Sunday was warm, highs in the 60s (F). The Crocus were open. And the honeybees were swarming over them.
Honeybee on Crocus tommasinanus
There are at least five (5) honeybees in this photo. Can you find them all?
This is the third year for these little Crocus tommasinianus. They’ve grown into this small grove from just a handful of corms. Here’s how they looked in March 2007:
The Eranthis in the above photo have not persisted. You can see how the Crocus have thrived.
Colletes thoracicus (Colletidae), Cellophane Bee
Circus of the Spineless #33 (COTS 33) is up on Seeds Aside.
I submitted my post and photographs of Cellophane Bees from last weekend. This is only my second contribution to COTS. My first was two years ago, in COTS #10.
I thought of sending in my post about Magicicada, but since I haven’t actually encountered any, it seemed premature.
The next edition, COTS #34, will be posted at Gossamer Tapestry. Send your submissions to Doug: dtaron(at)gmail.com before June, 29.
Colletes thoracicus (Colletidae), Cellophane Bees, May
Coleomegilla usurps Coccinella as New York State Insect, June 23, 2006
Circus of the Spineless #33, Seeds Aside
Circus of the Spineless
Update 2009.05.09: Cellophane Bees Return
Update 2008.05.28: Many thanks to John Ascher for the id!
While spending most of the weekend gardening, I discovered that the garden is home to a small colony of mining cellophane bees. At first I thought they Andrenidae, mining bees, based on photos and this description on BugGuide.Net:
Many small, ground-nesting bees observed in areas of sandy soil are members of the family, Andrenidae. Characteristics of this family (of which there are approximately 3000 species) are: Small size, 20 mm, (or smaller) brown to black in color, and nesting in a burrow in areas of sparse vegetation, old meadows, dry road beds, sandy paths. Although the nests are built in close proximity of one another, the bees are solitary (each female capable of constructing a nest and reproducing). Many species are active in March and April when they collect pollen and nectar from early spring blooming flowers. The female bee digs a hole 2-3 inches deep excavating the soil and leaving a pile on the surface. She then digs a side tunnel that ends in a chamber (there are about 8 chambers per burrow). Each chamber is then filled with a small ball of pollen and nectar. An egg is laid on the top of each pollen ball and the female seals each brood chamber. The emerging larval bees feed on the pollen/nectar ball until they pupate.
– Family Andrenidae – Mining Bees, BugGuide.Net
I contacted Kevin Matteson, contact person for the Bee Watchers 2008 project here in NYC. I wasn’t able to attend any of their orientation session last week, so I forwarded him a link to this post. He in turn forwarded the link to his “colleague at the museum.” Thus turned out to be John Ascher, a BugGuide contributing editor, and all-around big bee guy, who identified the species in the first comment below. Considering I don’t have a Ph.D. in Entomology, I don’t feel so bad.
[Colletes] are virtually indistinguishable from some of the Andrenidae mining bees. Colletes are honey bee size, and have dramatic black and white banding on the abdomen. Some andrenids have similar markings, but are usually slightly smaller. Colletes tend to nest in dense aggregations, while andrenids are not usually as populous.
– Genus Colletes – Cellophane Bees, BugGuide.Net
I noticed the first entrance mound a couple of weeks ago, shortly after I put up the bat house. I saw a discoloration on the ground directly below the bat house, and thought it might be guano. On closer inspection, I thought it was an anthill.
This weekend, I was doing a lot of work near that corner of the house, and the presence of bees was more obvious, especially when I started digging up and dividing perennials (Hemerocallis and Hosta) from a bed I was preparing for a new sunny native plant border.
I also noticed that the bees were entering and leaving what I had taken to be ant hills. Here’s the area where they’re all nesting. There are six entrance holes visible in this photo. There are a couple more hidden beneath leaves. The area is less than a square foot.
Here’s a closer view of the three entrances to the left. Zoom in and check out the leftmost one. There’s a little bee in there checking me out.
When I saw all this activity around numerous holes, I thought I might have a hive. Since they’re adjacent to the house, I was worried that they might move in. Before I did anything with them, I wanted to identify them to find out what they were.
To photograph this individual, I captured it in a plastic jug and placed it in the refrigerator for a few hours. When I retrieved it, it was inert, and I first feared I had killed it. When I took it into the backyard, where temperatures were still in the 70s, thankfully it slowly revived. I placed it on a piece of graph paper from my notebook for scale. The squares are 1/4″.
Here are two more views of the same individual. When I was done, I returned it back to the nesting area. Not realizing these are solitary bees, I thought it would return to the hive. It flew off, instead. I hope it returns and is able to find its own nest, again.
I want to take some more shots. I think I can get a shot of the wing venation without harming the individual. I’ll be more careful to not keep the subject away from its nest for so long next time. Maybe only a half-hour of chilling is all I would need to get my shots.
I’m not satisfied with the depth of field (DOF) in any of these shots. My macro lens has a focal length of 105mm (digital, around 150mm equivalent 35mm), which compresses DOF. Using the flash helped a lot. A tripod would be better. I’ll try some different options on my next attempts.
Colletes thoracicus, Discover Life
Bee Watchers 2008
Family Andrenidae – Mining Bees, BugGuide.Net
NASA scientist Wayne Esaias believes that a beehive’s seasonal cycle of weight gain and loss is a sensitive indicator of the impact of climate change on flowering plants. A hobbyist beekeeper, he has found signals of climate change in his records of the weight of his beehives, and wants to enlist other beekeepers to contribute their observations as well:
The 25-year NASA veteran has made a career studying patterns of plant growth in the world’s oceans and how they relate to climate and ecosystem change, first from ships, then from aircraft, and finally from satellites. But for the past year, he’s been preoccupied with his bee hives, which started as a family project around 1990 when his son was in the Boy Scouts. According to his honeybees, big changes are underway in Maryland forests. The most important event in the life of flowering plants and their pollinators—flowering itself—is happening much earlier in the year than it used to. – Buzzing About Climate Change
[The] 1-to-5-kilometer-radius area in which a hive’s worker bees forage is the same spatial scale that many ecological and climate models use to predict ecosystems’ responses to climate change. It also matches the spatial scale of satellite images of vegetation collected by NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. This similarity of scale means that all these ways of studying ecosystems could be integrated into a more sophisticated picture of how plant and animal communities will respond to climate change than any one method alone could provide. Esaias is particularly interested in comparing the hive data to satellite-based maps of vegetation “greenness,” a scale that remote-sensing scientists commonly use to map the health and density of Earth’s vegetation. Scientists have been making these types of maps for decades, and they have used them to document how warming temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are causing vegetation to green up earlier in the spring than it did in the 1980s. Such maps are an excellent general indicator of seasonal changes in vegetation, says Esaias, but by themselves, they won’t tell you something as tangible as when plants are flowering. – Will Plants and Pollinators Get Out of Sync?
About half of the approximately 6 million honeybee colonies in the United States are kept by individual or family-scale beekeepers. Esaias’ vision is to develop a how-to guide, an automatic data recorder, and the computer and networking resources at Goddard Space Flight Center that would be needed to collect and preserve the data. Ideally, a hive data recorder would be hooked up to the Internet so that volunteers’ hive weights could appear on a Website hosted at Goddard. His goal is to get the cost per kit below $200 and then to get NASA funding to outfit a network of volunteers — HoneybeeNet — and analyze their data. “Ultimately, what we’d like to have is thousands of these across the country. Even if we can get the cost down to $200 a piece, that is still a lot of money to ask for until you have a test data set that proves it is valuable,” admits Esaias. He’s been working with local bee clubs in Maryland, rounding up some 20 volunteers who already have or are willing to purchase their own scales. He hopes that the data collected during the 2007 spring-summer season will be a prototype that will convince NASA to fund a pilot project.
Links: HoneybeeNetColony Collapse Disorder (CCD)Heat Island Effect