Would you like to spend the next year with Non-honey bees cartoons? I made a project of calendar for self-printing. If you want to have it, please contact me and I’ll send you a link to download a pdf.
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Close
Pathogen transmission between bee species is an important but still understudied field. Diseases and parasites have always been a normal part of bees’ lives but anthropogenic pressures affected these relationships. For example, undernourished bees are more prone to infections, so diminishing numbers and diversity of flowering plants may make pathogens more dangerous. Managed bees (mostly honeybees) can be a source of infection for wild species, increasing prevalence of native pathogens and being the source of new, alien ones.
A new paper by Louella Buydens and colleagues (thank you for sharing, Louella!) examined the relationships between pathogen prevalence and plant sharing and taxonomic distance between bee species. They show that more related species are more likely to share their pathogens. Another, very important conclusion is that when there are low numbers of flowers, bees are forced to meet on them more often and pathogens are more likely to spread. Planting flowering plants (native ones are the best!) can reduce infections in bees’ population, both because it reduces the frequency of their interactions and makes bees better nourished.
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Monotonous
Today, I have a quick sketch about Lasioglossum for you. On an identification course for Halictidae, I learned that Michener described this very species-rich genus as “morphologically monotonous”. I can tell you that identifying them can be a nightmare, but at the same time they are really cute and have very interesting life histories. There is quite a lot of variation in their level of sociality (ranging from solitary to eusocial species). Among the species with most advanced sociality is Lasioglossum marginatum – they live in perennial colonies that produce new queens and males after several years of development.
Warm greetings to everybody attending the Halictidae course with me!
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Out of season
Here in Poland, it is season for out-of season bees now. I have already seen a few observations of spring bees such as the Ashy mining bee, Andrena cineraria. They definitely shouldn’t be on the wing in the autumn.
Are out-of season bees something normal, or has the phenomenon been intensified by the climate change? It’s definitely worth further study, so if you see a bee that shouldn’t be out at this time of year – please record the observation, e.g. on iNaturalist, or on your local nature observation platform.
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Late for the party
The season for pollinators is slowly coming to an end in many places. There are fewer and fewer bees, butterflies and hoverflies around… but some species thrive in autumn. If you have a blooming ivy in your neighbourhood, take a look at the pollinators visiting it. Maybe you’ll see the ivy bee (Colletes hederae) or the ivy longhorn hoverfly (Callicera spinolae)? They are examples of pollinators with autumn peak of activity.
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Climate denialist
I’m busy identifying bees collected during my recent field trip. I just found a male Bombus semenoviellus among them. It’s an interesting species – one of a few European species colonizing recently new areas, and at the same time being at the highest risk of suffering under climate change in the future. Do these two things contradict each other? Not really. In the future, B. semenoviellus will be losing the climatically suitable areas faster than gaining it in other places.
If you feel too optimistic today, feel free to check out the atlas of climatic risk for European bumblebees. Spoiler: climate change is very bad news for most of them.
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Gift
Today’s cartoon was inspired by a recent paper I co-authored. Its main character is a rare Megachile species. I had a pleasure to watch females carrying leaf pieces. Most of Megachile species in my region cut circular leaf fragments and use them to line their nests (hence their common name – leafcutter bees). If you see a plant with numerous regular holes along the leaf edges, you can tell a Megachile female was there. I remember seeing a post on social media where a lady complained that the bees cut almost all leaves of her favourite rose. I know quite a few people who would happily allow the bees take all the plants from their garden. Usually, however, leafcutter bees don’t cause any obvious damage, and live in our gardens unnoticed by most.
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Hoverfly mimic
Mimicry is a phenomenon in which one species becomes, in the course of evolution, similar to another. One of the classical examples are bumblebee-mimic or wasp-mimic hoverflies. But how do we know that a hoverfly mimics a bee or wasp, and not the other way around?
The type of mimicry we see in hoverflies evolved to give protection against predators. The distinctive appearance says: don’t eat me, I can hurt you. The weapon of bees and wasps is their stinger. Hoverflies are harmless, and they get protection from being confused with stinging insects by predators. Therefore, bees and wasps are models, and hoverflies are mimics, not the other way around.
This post was created in collaboration with The Pollinator Academy, a great resource of knowledge about taxonomy of European bees, hoverflies and butterflies.
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Bee tags
Some phenomena can be studied only when you can recognize individuals of the same species. For example, red mason bees often usurp each other’s nests. If you can’t tell them apart, you have little chance of knowing that the bee provisioning a nest is not the same as yesterday. Have you ever wondered how scientists tell one bee from another in their experiments?
A frequently used method is gluing tiny plastic tags on the bees’ thoraxes. The combination of colour and number is unique for every individual in the studied population. I used tags on the red mason bees (Osmia bicornis) during my PhD studies, and here you can see an example of ongoing study on the orchard mason bee (Osmia cornuta) conducted by Grupo de Investigación en Ecología de Insectos y de la Polinización, CREAF. There is also a photo of a real tagged bee!
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Bullies
Last week, I was observing bees in a garden. Among other plants, there were two flowers, looking more or less the same to me. One was visited by quite many bees, and the other was abandoned. After a moment, I saw a male bee zooming around it. Maybe it was a coincidence, but males of some bee species are well known for their aggressive defence of their territory. Maybe the other bees just didn’t want trouble.
