Take care of what you love — and love bees

I gave a talk last weekend on pollinators — PowerPoint with a lot of photos.

Honey bees get a lot of attention, but my focus was on our unsung native bees, small and quick and easy to miss as they go about their work.

When you sit down to your Thanksgiving meal, be thankful for pollinators for just about everything on your plate.

Bees, mostly. They are the true pollinator queens.

Over millions of years, bees and plants have evolved and diversified together for great mutual benefit — and pollination efficiency. Each needs the other. It’s a mutual intimacy that inspires, and I’m eager to pass the stories of bees and blossoms along to help people fall in love with bees.

We take care of what we love.

After birds, I fell in love with butterflies and planned our flower gardens for them.

Then came bumble bees, visiting those flowers, and the next love affair. I’ve written about bumble bees here. They are pollinators without equal, but preparing for Saturday’s talk I learned about our many other native bees.

Over 200 species in New Hampshire.

It’s been a hard week, emotionally, since the election. Immersion in the world of bees and blossoms has helped.

Photos can communicate intimacy, and I included one of a mason bee dusted with golden pollen grains from head to toe. Native bees are messy. That’s one reason they are such good transporters of pollen, flower to flower. They buzz right into a blossom, making pollen fly. Their hairs (bees are very hairy) are branched not smooth, all the better to trap pollen.

I showed that photo next to one of a tidy honey bee, not the least bit dusted.

That’s one reason why native bees are great pollinators. They’re messy as they go flower to flower, inadvertently delivering male pollen to female receptor as they go.

They got the job done long before European explorers brought European honeybees to the New World.

Another photo showed a leafcutter bee transporting a perfectly round, bright green cutout from a leaf, about the size of a dime. Leafcutter bee species separate each brood cell with leaves while mason bee species separate their cells with mud.

If you see leaves with tidy round cutouts, you’ll know who’s been at work: an important pollinator.

Orchardists are learning to place bunches of nesting tubes for leafcutter and mason bees near their fruit trees.

As I researched native bees on the Internet, links to “bug” exterminators often popped up with warnings about bee stings.

Last week we voted to send leaders to the White House and Congress who would click on that link. They don’t know the intimate stories.

Exterminators; insecticides for crops; herbicides to kill the weeds — milkweed included. That’s what they know.

It makes me cry.

I was among the many who cheered in 2014 when President Obama sent a directive to all federal agencies to assess their work in the context of pollinator health.

Steps included establishing the public-private Pollinator Partnership; setting best management practices to restore or create pollinator habitat; surveys of pollinator populations past and present to determine where attention is most needed.

Policies were put in place and progress reports issued.

Honeybees and monarch butterflies were cited prominently in the directive, as we all know about their plight, but native bees were mentioned, too.

It was a sophisticated analysis of threats and responses needed.

Threats cited include climate change. What happens if apple trees bloom before orchard bees emerge to pollinate them? Not good for the trees; not good for the bees.

What will happen to this initiative, the task force formed along with funding, now that climate-change deniers are in charge What will happen to the Environmental Protection Agency’s halt to new uses for a systemic insecticide commonly applied to crops and greenhouse plants? “Systemic” means it stays with the plant. It’s a neurotoxin that can’t tell the difference between plant “pest” and plant pollinator.

They’re commonly called “neonics,” shorthand for neonicitinoids. California vineyards, corn, cotton and soy crops—most use neonics. Monadnock Community Hospital applies it to hospital lawns for “grub” control.

We don’t know any better, and the EPA is there to help us know better—if the politicians let it. Neonics have been banned in some countries.

The pesticide was developed by Bayer CropScience. Bayer and Monsanto hope to merge. How many lobbyists are working to achieve that merger? Again, these days, it makes me cry.

Here’s a story I told about squash bees, species that are well named. They’ve evolved to specialize on cucurbits—watermelons, gourds, squash.

Accordingly, they emerge from their pupae as adults when cucurbits bloom.

The females go to work early in the day as squash blossoms open at dawn. They collect pollen and nectar to take back to their nests before the blossoms fade.

Guess where the males sleep. Yes, in the blossoms. What better place to meet a female, and to mate.

I showed pictures of all three: a female, her impressively long tongue about to extract nectar; sleeping males curled within the blossom; and a mating pair.

For efficiency, females nest near the host plants so they don’t lose time commuting. Most native bees are ground nesters that require bare, well-drained soil.

That’s another priority of Obama’s pollinator initiative: nesting habitat.

I close with a wish, that everyone view a video about a bumble bee recently proposed for endangered species status. Several bumble bee species are disappearing and it’s good news that attention finally is being paid.

It’s called “A Ghost in the Making: Searching for the Rusty-patched Bumble Bee,” found at www.rustypatched.com.

It just might make you fall in love. It’s what the world needs now.

Backyard Birder by Francie Von Mertens appears every other week in the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript.