National Pollinator Week - Help 'Em Live On!

Last year, while volunteering at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on their bee survey project, I realized that, not only are the non-native honeybees in trouble, so are the native bees. And the native bees are far better pollinators for native plants and many of our fruits and vegetables.

A few native bees

Some bumblebees are believed to have recently gone extinct and others are in serious trouble. And it seems we don't even know the status of many of our native bees.  As bees go, so do we, since we depend on bees for one-third of our food.  And wildlife depend on bees for most of their nuts and berries.

The staff at Malheur NWR were very interested in bees and  wanted to expand both their bee research and educational outreach about saving bees. I got very involved in all of this and helped design and produce a bee display that is now in the little museum on the refuge grounds. Parts of it can be packed up to use for booth displays. My boss on this project used some of my pictures and my research to make a series of posters on pollinators.  (We started with bees and added butterflies while I was there, and then she added honey-bees and moths, since there is also a person doing research on the moths of Malheur NWR.) I asked for, and was given the posters as files to use myself and share with others. And I worked with the Piaute Indian Summer Program by developing and presenting activities to the kids on various pollinators.

One of the pinned sweat bees

The original idea was to use some of the boxes of pinned bees with posters for the display.  I suggested we collect and dry plants bees and butterflies were using and then glue bees and butterflies I collected with a net on them.  So I carried my butterfly net, kill jar, zip lock baggies, silica gel and a drying box around with me.  I could only dry one batch of flowers a day and some I had to redo to get them to look natural so this was a slow process.  Shortly mid  summer came and all the flowers and grasses dried up, leaving me with no more materials to collect.

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Collecting  flowers and setting up the drying bin  in the field

I even had to think of how to present the flowers.  I ended up making home-made play dough into bases, then arranging the cuttings in it.   At first, I decided to make the dough match the native gravel we planned to use in the bottom of the clear donation boxes. My best match involved using wine and strong tea as the liquid.  That batch sat for the two months of my various vacations and turned to some kind of unusable mush.  After that we settled on just a neutral color that came from using whole wheat flour.

One of the posters Carla made using my pictures and research

This year, I'm working at National Bison Range.  The biologists here knew of my bee work from my resume wanted me to work with  them and the regional pollinator person to develop bee survey protocols to use with the Montana Civilian Corp workers this summer.  I'll be managing the surveys and working with the kids to pin bees. We are also going to be manning Naturalist stations one day a week and I'll be helping with those activities.My other job is to work with the recreation/educational outreach director, Pat, mostly in the Visitor Center.

We used many of the posters from Malheur for the display at the Bird Festival

She received a request from Salish Kootenai College to bring a booth and some children's activities to their first annual Community Bird Day Festival, on May 23. Sh, in turn, invited me to make up a booth and children's crafts for this, and suggested using pollinators as our theme. So that was pretty easy. I  decided to let younger children make a paper bag puppet butterfly or bee while the older children could work around stations to make an origami butterfly.

I printed out information people could download off the net for display and then made a handout with links to it. We also printed out the planting list of plants for bees in this area and gave away pollinator bookmarks and mason bee houses.

At the Bird Festival  - picture by Kyle

Thursday was my one of my official days off, so I didn't go to work until after lunch.  I finished adding the title to the display, then packed everything up and drove about 40 miles to the festival site. Fortunately, I conned Kyle into riding along to "hang out".  What he actually did was help with the craft table so I could talk to visitors to the display about bees. Both the display and the craft table were really popular. Kids of all ages, and even a few college students made the Origami butterfly.  A few little kids took home a bee or butterfly puppet to make later. And we ran out of the mason bee houses.

Kyle helping with the Origami butterflies

There are other on-line resources with information and materials you can download and use. I'm also listing the Sunflower Project so you can find out about a Citizen Science Project that helps track bee populations.

The Fish & Wildlife's Site with probably all you need - from kids activities to school gardens to posters and other information  and pictures.
http://www.fws.gov/pollinators/

Polilinator Partnership- another complete site of information and resources. Be sure and check out the Education, Just for Fun,and Pollinator Week (Under Get Involved). And check out Pollinator Partnerships gallery of photos from Pollinator Week Celebrations:
http://pollinator.org/pollinators.htm

Field Guides to Bees that (I think) print out as the front and back of cards. Use cardstock. These need better formatting to save paper.
http://fieldguides.eol.org/observer/Observer-Bees-ebook-v4DL.pdf

The Great Sunflower Project - both a good way to learn more about bees and to contribute your own data.
http://www.greatsunflower.org/

The link to my dropbox file of pollinator activities and posters. I'll try to get a prettier title in there soon - one you can print out on acetate. The posters are in one PDF file.  Just print the ones you want.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/iwnncely2n7lpsy/dZa6bVDZnN

Hope you can help spread the word on the plight of bees or start a project to help them during  Pollinator Week.  Boy and Girl Scouts, Master Naturalists and Summer Camp Leaders will all enjoy this. And you can probably get your library to let you build a display on pollinators and then add their books on them.

Garden Like You're Saving the World

There are many reasons to have a garden: to collect favorite plant species,  to have a calm, happy space, to make your property more attractive, to help live a long happy life, to have a place where butterflies and birds can add their beauty, to grow the healthiest and best tasting fruits and vegetables, to help maintain plant diversity.

But today a keystone group of animals (keystone species are necessary to preserve their ecosystems) is under severe attack, from loss of habitat, pesticides, and  introduced diseases. That group is the bees. Many have gone extinct and others are severely threatened. Wild hives of honeybees may be completely gone and 35 percent of the U.S. honeybee population between 2006 and 2009 have disappeared in from the colony collapse syndrome or other causes. There are 4000 known species of these bees in the U.S., so doing just a few changes in your garden can help many different species of bees continue their pollination jobs.

Bees evolved from wasps and with flowering plants as they changed from meat eaters to pollen and nectar eaters.And plants have evolved to become more attractive to bees and other pollinators. Some orchids go so far as to smell and/or look like a female bee. The poor male gets a dose of pollen rather than love.

A  100 million year old bee fossil preserved in amber

Today bees help fertilize some 250,000 flowering plants and a third of all our foods, including most of our fruits and vegetables.  Without bees, most of these plants would not be able to form seeds and continue to exist. And crops such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplants which can make some fruit by wind or self pollination, need bees to be truly productive.

One area in China has already learned, too late, the importance of bees. Indiscriminate use of pesticides has eliminated their bees and they have had to resort to hand pollinating their apple trees for the last two decades.

Workers in China hand- pollinating fruit trees - all apple and pear trees have to receive this treatment

Our native bees are uniquely adapted to fertilize our native plants, including members of the squash family and other new world vegetables and fruits. And bumblebees and some carpenter bees can shake the pollen out of tomatoes and other flowers by a process called sonification, allowing them to fully fertilize a flower on one visit while honey bees may take up to 7 visits to do the same job.

I'm working on a bee display, building bee houses and learning about our native bees. I'll share information on the various species with you in future posts.

But we can all begin to use our property to protect bees:

Grow plants that bees need - grow several varieties of early, mid-season, and late varieties of blooming plants of the types and colors attractive to bees.  They especially love blue and yellow plants but see blue/purple nectar guides on yellow and red plants. (They don't see red but do see in the ultra violet range so flowers show up with different colors and patterns to them than to us. )

Use this general list and check with your Native Plant Society for plants native to your region. Another easy way to determine species of each genus native to your state is to use the Lady Bird Johnson Plant Database.
Fill in the genus name, then use the "Narrow Your Search" feature on the right to enter the name of your state, before scrolling  down to the search button on the bottom.  You can then open each species, and scroll down to the USDA database link for that plant. This will allow you to see if the plant has been reported in your county.  This allows you to use plants that naturally grow close to you.You may also find seed sources by checking out the data base of native plant suppliers in your state or region.

• Aster - Aster
• Currant - Ribes
• Elder - Sambucus
• Fireweed - Chamerion
• Goldenrod - Solidago
• Huckleberry - Vaccinium
• Larkspur - Delphinum
• Lupine - Lupinus
• Madrone - Arbutus
• Mint - Mentha
• Oregon grape - Berberis
• Pacific waterleaf - Hydrophyllum
• Penstemon - Penstemon
• Rabbit-brush - Chrysothamnus
• Rhododendron - Rhododendron
• Salmonberry - Rubus
• Saskatoon - Amalanchier
• Scorpion-weed - Phacelia
• Snowberry - Symphoricarpos
• Stonecrop - Sedum
• Wild buckwheat - Eriogonum
• Willow - Salix
• Yarrow - Achillea

And do remember that plants bred to be showy often don't offer bees pollen or nectar.  Use the simple, native ones instead. Single flowers are better than doubles. Also let some of your herbs and vegetables go to flower. 

Don't use pesticides. Use garlic oil and BT to control mosquitoes. Use mechanical means of pest control first.  And remember that having pests is a sign of imbalance. Be sure to use organic fertilizers and things like compost teas to keep your plants unstressed and healthy so bugs won't attack them. Your soil needs to be alive, so don't kill it with chemical fertilizers.  Let the living organisms in the soil naturally nourish your plants.

Provide places for bees to maintain their nurseries. Seventy percent of the native bees live in holes in the ground. Thirty percent use hollow stems or rotten wood to make tunnels. Bumblebees live in holes made by mice and ground squirrels, old mice nests within bunch grass,  hollow trees,  and other cavities. So keep some ground clear of plants or mulch and keep messy dead stems and branches where you can. Provide bee houses for a neater solution.

Provide mud - if not is nearby - for your mason bees.

Provide fresh water. A birdbath works fine, just clean it every day or so.

We gardeners are entering our dreaming and planing stage as we contemplate our growing season just past and look forward to next year's gardens. While we read plant catalogs, we can also inventory what plants in our garden are useful to bees and figure out what other plants we might like to add. And this is a great time to build bee houses. I'll post about mine soon.

Another neat way you can help, and all while enjoying your garden, is to join the Great Sunflower Project and document the bee species that visit your garden.

And finally, you can recruit more people to work to save bees.  Post information on your facebook page, get fellow garden club members and other gardening friends involved, see if you can start bee projects in public spaces such as parks, fire stations, and libraries. We need to know the kinds and numbers of bees in our areas and then work to build their numbers.

These are some of the bees I've discovered on the refuge. 

Halictus -

Bombus centralis -

Osmia -

 
For further fascinating reading, check out some of these papers and books.

 Bee Basics:  An Introduction to Our Native Bees

Note:  You can download PDF files, then send them, as attachments,  to your Kindle Fire address and they will show up on your Kindle as books.  Very handy for these books that are free as PDFs but cost $$$ for the print version.  

How to Build a Bee Garden

Tomato Pollination Graphics

Give  Bees a Chance

Ten Reasons to Use Bumblebees for Pollination

A little good news: Extinct British Honey Bee Rediscovered

A Red List of Bees - shows status of some bees and shows a need for lots more research on other bee species. 

Book: Attracting Native Pollinators - This is a wonderful reference and has a Kindle version.

Guide to Eastern Bumblebees

Guide to Western Bumblebees


Pollinator Syndrome Traits Table

Pesticides That Kill Bees