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The Honey Bee Colony

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How to Handle These Valuable Pollinators

It’s the stuff of Hollywood movies and spine-chilling stories — a swarm of bees attacking everything in their path. Mad, ruthless, and vicious buzzing creatures covering whatever strikes their fancy (usually a person) until they succumb to the deadly stings! This is how a swarm of bees behaves, right?
Well, not exactly.

First of all, let’s discuss what a honey bee swarm is and exactly why they’re swarming. A swarm is an entire colony of bees looking for a place to start up housekeeping. It includes a queen and up to 30,000 of her pals, the worker bees and drones. They do this without any anger, aggression, nor any plans to sting people.

Usually, a young queen is born into a honey bee colony and she takes the place of the old queen (no one said life as a queen was easy). The old queen sees the writing on the wall and starts packing for greener pastures. Don’t worry, she has some loyal subjects — she ends up taking about half of that colony with her to hang around a new castle.

The entourage is led by the queen bee and her pheromones — which has them following her beyond all reason. When the queen finds a comfy bush or tree branch, the swarm will settle there, as well. Ultimately what they’re looking for is an unoccupied cavity in which to call home. This is the time when a savvy beekeeper will place a beehive below the swarm to attract them. If the colony approves (and by “the colony”, I mean the Queen) then someone just got themselves a brand new hive, pollination team, and honey processing plant!

Let’s back up a bit. There’s a thick, black, buzzing cloud going through your yard and you’re supposed to believe that these guys don’t have your name at the top of their tiny, bee hit-list, right? That’s exactly right. And the reason that they don’t have stinging on their mind is that honey bees typically defend two things: their young (in the hive) and their honey (also in the hive).

They tend to get irked when you mess with these things — as well they should. In the honeybee’s defense, if you’re going to go into a hive and take either of those things, well…that actually makes you the aggressor.

That said, personally, I wouldn’t gr

ab a broom and start flailing it around trying to swat at the swarm. I mean that probably falls under the definition of provocation, am I right?

If you find that a swarm of honeybees has landed at your home, garage, or porch and you not only don’t believe a word I’ve written here, but are getting ready to sue me because these bees are certainly going to kill you in your sleep…all I ask is that instead of taking matters into your own hands, please contact a local beekeeper to have them gently removed. Honey bees are one of our most valuable pollinators and they’re having a terrible time staying in existence.

Trivial Note: I’m not a honey beekeeper. Although, I am a Western Blue Mason Beekeeper, which isn’t of any importance to this article at all. I only mention it for the record.

Bats are beautiful and essential

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Why Bats Are So Important

There are so many misconceptions out there about bats. Bats are not evil, blood-thirsty creatures that fly around at night trying to get caught in your hair. They are graceful and fascinating nocturnal creatures, which benefit humans by pollinating plants, dispersing seeds, and feeding on insect pests. In fact, over 300 species of fruit depend on bats for pollination including mangoes, bananas and guavas, carob, peaches and balsa wood. They are excellent pest managers eating up to 1,200 mosquitoes in one hour and in the wild they can live for up to 20 years.

Worldwide, at least 67 plant families and over 500 species of flowers rely on bats as their major or exclusive pollinators. Bats certainly play an important role in keeping the insect populations in check by eating insects. They consume damaging pests that attack a host of commercial crops. Nectar-feeding bats are also essential pollinators. Bats are often considered “keystone species” that are essential to some tropical and desert ecosystems. Without bats’ pollination and seed-dispersing services, local ecosystems could gradually collapse as plants fail to provide food and cover for wildlife species near the base of the food chain.

Bats are able to pollinate the flowers of plants that have evolved to produce nectar to attract them. When they drink the sweet nectar inside flowers they pick up a dusting of pollen and move it along to other flowers as they feed. Scientists believe that many groups of plants have evolved to attract bats since they are able to carry such large amounts of pollen in their fur compared to other pollinators. The ability of bats to fly long distances is also another benefit to plants, especially those plants that occur in low densities or in areas far apart from each other.

Flowering plants have developed several traits to attract these flying mammals. Bats use sight, smell and echolocation to locate flowers. Many of the flowers that rely on bats for pollination are white or light-colored to show up in the evening and night times. Many of the flowering plants have evolved a strong fruity or musty or rotten perfume. The smell is created by sulfur-containing compounds, which are uncommon in most floral aromas but have been found in the flowers of many plant species that specialize in bat pollination. Some plant species have even evolved acoustic features in their flowers that make the echo of the bat’s ultrasonic call more conspicuous to their bat pollinators enabling them to easily find the flowers in dense growth.
Other interesting stuff!

-Tequila is made from the agave plant, which relies solely on bats to pollinate its flowers and reproduce. Without bats, we would have no tequila.

-Anoura fistulata, a nectar-feeding bat from South America, which has the longest tongue (proportionally) of all mammals. A. fistulata is only the size of a mouse, but its tongue is around 8.5 centimeters long, making it up to 150% of its body length! With such a long tongue it couldn’t possibly keep all of it in its mouth. Instead, A. fistulata keeps the tongue in its chest, in a cavity between the heart and sternum.

-Bats almost exclusively pollinate wild bananas, which originate from Southeast Asia. Bats pollinate many ecologically and economically important plants from around the world. The products that we value from these plants are more than just fruits, including fibers and timbers that we use every day.
-Flying foxes, nectar and fruit-eating megabats from Australia, pollinate the dry eucalyptus forests, which provide us with timber and oils that are shipped around the world.

-Many tropical and sub-tropical rainforest ecosystems also rely on bat pollinators to regenerate. Without nectar-feeding bats not only would our environment suffer, but our way of living as well! Bats are so effective at dispersing seeds into ravaged forest lands that they’ve been called the “farmers of the tropics.” Seeds dropped by bats can account for up to 95 percent of the first new growth.

Bats can be found in almost every part of the world except in extremely hot and cold climates. They live on all continents except Antarctica. You can find more species of bats where the weather is nice and warm. Bats like to roost in groups in dark and humid environments. They also roost in different structures, such as the underside of bridges, in caves, inside roves of buildings, in cracks in between rocks, in mines, and in tree hollows.

Unfortunately, because of human misunderstanding, as well as practices such as habitat destruction and indiscriminate use of pesticides, many bat species are endangered, and some have already gone extinct. In the United States, nearly 40% of the native bat species are endangered.

Click on the links below for more great info!

Info on how to safely & humanely remove a bat from your home:
Build your own Bat House!
Bring a Bat program into your School:
Bat Coloring Pages:

Our Native Bees

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How to Help the Bees Feel At Home

by Sandy Swegel

 

Ever feel like you’re doing all the work and everybody else is getting all the credit?  That was the great scenario I watched unfold yesterday.  It was a warm sunny day and there were hundreds of honey bees buzzing loudly in a hot pink crab apple tree.  Such a sight and sound is a crowning point of Spring and gives us hope for honeybees.  But I was working in the rock garden nearby pulling weeds out of a mini-hedge of yellow Basket of Gold. (Aurinia saxatilis)  While everybody else was watching the crab apple full of honey bees, there was one solitary native bee happily feeding and pollinating an entire row of bright yellow alyssum growing over the rocks.  This native bee wasn’t getting all the glory but he was a Rock Star.

Native bees are often much smaller than honey bees. They don’t make honey for us.  They have evolved alongside native plants so they prefer to feed on native plants rather than human-made hybrids.  The native bee I watched wasn’t a hive builder but makes a solitary nest just for itself in the dirt or somewhere in a little hole in an old dead tree.

 

You can encourage native bees to live in your garden by planting native plants and by building little nests the native bee likes.  You can make a small practical native bee nest out of a box and hollow tubes, or you can go all out and make some garden art as we see in these pictures.

Or just honor the native bee by noticing it.  Next time you’re in the garden, look for the little bee that’s at least half the size of all the other bees you see.  That’s one of our unsung pollinator heroes.

How to Build your Own Native Bee Nest:
http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/nests_for_native_bees_fact_sheet_xerces_society.pdf

Photo Credits
http://landscaping.about.com/od/Deer-Proof-Plants/tp/deer-resistant-perennials.htm
nativebeeconservancy.org

 

 

The Native Bumble

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All About the Bumblebee

by Summer Sugg

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s—it’s…a bumblebee? This seems to be more than fitting, seeing as this pollinator’s genus name, Bombus, literally means “booming”, or “buzzing” in Latin. Anyone who’s had a garden in Colorado, or hiked in its wildflower filled landscapes can testify to the astounding amount of noise a bumblebee can make while zooming past your head. It definitely caught me off guard when I got the amazing opportunity to work with the bumblebees in the field with two biology professors at CU (Diana Oliveras and Carol Kearns) during the summer months as research.

I’m sure many of you know what a bumblebee looks like, but what I never knew before my research experience was that there are more colors than just black and yellow to a particular species of bumblebee. The abdominal segments (6 on a female, 7 on male) are where the color is located and can contain orange, white, rufous red, and even brown pile (fur) with the yellow and black depending on the species.

Female bumblebees are very interesting, especially the long life of the queen (one year or longer) who first mates, then overwinter to emerge in the spring with a mission to gather and find a good place for a hive to lay her eggs. The workers are also female, have stingers that can sting something as many times as it wants without dying, and are much smaller than the queen (except for when the new queen is chosen and leaves the hive with the males). Male bumblebees are also interesting, and some people who are good at identifying the males can scoop them up with their bare hands to examine them. The males have no stingers or corbiculae (female’s shiny area of the back legs’ femur surrounded by stiff hairs to carry pollen) and sometimes loiter on flowers or branches with their large humorous bug eyes.

Female (left) vs. Male (right)—different species, but you can see the characteristics. (http://bugguide.net)

Another interesting fact is how bumblebees are native to North America with 23 species found in Colorado alone, while honeybees are of European origin and are only a single species. The experience of working with them and this new knowledge also gave me more appreciation towards our native pollinators, especially bumblebees who are the primary players in helping to pollinate some of Colorado’s (and other state’s) native wildflowers, such as the shooting star anthers (as pictured below). This is due to their large size, enabling them to literally buzz out the pollen, which other non-native pollinators cannot do.

(http://beetlesinthebush.wordpress.com/2010/07/)

Sources:

Book: “The Natural History of Bumblebees—A sourcebook for Investigations” by Carol A. Kearns and James D. Thompson

Websites: http://www.colostate.edu/Dept/bspm/extension%20and%20outreach/Bumble%20Bees.pdf http://beetlesinthebush.wordpress.com/2010/07/

http://backyardbeekeepers.com/wp/honeybee-facts/

Ancient Wisdom from Women who Grew Vegetables

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Buffalo Bird Woman

by Sandy Swegel 

I learned the story this week of Buffalo Bird Woman, a Hidatsa Indian born around 1839 in the Dakotas. She and the women of her tribe were the ones who did all the farming from breaking hard ground to heavy harvesting and transporting. Toward the end of her life, she gave interviews about how her people had farmed sunflowers and corn and beans, and how they preserved and even seasoned them. It was the work of women. Her stories always start with phrases like, “My two mothers and my sister and I went out to the field…” or “My grandmother Turtle would break the hard new ground with a stick.”

But Buffalo Bird Woman was also a scientist in her approach and gives detailed information about creating soil fertility (and softening the ground), about the timing and order of planting. Unlike the stories we hear of other tribes planting beans and corn and squash into single holes, the Hidatsas had an elaborate system that included sunflowers. They also planted in rows and pre-sprouted their corn and had a strict timing system.

Here was how you knew when to plant corn:
“We knew when corn planting time came by observing the leaves of the wild gooseberry bushes. This bush is the first of the woods to leaf in the spring. Old women of the village were going to the woods daily to gather firewood; and when they saw that the wild gooseberry bushes were almost in full leaf, they said, “It is time for you to begin planting corn!”

I think you’ll find it delightful to meet Buffalo Bird Woman. There is a children’s book based on her childhood called Buffalo Bird Girl.

There are even recipes for good warrior food like sunflower-seed balls.

Buffalo Bird Woman’s story of the practice of agriculture among her people is available free online at the Upenn digital library: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/buffalo/garden/garden.html

An interview with her was also included in the PBS series, The Sky Above Us.” http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/program/episodes/eight/tospeak.htm
At the end of her life, the practices of her people modernized into Western ways, she bragged:

I think our old way of raising corn is better than the new way taught us by white men. Last year, our agent held an agricultural fair… and we Indians competed for prizes for the best corn. The corn which I sent to the fair took the first prize… I cultivated the corn exactly as in the old times, with a hoe.
Buffalo Bird Woman

 

The One Best Way to know when fungus is attacking your rose garden

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Tips for Handling Fungus

by Sandy Swegel

We’ve had crazy amounts of rain this season and a sad consequence of this is plants are plagued with leaf diseases of every sort. Organic treatment of black spot and rust and powdery mildew usually starts with useless notes like air the plant out, provide adequate drainage, pick off diseased leaves. Daily rain means there is no extra air, there’s nowhere for the water to go, and if we picked off all the diseased leaves there’d be no leaves left to support the plant.

The One Big Secret to knowing if a fungus is about to move in on your plant? Look on the bottom side of the leaves. This works as well for pumpkins and squash as for roses.

 

Catching the Fungus in action was the most important part of keeping your plants healthy.

Now you have to Treat it Regularly.

There is no reversing fungus when it hits your plant…there’s just stopping it from spreading. If you know you have plants likely to get diseased, like roses in the rain, or squash plants in hot stressed conditions, walk by the plants from time to time and look at the underside of the leaves.

 

At our monthly Rose Society Meeting with collectively at least 200 years of rose growing experience, we did come up with things we think you can do to keep roses and other plants health during a high fungus year.

Number One was to feed your soil.

Everyone agreed that good soil with lots of nutrients and microbes made for plants that didn’t catch every fungus and disease floating in the air.

Number Two was pay attention and respond quickly. Nip it in the bud so to speak.
Watch the underside of the leaves. As soon as there is the sign of disease start treatment.

Some people use foliar sprays like baking soda or potassium salts. Others used buttermilk. (both of those treatments change pH.) Some are big on compost tea. Liquid kelp in a spray bottle is my go-to for most things.

The trick with sprays is to pull off the entirely diseased leaves and then start spraying on the underside of leaves, then on the top. The second secret for sprays is to repeat them every week. One time isn’t going to do it.

That’s it. The short version of our collective wisdom when it comes to a rainy season full of disease:
Have a potluck so everyone can commiserate with each other about their little natural disasters. Then get out there and make sure your soil is good and you stay vigilant.

Photo Credit: http://www.cnbhomes.com/rose-garden-pictures/best-beautiful-rose-garden/

Flowers to set the mood

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Flower Arrangement Tips

by Sandy Swegel

One of my favorite jobs each year is designing twenty-two flower pots for an urban condo. The homeowners are real garden lovers but they live in the middle of the city on a high floor. Rather than be content to just look at the amazing mountain vistas their elevation provides, they decided to bring flowers to them in profusely planted pots.

The fun for me is not just designing the interesting combinations of flowers and foliage, but also using the flowers to set the mood for each tiny “room” on the deck.

Here are some of the moods I’ve asked the flowers to set this year.

Sweet, soft gentle awakening.
I love vivid designs, but sometimes one needs to move slowly into the day. So the flowers outside the bedroom window are pretty and not too stirring. Salmon geraniums with spilling blue lobelia. A small white pot with water plants like papyrus. A gentle mood set for early morning.

Late Afternoon Jolt of Wow
The east side of the deck has afternoon shade and really comfy chairs, so it’s a grand spot for guests and afternoon cocktails. Planters here are full of what I call the diva plants: giant purples and oranges. Weird grasses or showy reds. This year a feathery purple Japanese Maple surrounded by orange tropical kangaroo paw and goldfish plant and any other odd orange flowery thing I could find provide the centerpiece. Last year a hot red castor bean plant and lime green foliage and fuchsia colored flowers did the trick. Pots on the perimeter are full of giant petunias and cascading sweet potato vines. Diva flowers always look even more amazing after a few margaritas.

Dinner time
After cocktails, people shift to the grill area. Plants are sturdy here on a west deck. A couple of potted evergreens to balance the big grill and table. Orange hibiscus that is bright and colorful but doesn’t mind being jostled or heated by the grill. Multi-colored coleus to create the illusion of color and texture in the setting shade. An herb pot in case the grills needs some extra rosemary sprigs.
Fading light
After the sun sets, people move indoors and even though there are soft solar lights coming on near a fountain, the flowers fade in the coming night. Exceptions are the white alyssum and silver foliage spread throughout pots that glow under moonlight or the orange osteospermum with the purple fluorescent centers that hold the light a little longer.

Flowers are such powerful influences in our lives. We choose what we grow for many reasons.

The first 21 days of a bee’s life.

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A Bee’s Life

by Sandy Swegel

You have to watch this Ted Talk. It’s a time-lapse video of the first 21 days of a bee’s life and how bee babies turn into what looks like slime into a bee.

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2015/05/an-extraordinary-glimpse-into-the-first-21-days-of-a-bees-life-in-60-seconds/

I think promoting bees is the real key to reversing the dumping of pesticides in our environment. It’s just not compelling to try to say we should use fewer chemicals in our lawns and trees. But it does persuade people when they understand how many bees are being killed. In our area, there are noticeably fewer bees this Spring. Even non-gardeners are starting to notice.

I had a different opportunity this week to talk about protecting bees. We have a big problem in Colorado in that the Emerald Ash Borer that destroys ash trees finally reached us. The problem is the systemic treatment that people hope will save the ash tree. Our scientists think the only ash trees that will survive will be ash trees that are treated with the systemics that are toxic to bees and other pollinators and beneficial insects. The trees will be treated every year for years and years.   So we might save the ash trees at the cost of flooding our environment annually with the chemicals that kill bees and beneficial insects. This is the dilemma when we face when we use chemicals to save one part of the environment…we then damage other parts of the environment.

For most people, this is a boring argument. That’s why I like things like videos of developing baby bees. It makes the story more real.   The more we understand the importance of bees and pollinators, and the more we think they are cute and valuable, then the better chance we have for stopping the systematic pouring of toxic chemicals into our yards and parks.

The Wisdom of Bees

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All About These Important Pollinators

by Sandy Swegel

“The bee collects honey from flowers in such a way as to do the least damage or destruction to them, and he leaves them whole, undamaged and fresh, just as he found them.” — St Francis de Sales, 16th c.

I spent a restful weekend in a monastery in Northern Colorado and came to understand much about the wisdom of bees. Mystics and poets have been observing bees for centuries and gathering wisdom for us to practice. Imagine what our world would be like if for the last five centuries we had followed St. Francis de Sales attitude toward nature.

 

 

In the 20th c John Muir would elaborate on the sustainability of bees:
“Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”
— John Muir

Another mystic, writing a thousand years early earlier in the 4th century, wrote:

“The bee is more honoured than other animals,
not because she labors,
but because she labours for others.”

— St John Chrysostom, Constantinople

Many have known that keeping bees is a task of the higher heavenly realms. As Henry David Thoreau mused in the 19th c.
“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”

And finally, the wisdom of bees to teach us that the toil of our everyday work can turn to joy.
From Dante’s Paradiso:
“Like bees that in a single motion swarm and dip into the flowers, then return, to Heaven’s hive where their toil turns to joy.”

The wise monk on my weekend wrote: “Love, motion, joy, renewal, gentleness, light, perfection; these are a few of the attributes of bees.”

No wonder we love them.

Photo credit:

http://www.glenn-apiaries.com/bee_photos_water_lily_nymphaea.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_de_Sales