NC State Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteers of Buncombe County

Beneficial Insects

We are ALL keepers of the bees.

 

Honeybee skepThe first settlers who brought honey bee hives in woven skeps to the colonies from Europe in the early 1600s could never have imagined today’s commercial beekeeping industry. Now more than a million hives crisscross the country on flatbed semis, providing essential pollination services so that the resulting produce (not unlike the bees) can be shipped to consumers from coast to coast.

Today, honey bees are considered “livestock”, and most are managed intensively by commercial, migratory beekeepers who work to keep up with the demand of equally intensive, industrial agriculture. The world’s largest pollination event is in California each February to March where more than 1,600,000 hives pollinate the state’s 800,000 + acres of almonds.

Nor would the settlers have predicted that bees, both managed honeybees and the 4000 species of native bees, would be unable to find enough food in a vast country filled with such rich and abundant flora.

While we cannot turn back the clock, we can help by taking important action. To repeat Dr. Marla Spivak’s urgent plea, grow more flowers, including vines, ground covers, perennials, annuals, shrubs and trees. Plant mostly natives since they thrive where they evolved, and support the pollinators with whom they co-evolved. Cultivate without pesticides.

I recommend you plant flowers everywhere you can imagine – containers on apartment decks, in landscapes where you work, live, worship, play, go to school, and shop. Plant flowers along roadsides and in empty lots.

If you cannot or do not want to plant flowers, here are some other things you can do:
• Understand where and how your food is produced. From the seeds that are planted in California’s Central Valley or in Peru or China to the produce at your grocery store, learn what happens along the way. Consider purchasing locally produced food that is grown with more sustainable practices. Better yet, grow at least some of your own food. Join or start a community garden.
• Support you local beekeeper and buy real, natural, local honey. Like vintage wine, local honey is a unique reflection of a specific place in time. Each of my honey harvests is a taste ‘picture’ of the flowers that bloomed during that season within just a mile or two of our farm. I even label it: “A Taste of Summer 2015”, or “Appalachian Spring 2014”. The French use a hard-to-translate word to describe this utterly unique characteristic, “terroir”.
• Reduce the size of your lawn. This bears repeating from an earlier post. Author of the groundbreaking, prophetic book, “Bringing Nature Home”, Doug Tallamy urges all of us, along with the landscaping industry, to upend the standard use of the lawn as the default element, with plants added to it. Instead, put a variety of elements into the yard (places to retreat, to sun, to have shade, to play, to picnic, to grow food and cut flowers) and let the lawn be the green carpeted walkway that leads us to these destinations and defines borders.

A pocket meadow supports life.
A pocket meadow supports life.

• Reduce or eliminate use of toxins, not just pesticides in the garden and landscape, but all toxins. Our soils and waters, and even our bodies and the bodies of many animals are becoming contaminated with poisons in so many of our household products. Two chemicals in the news and generating much controversy: glyphosate (active ingredient in Roundup) and the family of neonicitinoids. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to start testing certain foods for residues of glyphosate, the world’s most widely used weed killer (1.4 billion pounds/year) after the World Health Organization’s cancer experts in 2015 declared the chemical a probable human carcinogen. Neconicitinoids, often called “neonics” are systemics. The toxins are taken up by a plant through water in the soil and circulated through the vascular system, showing up not only on the foliage (the leaves those young monarch caterpillars eat) but also in pollen and nectar. Neonics, including imidicloprid, are active ingredients in many of the lawn and garden chemicals most home owners purchase, and are used by most large producers of bedding plants sold by many nurseries and garden centers. A recent, even-handed summary of scientific studies, published by The Xerces Society, looked at the impact of neonics on beneficial insects, especially bees. The full 44-page report as well as a 2-page summary are available for free at:
http://www.xerces.org/neonicotinoids-and-bees/
• Educate yourself and others. Ask questions, share the answers and encourage folks to continue learning and understanding the complex issues around pollination. Did you know that a swarm of honey bees is nothing to fear?

Relax: Swarming is how honey bee colonies reproduce. No swarming would mean no honey bees. Swarms of honey bees rarely sting since they have no home to protect, and because they are engorged with honey (they packed before they left their old home). Many swarms do not survive in the wild and beekeepers are eager to rescue them. Call your County Extension offices which generally have lists of area beekeepers wanting swarms.
Relax: Swarming is how honey bee colonies reproduce. No swarming would mean no honey bees. Swarms of honey bees rarely sting since they have no home to protect, and because they are engorged with honey (they packed before they left their old home). Many swarms do not survive in the wild and beekeepers are eager to rescue them.

In fact, this crowd of bees is an old queen with half her original colony in search of a new home. She left soon-to-be-born daughter queens and the other half of the colony’s population back in the original home. One colony becoming two. Swarming is how honey bees procreate, and is the goal of every healthy colony – to get big and strong enough in mid to late spring to be able to split into two colonies. Often the cast swarm doesn’t make it through the first winter. If you see a swarm, call the Extension office. They will give you a beekeeper contact who will come to the rescue. Beekeepers love swarms.
• Look for more ways to connect, or re-connect, to the natural world. We, all of us – plants, animals and those animals we call “people” – are in this together.

Written by Diane Almond, Extension Master Gardener Volunteer

The bees are dying, the bees are dying…Really?

The media’s continuing coverage of bees and their challenges, especially pesticides, tends to incite, frighten and confuse most of us. Even among scientists the issues are complex and controversial, but everyone agrees that bees desperately need more and better food. The best way for all of us to help is to grow more flowering plants. Dr. Marla Spivak’s plea is more specific and compelling: “Plant flowers, mostly native and keep them free of pesticides.” For a clear, concise explanation about what is going on with bees, you can’t beat her TED talk,  http://www.ted.com/talks/marla_spivak_why_bees_are_disappearing?language=en

The oft-quoted ‘Bees are responsible for every third bite of our food’ is really an underestimation. The majority of our most nutritious and delicious foods rely on insect, largely bee, pollination. This includes foods such as fruits,  vegetables, nuts, berries, oils, and indirectly some of our dairy and meat products, since alfalfa used for hay and silage requires bee pollination. Today’s industrial agricultural system comprises huge fields of single crops (monoculture) and relies heavily on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Because these fields do not sustain populations of native pollinators, since flowers are only in bloom for a brief time, managed honey bee hives are brought in. In February, when the 800,000 acres of almond trees are in bloom in California, it can be a pollinator paradise. After the blooms are gone in a few weeks, the almond  orchards are a toxic food desert and will be so for most of the year. The bloom period is preceded and followed by a regimen of pesticide applications, most harmful to bees. A majority of this country’s 2.5 million honey bee hives, up to 1,600,000 hives, are transported to the orchards on pallets. Most of those bee hives are then trucked off to other crops across the country.

Moving Honey Bee Hives from South Carolina to Maine for Blueberry Pollination
Moving Honey Bee Hives from South Carolina to Maine for Blueberry Pollination

It’s a paradox. Bees working hard to help produce our food are in need of more and better food of their own. Hmmm.

Besides the mandate to plant flowers, mostly natives, free of pesticides, gardeners might consider using edible plants throughout the landscape for both their inherent beauty and their teaching value. Watch the bumble bees buzz-pollinate your tomato and pepper plants grown in attractive containers with artistic stakes. Catch the huge carpenter bees cheating at blueberry pollination. Instead of diving straight into the flowers, they drill holes through the petals, bypassing the pollen and going straight to the nectar.

Carpenter bees 'cheat' by cutting slits in the petals to reach the nectar without passing the pollen. Often other potential pollinators such as this honey bee nectar forager will use the slits and also bypass the pollen.
Carpenter bees ‘cheat’ by cutting slits in the petals to reach the nectar without passing the pollen. Often other potential pollinators such as this honey bee nectar forager will use the slits and also bypass the pollen.

Blueberry bushes are beautiful most of the year, having spring flowers followed by delicious fruit and then gorgeous fall foliage colors of oranges and reds that often last until winter. Let a squash or pumpkin vine wander through a flower bed, or stake a cucumber vine on a privacy fence. Five pollinator visits per flower to make a single fruit means lots of buzzing activity and gives kids of all ages a chance to learn about male and female flowers. Then observe the tiny ovary grow to full fruit size. Watch the ‘bee party’ in a patch of sunflowers at the back of your cutting garden or along a sunny fence line, and remember; no bees, no sunflower seeds or sunflower oil. While not a pollinator favorite, a border of Rainbow Chard with its crinkly large leaves of glossy red, pink, orange, yellow and green are stunning, and if you don’t mind the resulting holes, you might love seeing the goldfinches dining on them. The options are nearly endless for edible landscapes that are beautiful, educational and also provide food for you, the precious pollinators and the other wildlife in your neighborhood.

Written by Extension Master Gardener Volunteer Diane Almond.

Meet the Pollinators

Remember that roughly 80% of the quarter million or more flowering plant species rely on pollinators to move pollen from the male to female parts, thereby facilitating fertilization, fruit and seed production. That’s a lot of the food we and most animals eat, and that’s also the next generation of plant. The abundance and diversity of plants and their pollinators mystified early scientists, including Darwin who called it an ‘abominable mystery’. Plants have evolved complex strategies to attract pollinators using colors, scents and ultraviolet visual cues, with the strongest one being nectar, the ultimate sweet reward.

Pollinators adapted accordingly, some with long tongues to reach deep into tubular flowers, others with branched hairs or special sacs for carrying pollen. Flies developed a fondness for the scent of decay, pollinating stinky flowers that bees avoid. Moths took on the night shift, preferring highly aromatic, white flowers that bloom at night. Examples are nearly endless.

Carbing Up: Notice how the syrphid fly, disguised as a bee, gets covered with pollen when it pushes past the anthers to drink sweet nectar deep inside the flower.
Carbing Up: Notice how the syrphid fly, disguised as a bee, gets covered with pollen when it pushes past the anthers to drink sweet nectar deep inside the flower.

Many flowers are structured so that small pollinators such as birds and insects inadvertently brush the protruding pollen laden anthers en route to the nectar reservoir. They are ‘accidental’ pollinators, as are larger mammal visitors, such as human passersby or bats. Interestingly there are approximately the same number of pollinator species, from ants and birds to butterflies and humans, as there are species of angiosperm. In the tropics, birds, moths and butterflies are important pollinators; less so in the temperate zones. Most pollinators are generalists, visiting a wide range of flowering plants. Some plant-pollinator relationships are those of mutual co-dependence, called ‘obligate’, a precarious situation where a single species of plant relies entirely on a single pollinator and vice versa. The best example in this country is yucca and the yucca moth.

Despite the hundreds of thousands of pollinators, most plants rely on visits from bees. And while there are 20,000 species of bees, just two or three species do much of the work: honey bees. Why? Bees evolved from the ants, wasps and bees family of insects (hymenoptera), and unlike the other insects, they rely entirely on flowers for food. Pollen is their sole source of protein, without which they could not raise young. Bees’ total reliance on pollen means that they diligently collect pollen, rather than just bumping into it as they locate the sweet nectar. Studies show that these purposeful foragers are 10 times more effective than the ‘accidental’ ones. Equally important, most bees collect one kind of pollen per foraging trip making them exceptional pollinators (pollen from one species of plant (apple) cannot pollinate a different species (pear)).

Protein Bars: Honey bees return to the hive with loaded pollen 'baskets'. Nurse bees eat much of the pollen and plenty of water to produce the royal jelly that feeds the youngest bees and the queen.
Protein Bars: Honey bees return to the hive with loaded pollen ‘baskets’. Nurse bees eat much of the pollen and plenty of water to produce the royal jelly that feeds the youngest bees and the queen.

Another important fact: social bees such as honey and bumble bees feed their young directly, in the larval stage. Solitary bees like mason bees or leaf-cutters and most sweat bees, don’t feed their young directly, but they do provision the nest, laying eggs on a large ball of food made from honey and nectar. Honey bees are even more effective because they live in large, perennial colonies with big pollen and nectar requirements.

Bees as vegetarians must collect large amounts of protein-rich pollen most of which is fed to the young. They are exquisitely designed pollen collectors with their copious branched hairs and collection devices on legs or abdomen.
Bees as vegetarians must collect large amounts of protein-rich pollen most of which is fed to the young. They are exquisitely designed pollen collectors with their copious branched hairs and collection devices on legs or abdomen.

So what’s really going on with pollinator health and populations? And what does it all mean for us concerned gardeners? Stay tuned…

Written by Extension Master Gardener Volunteer, Diane Almond.

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N.C. Cooperative Extension
Buncombe County Center
49 Mount Carmel Road
Asheville, NC 28806
Helpline 828-255-5522

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