Or Else

I'm still on my quest to become less rubbish with bees. I felt I'd stalled recently, so after several months of struggling with Steven Falk's "field guide" (a somewhat marginal call, but you can put it in a rucksack, and if you've got a 20X hand lens, good lighting, and no wind, use it in the field), after a great deal of hesitation, I splashed out on Else & Edwards monumental Bee Bible, The Bees of the British Isles. 

And I'm glad I did. The Else & Edwards keys frequently use different characters to the Falk keys, often less subjective in my opinion, and this alone makes them easier to use. The photos & drawings are larger and better reproduced therefore it is much easier to see fine details. In addition, the Else & Edwards comes with a CD with 835 key photos - full screen screen viewing is great. So what's the snag (apart from not being able to put them in your rucksack): THE PRICE! £150!!

So is comparing these books like comparing apples and oranges? Yes it is. A reasonably priced "field guide" vs. the ultimate reference. For me it's worth it. You pays your money and you takes your choice. 

Falk, S. (2019) Field guide to the bees of Great Britain and Ireland. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Else, GR and Edwards, M.(2018) Handbook of the bees of the British Isles. Vols 1 and 2. The Ray Society, London.
 

Free Range Pollen

Out and about recently I came across this Chocolate Mining Bee, Andrena scotica, with bulging pollen brushes (scopa), so I put my pollen "skills" into action.

95% of the pollen grains in the sample were the lower, triangular-shaped grains. This is either Bird's-foot-trefoil, Lotus corniculatus, or more likely, Horseshoe Vetch, Hippocrepis comosa, which was present on this site. I can't tell the difference between these two and I'm not sure if it's possible without resorting to DNA. The remaining 5% were Cow Parsley, Anthriscus sylvestris, (the upper oval grain). This makes sense as while the entire site was fringed with Cow Parsley, and while it's not that attractive to bees, the sheer abundance of the pollen would make its absence a surprise. 

So, within my limited skills, it works! The only thing that occurs to me is that I really didn't learn anything in this analysis that I didn't already know from observing the bees on site. It would be worth doing with bees from unknown sites, but a little behavioural observation in the field goes a long way. 

As an aside, I'm also getting good results using dark field illumination for pollen. Can you guess what species this pollen is from (warning: it's a tricky one!)?

Where the bee sucks

Unsurprisingly, the solitary bees I have been working with recently have often been covered in pollen (they have a lot to cram into their short adult lives). I took this female Osmia bicornis from the Geranium macrorrhizum which attempts to overrun my garden (I've never rated it much as a wildlife plant but it has filled a gap which the bees have been very grateful for over the last few weeks). 

 

The large orange pollen grains are obvious, but also very distinctive under the microscope:

My favourite so far is Daisy pollen, Bellis perennis: 

So far so easy - I know the flowers I have taken the pollen from. But can I identify pollen taken from bees to work out what they have been feeding on? There are several useful websites for identifying pollen. The Global Pollen Project is good, but my favourite is the Northumbrian Bees pollen gallery. 

By coincidence, this month's Microscope Club also involved messing around with pollen and as usual, I picked up some useful tips. Size as well as shape is a key feature of identifying pollen grains and the standard is to make sure the pollen is fully hydrated before measuring, thus aqueous media are used. Glycerol Jelly is the standard medium but is a pain to work with, so I'm using Magnacol aqueous mountant. In water alone pollen grains are quite frisky and move around, making photography difficult. The Magnacol mountant contains PVA and is quite viscous, which fixes the grains better. 

This is very much a work in progress but it will be interesting to see what I can find as the season progresses (assuming there are enough hours in the day). 

Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly
After summer merrily.
Merrily, merrily shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.

Bees Knees - Minding The Gap

It's been a good year for bees so far - the weather has suited them. Last month I found an interesting mining bee in my garden. Leicestershire has fairly good bee records, but they are mostly focussed on bumblebees. The solitary bees (and even more so solitary wasps) are a black hole in recording, particularly when it comes to verification of records. Solitary Hymenoptera in general are a vast and growing skills gap in our knowledge. Partly spurred by curiosity at my find and partly by guilt, I bought a copy of the excellent Falk and Lewington field guide and set off on a quest (Falk, S. (2019) Field guide to the bees of Great Britain and Ireland. Bloomsbury Publishing). 

I wasn't expecting it to be easy, which is good because it's not. This is not an area where casual recorders are ever going to make much impact beyond a handful of species. Nevertheless, I'm enjoying the challenge although I wouldn't have got very far with the field guide alone and without the support of the highly knowledgeable online bee communities. Whether I'll be able to make any sort of impact when it comes to the skills gap it's far too early to say. 

 

FIT Count Summary 2024

The UK Pollinator Monitoring Scheme (UK PoMS) launched FIT Counts (Flower-Insect Timed Counts) in the UK several years ago. At the time, I decided not to bother. This year, with the moth trap in my suburban garden not justifying the electricity to run it (other than to document the disastrous local decline in flying insect numbers this year), FIT Counts seemed much more attractive. For one thing, FIT COUNTS are a very low carbon way of recording - in good weather, spend ten minutes watching flowers and insects in your garden or local park, then upload the results via a mobile phone app or the website. I'm usually disappointed by big citizen science projects, which tend towards engagement rather than useful data, but the FIT Count methodology is geared towards long term monitoring which is desperately needed. 

UK POMS has just sent all the recorders an end of year summary - short version: another record year for FIT Counts. My own effort is a sad four sessions, but I'm looking forward to the start of the FIT Count season (1st April - 30th September) and making a better effort next year. With 2024 virtually certain to be the warmest year ever and the first year to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, this sort of data becomes ever more important, as does gathering it without getting in your car and driving off to get it. The two most important groups of pollinators, bees and flies are both vulnerable to climate change between these two major groups of pollinators, with flies seemingly being more at risk. Even 10 minutes standing watching your local insects can help. How hard can that be? 

Critical thermal maxima differ between groups of insect pollinators and their foraging times: Implications for their responses to climate change. Journal of Melittology, (122), 2024.

https://journals.ku.edu/melittology/article/view/22505

 

Bad Bees!

 Gail MacInnis, Etienne Normandin, Carly D. Ziter. Decline in wild bee species richness associated with honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) abundance in an urban ecosystem. PeerJ, 2023; 11: e14699 https://peerj.com/articles/14699/

Not the bee's knees

You may have seen the wildlife documentary "My Garden of a Thousand Bees", wildlife cameraman Martin Dohrn's 2020 Covid lockdown project.  If you haven't seen it, Google it and try and track it down - it's the best wildlife documentary I've seen for years, certainly since before the BBC gave up on anything that is not characteristic megafauna. And if that doesn't give you enough food for thought, read this:

MacInnis G, Normandin E, Ziter CD. 2023. Decline in wild bee species richness associated with honey bee (Apis mellifera L.) abundance in an urban ecosystem. PeerJ 11:e14699 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14699

 

Cities are bad for (most) insects

Another spoke in my "It's not all about bees you know" campaign.


Urban areas as hotspots for bees and pollination but not a panacea for all insects. Nat Commun 11, 576 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-14496-6
"Urbanisation is an important global driver of biodiversity change, negatively impacting some species groups whilst providing opportunities for others. Yet its impact on ecosystem services is poorly investigated. Here, using a replicated experimental design, we test how Central European cities impact flying insects and the ecosystem service of pollination. City sites have lower insect species richness, particularly of Diptera and Lepidoptera, than neighbouring rural sites. In contrast, Hymenoptera, especially bees, show higher species richness and flower visitation rates in cities, where our experimentally derived measure of pollination is correspondingly higher. As well as revealing facets of biodiversity (e.g. phylogenetic diversity) that correlate well with pollination, we also find that ecotones in insect-friendly green cover surrounding both urban and rural sites boost pollination. Appropriately managed cities could enhance the conservation of Hymenoptera and thereby act as hotspots for pollination services that bees provide to wild flowers and crops grown in urban settings."

Andrena scotica

It's #WorldBeeDay, apparently. Too bad beetles, wasps, flies, dragonflies, you're out of luck.

Tawny Mining Bee - Andrena fulva

Lots of females like this one around at the weekend.