The field season doesn’t leave me much time to draw but I didn’t want to skip a Monday cartoon, so a quick drawing about bees’ violent mating practices. When you look at males trying to mate with a female, you can often see she is not happy and trying to throw him off her back. In human standards it looks like absolutely unacceptable behaviour… but think about ducks where males are even more aggressive in forcing copulation. A female can be injured or drowned in the process!
Remember not to apply ethical norms of humans to animals, or vice versa š
Do you know those silly quizzes in social media? I made one for you, and it’s about dating. Let me know if you need more illustrations in this series.
Let’s go:
Do you know these cute little fluffy bees who mercilessly bully all other bees coming into their territory? The European wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum) males are larger that females and have sharp mandibles and spines on the abdomen – all that helps them fight. Nobody stays on their territory for long – except for the females of their own species.
When a female of the ivy bee (Colletes hederae) comes out of her natal nest, she is immediately surrounded by the crowd of males ready to mate. In all this chaos, she somehow manages to mate with only one male. In solitary bees, mating balls are a more common phenomenon, as are females mating only once in a lifetime. I have three other cartoons about mating balls: here, here and here.
In bees, males don’t actively help in brood care – with some notable exceptions. Male of Ceratina nigrolabiata guards nest entrance in order to keep parasites off when the female is away collecting pollen. Cute, isn’t it? I had a cartoon about these bees here.
And the last are honeybees making a guest appearance on the Non-honey bees blog. I hope nobody identifies with them in their love life! It’s really, really creepy. Honeybee queen mates multiple times. Drones, on the other hand, die during mating – their genitalia explode and detach from their body, part of them remaining attached to the queen’s abdomen.
The common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) is well known for its distinctive call, and for the fact that females don’t build their own nests but lay eggs in the nests of other bird species. Since the 17th century, little figurines of cuckoos have been placed in a special type of clock. At every full hour the bird pops out of a cuckoo clock, and the number of its calls indicates the time.
What does this have to do with bees? There is a group of species whose reproductive strategy is almost exactly the same. They are called parasitic bees or cuckoo bees. In most species, the female sneaks into the nest of her host (another bee species) and lays her eggs there. Some species, like cuckoo bumblebees, invade a colony of the host and replace the queen in her function. About 25% of bee species in Poland are cuckoos, and I’m very fond of them. They have cool strategies that help them to get into the host’s nest and hide their eggs, and often don’t resemble a popular image of a bee at all. In the cartoon you see a Nomada. Members of this genus have little hair and vivid colours, and resemble wasps.
This cartoon was inspired by a conversation with a friend who prefers to stay anonymous (thank you! š ).
This post was published on Instagram in cooperation with The Pollinator Academy. Iām happy to be involved in this initiative. If you are interested to learn about European pollinator species, in particular bees, hoverflies and butterflies, and recognizing them, check out the PA website!
As on a black-and-white cartoon it may be hard to tell the species, I’ll tell you that it’s Colletes cunicularius – a spring solitary bee common in Europe, and Sphecodes albilabris – its cuckoo.
Many species of cuckoo bees sneak into the host’s nest when it’s open, to lay their eggs inside. If they encounter their host, it may pay no attention to the intruder (I had a cartoon about it) or a fight may start. Sphecodes are quite aggressive and they often kill the host.
The Grey-backed Mining Bee (Andrena vaga) is one of signs of spring in Europe. It is a pollen specialist (oligolectic) species, and the females collect pollen only from willows (Salix). I didn’t notice that before but the fluffy fur on their thorax is strikingly similar in colour and texture to the hairy willow catkins before they become covered in yellow stamens.
Spam is, basically, an unwanted mail appearing in large numbers, right? Wild bees might feel like being spammed by commercially sold bees, then.
Recently an important opinion paper by MacIvor and Irvin was published. The authors draw attention to the problem appearing when bee solitary bee cocoons are sold on a large scale. Why buy bee cocoons at all? They don’t make honey or wax but are great pollinators, and can be used in commercial orchards for that purpose. They are also often are reared as a hobby, or are bought by people who think that breeding bees is a way of helping them (actually, it is not).
There is too little oversight of the sale of bee cocoons. They can be shipped for large distances, even to the places where the sold bees aren’t a native species. At their destination, they are released into the environment and can interact freely with local species, competing and sharing pathogens and parasites with them. Even if they are shipped to the areas where they are a native species, they may belong to other subspecies or lineage. During interbreeding with wild conspecifics, the gene pools are mixed and that also can have negative consequences for the local populations.
The authors call for legal regulations which would allow to prevent large-distance mailing of wild bees. For now, everybody can help to make the situation better – just don’t buy bee cocoons from distant places, check what species you’re buying and if it’s native, and above all, don’t buy bees at all unless you really need to.
Just a few weeks ago a new edition of the Red List of Bees of Europe was published by IUCN. I was one of the co-authors. It replaces the Red List published in 2014. In this edition, more species could be moved from the DD (data deficient) category, which is assigned when we don’t have enough information to say anything about their status, to the more informative categories: LC (least concern), NT (near threatened), VU (vulnerable), EN (endangered), or CR (critically endangered).
Today I have a spring drawing for you. This is the common carder bumblebee (Bombus pascuorum), one of the most numerous bumblebees in the area where I live. It is by no means the easiest to identify, though. Its colouration is very variable and some colour forms are strikingly similar to other bumblebee species.
Bumblebees are said to have innate preference for blue colour. It means that a bumblebee that has never seen flowers before will be more attracted to blue ones. I don’t know how universal it is – I found research done only on a few species. What is interesting, there is some degree of individual variation in colour preference – not all bumblebees and all colonies of the same species like exactly the same colour.
The innate preference can be quickly modified after a young bumblebee starts foraging, and learns which flowers are most rewarding in her environment. Therefore, we can see bumblebees foraging on all colours of flowers (even on red ones – see my previous post!)
Today is the International Women’s Day. Best wishes to all female readers of my blog! It’s a good opportunity to mention that the world of bees is ruled by females. And no, I’m not referring to the queens of social bee colonies. In fact, they are not as powerful as their title suggests.
What I mean is that the vast majority of tasks is done by females, without any assistance from the opposite sex. Females collect food for their offspring, build nests and (in some species) actively protect them from predators and parasites. In social species, all the workers are female and they care for their siblings and the queen. Most (but not all) of the bees you see on the flowers on a warm summer’s day are likely to be females.
And what do the males do in the world of bees? Their role is also very important, though much smaller. But that’s a topic for another post š
As you surely remember, there are over 20 000 bee species described by scientists so far. No wonder that among so many species, there is also a substantial diversity of nesting strategies. Most species nest in the soil, a smaller proportion chooses various cavities above ground, some make constructions from mud or resin. You can find a bee nest in a snail shell, plant gall or a termite mound.
The level of specialisation also differs between species – some bees are very choosy when it comes to nesting, others can be more flexible. The most creative species I know is the red mason bee (Osmia bicornis) – a common European species, which is often bred for pollination purposes. Females nest in pre-existing long and narrow cavities of about 4-8 mm in diameter – typically, hollow plant straws or holes in wood made by other insects. However, some females can nest in keyholes, nail holes, cracks in window frames, rolled-up carpets and a many other man-made cavities of various sizes. Once I saw a photo of a nest made in a bicycle wheel.
This post was published on Instagram in cooperation with The Pollinator Academy. Iām happy to be involved in this initiative. If you are interested to learn about European pollinator species, in particular bees, hoverflies and butterflies, and recognizing them, check out the PA website!
Have you heard that bees can’t see the red color? I guess so. Maybe you even read that in some of my posts. Recently, I stumbled upon two papers, one by Chittka and Waser, published in 1997, and a bit more recent one, by Martinez-Harms et al. (2009). And these papers, especially the first one, have shown me that the issue of bee color vision isn’t so black and white (pun intended). Let me explain it a bit below, but I strongly recommend you reading the original papers.
Bees are trichromats, as we are, which means that they have three types of receptors in their eyes, each type sensitive to different light wavelengths. We can see the wavelengths from, basically, violet to red, whereas bees can also see UV, and they are less sensitive to the red part of the spectrum. However, they are not completely blind to red: one of the receptor types is sensitive to wavelengths which humans could well describe as red color. So, a monochromatic red object will not be black to bee.
But then, although bees can see the red light, they seem not to be able to see red as fully distinct color. If you show them monochromatic green, yellow, orange or red light, the bees will perceive them as the same or very similar hues, but they will differ in their brightness. As Chittka and Waser put it, “for example, a monochromatic red light of strong intensity will generate the same sensation as a green light of moderate intensity”. So, you can trick a bee into believing there is no color difference between the two stimuli if you cleverly choose wavelengths and light intensities for them.
But the story doesn’t end here! In real life, bees rarely have to do with monochromatic objects. What an eye perceives as a given color, is usually a mix of different wavelengths. Therefore, it is much less likely that a red flower will so perfectly match a green background that it will be invisible to bees. If it reflects light of some shorter wavelengths in addition to the red ones, it’s easy – a bee can distinguish its colors well. If it reflects only red light, however, she will rely on brightness contrast, which will be a bit more demanding but still possible. It was observed that bees foraging on “truly red” flowers take more time flying between distant inflorescences than between flowers of other colors, probably because locating them is more challenging.
And regarding the cartoon, the hummingbirds are quite justified in speaking about color-blindness of the bumblebee, as their color vision is amazing, better than bees’ and ours. The bumblebee in the cartoon is Bombus dahlbomii, the rare South American species which is known for its love of red flowers.
You love bees and want to do something for them? Dont be ‘that guy’. Don’t buy hives. Increasing the domesticated honeybee population doesn’t do any good for bees. In fact, it can harm both the wild species and honeybees.
Non-honey bees 