Makes me wonder how far back bee-keeping goes. I suppose that as soon as agriculture became a mainstay of food-production, bees became important too. Were they important to humans before agriculture, just as a symbol of natural fecundity?

Update: A kindly lurker (my housemate) has pointed me toward a page that led to a page at Evergreen State about local bumblebees with the following enlightening comment: "Bombus are notorious for having considerable variation in coloring within a species. One reason for this is a single species may be involved in different mimicry systems in different parts of the species' range (see mimicry). This variation makes taxonomy difficult. It is often hard to define a species, and even harder to define subspecies. A common method is to look for discrete forms in sympatry (occurring in the same area), this reveals two distinct species. The variation in coloring within a species is more extreme with male Bombus than females. To identify males, it is usually necessary to dissect the genitalia."

Um, ouch? I'd say that this makes taxonomy not just difficult, but torture!

The raspberries have just started to blossom, and I saw my first bee of the year. I still don't know what kind they are. This one was pretty much as I remembered the bees that have shown up the past couple of years since the local wild honey bees apparently died off. It was a little bit bigger than a honey bee, quite hairy, with bands or areas of black and a pale, buttery yellow. It may be a mason bee, but it's not the Orchard Mason Bee, which seems to be all black with a metallic green or blue sheen, from the pictures I've seen. Is this some kind of bumblebee instead? I guess I did see a bumblebee earlier this year -- not in my garden -- that was what I think of as the traditional kind, with lots of black and a few bands of bright yellow.

This hornfaced bee is close in coloration and hairiness to the bee I saw in the raspberries. I guess the hornfaced bee is another type of mason bee, so maybe that's it. I'll have to look for the horns next time.

Hm, just stumbled upon this page about the type of garden plants that attract mason bees. Raspberries are on the list. "There are about 3,500 species of native bees in the USA," it says. Good luck identifying the species in your garden, it might as well say.