Bee Hotels and Gardens – Applications and Limitations
The model of a ‘Bee Hotel' has been a useful tool for surveying insects in research studies for decades. However, in recent years, the concept of a bee hotel has entered the mainstream; capturing the attention of naturalists, gardeners, and those alike. With this transition, it has gained its name and evolved to take on various forms that hardly resemble the humble wooden box model used in research.
Increased interest in creating spaces for bees is hopeful, as it signifies a positive trend in attention to pollinator livelihood. The UC Berkeley Urban Bee Lab has had great success with simplistic wooden box models of bee hotels in our Costa Rica Bee Project. We share here some of the knowledge we have gained through numerous years of research working with bee hotels in both Costa Rica and California. Additionally, we offer some considerations to ponder when creating your own bee hotel, acknowledging the limitations that they hold, especially in regards to a changing climate.
Put a bunch of natural historians together with their collections and images and what do you end up with - a collection of all the bee species held by some of the biggest entomology institutions around the United States:
The Bee Library is an online repository of bee image, trait, and specimen data. The portal has a worldwide scope and may include other taxa that are not bees but interact with bees (i.e., bee parasites). The contributors to this resource are varied and include the many taxonomists, data managers, and bee ecologists whose work it is to determine bee specimens and help us understand bee evolution and ecology. The Bee Library recommends citing the repository for a bee specimen, the specimen catalog number, and who determined the specimen in any publication that references data from this portal. Images are free for reuse, but please cite the institution that provided the image.
These data are currently growing due to the work of the Extending Anthophila Research Through Image and Trait Digitization National Science Foundation Project (Big-Bee). Big-Bee is a collaboration of 13 universities, research stations, natural history collections, and agencies who aim to share images, label, and functional trait (i.e., flight timing, host plant, body size) data for over 5000 bee species
Bumblebees pollinate many of our favorite foods, but their own diet is being upset by climate change, according to a new UC Riverside study.
Bombus impatiens, aka the common eastern bumblebee, served as taste tester for this experiment.
Bombus impatiens, aka the common eastern bumblebee, served as taste tester for this experiment. There's a sweet spot where floral nectar that bees eat has just the right balance of microbes like bacteria and yeast in it. Hotter weather can upset the balance, endangering the bees' health and potentially, our own.
A new study in the journal Microbial Ecology examines the effects of these nectar composition changes on an American bumblebee. Without bumblebees, who perform a type of pollination that honeybees do not, it would be difficult to mass produce food crops like tomatoes, blueberries, peppers, or potatoes.
“Micro changes in floral nectar may alter the way bees forage and look for food, affecting their health and in turn, potentially affecting human health, by reducing the availability of fresh foods,” said UCR entomologist and study lead Kaleigh Russell.
Bumblebees do enjoy nectar with some microbes in it, but too much of a good thing can deter them, Russell said.
With even a small increase in temperature, microbes' metabolism speeds up, causing them to reproduce more and eat up a higher percentage of the sugars in the nectar. “Less sugar means the nectar could be less palatable for our pollinators,” Russell said.
To test the bumblebees' taste preferences, Russell made nectar in a laboratory. Some was sterile and some contained microbes, and she grew both at a lower and a higher temperature.
The lower temperature, 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit, represents the average springtime high for Riverside in 2017. The higher temperature, 89.6 F, corresponds with what the predicted average temperature will be at the end of the century due to climate change.
Nectar from wild mustard, abundant in Southern California, was collected for this experimental taste test.
Nectar from wild mustard, abundant in Southern California, was collected for this experimental taste test. A clear preference for some level of microbes was evident even when the nectar contained less sugar. However, the bees only went for this less sugary nectar containing a moderate amount of microbes at the cooler temperature. They did not prefer the nectar with too many microbes, as well as the nectar with no microbes at all.
It isn't yet clear why the bees have such specific preferences. Russell speculates that bacteria or yeast may help bees digest sugars in the nectar. Another theory is that the microbes produce secondary metabolites that aid in bee health.
What is clear is that it isn't likely that an increase in average temperatures will have a positive effect on bumblebees.
“We could see shifts in the locations of bee communities, since they leave when they can't find the food they like or need,” Russell said. “We might also see a decline in overall pollinator populations.”
For concerned readers with gardens, Russell recommends growing native plants that have not been treated with insecticide. “That's the best thing someone could do right now to help bumblebees,” she said.
bee avocado flower
Posted on Wednesday, February 23, 2022 at 10:06 AM
As bees gain foraging experience they continually refine both the order in which they visit flowers and the flight paths they take between flowers to generate better and better routes, according to researchers at Queen Mary University of London.
Despite this, bees can be tricked into taking tempting shortcuts between flowers even at the cost of increasing the overall distance they have to fly.
Animals that travel between multiple destinations and return to a home base - like bees, birds, primates and humans - face a predicament known to mathematicians as the Travelling Salesman Problem.
The challenge is to find a route that visits each destination while travelling the shortest possible distance. Previous research, looking only at the order in which animals arrive at each destination, has shown that animals often find a good, or even optimal, solution but little is known about how they find that solution.
Lead author Joseph Woodgate, from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, said: "Animals cannot simply inspect a map to find out where the best food sources are or plan how to get between them."
Bumblebees start out knowing nothing about the terrain or where they can find food, so they must explore the landscape, discovering locations one by one and then face the challenge of integrating their spatial memories into an efficient route.
"Only by monitoring every move they make as they explore and try to generate a better route, can we understand how they tackle this challenge", Dr Woodgate added.
The researchers allowed bumblebee foragers to feed on an array of artificial flowers and used harmonic radar technology to follow individuals continuously over every foraging trip they made as they gradually developed solutions to the problem of how to visit them all.
The result was one of the largest and most complete datasets on bee flight ever recorded and provided an in-depth look at route development for the first time ever. They found that focussing simply on sequences of visits to feeder stations, rather than the actual movements between stations or the way that routes develop, is insufficient to understand how animals solve route optimisation problems.
The study, conducted in collaboration with Rothamsted Research, was published in Scientific Reports.
Professor Lars Chittka, coordinator of the study, said: "Imagine a salesman from London who needs to call at Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Inverness before returning home. From Manchester it is tempting to make the short trip across to Leeds, and from Glasgow it is tempting to visit Edinburgh, but a salesman who does that will soon find themselves stranded in Inverness with a very long drive home. The better solution is to travel up one side of the UK and return down the other."
The researchers presented the bees with an equivalent challenge.
Dr Woodgate said: "As predicted, our bees showed a strong preference for taking shortcuts between nearby pairs of feeders even though this meant flying further in the long run. However, they did not exclusively fly only to the closest possible feeders, and tried out different routes in a flexible way."
The tracks recorded by the harmonic radar could be used to visualise the routes taken by the bees as they foraged. The researchers developed animated heatmaps that graphically demonstrated how some segments of route became habitual while other explorations were forgotten as preferred flight paths were discovered.
The flight distance and duration of foraging bouts reduced as bees gained experience and this increased efficiency was attributable mainly to experienced bees flying straighter and exploring less, rather than improvements in the order in which flowers were visited.
However, the bees never became completely set in their ways and the researchers uncovered evidence that suggests that they use random processes to introduce some variation into their routes which may help them to try out different visit orders looking for improvements to their routes.
The results also reveal that efficient routes develop by parallel improvements of both the order feeders were visited and the actual movements of bees flying between them. In other words, experienced bees not only visited their feeders in the same order, but also flew along the same flight lines time after time. These habitual flight paths were straighter than the routes they flew when first discovering the feeders, allowing them to reduce their travel distance even when they were unable to visit them in the best possible order.
Co-author James Makinson said: "Understanding how small-brained animals like bees find efficient rules-of-thumb to accomplish complex and flexible behaviours has great potential to inform the development of artificial intelligence and advanced robots.
"It's also important to understand how bees and other pollinating insects search for food and use the landscape is crucial to managing the risks to pollinator services posed by habitat loss and agricultural intensification."
VIDEO: This video demonstrates how bees gradually develop repeatable routes between artificial flowers. It shows all the foraging flights undertaken by a single bee. Where the bee repeatedly flies along the... view more
Nearly 1600 species of native bees can be found in California's rich ecosystems; this colorful pocket-sized card set will help you identify 24 of the most common bees found in urban gardens and landscapes.
Using this card set, you'll be able to identify bees on the wing to the genus level. Included for each featured bee are color photographs, a general description of appearance, the distribution and richness, flight season, nesting habits, floral hosts, and how each transports pollen.
Also included is a brief description and illustration of the anatomy of a bee, a glossary, bibliography, and online resources so you can delve deeper into the lives of these fascinating social insects.
Designed as a companion to the book California Bees and Blooms. This 3-1/2" x 5-1/4" card set is spiral bound and printed on sturdy laminated paper to hold up to rough service in the field.
CB & B also has lists of plants attractive to different bee species
University of California Cooperative Extension Ventura County 669 County Square Drive, Suite 100 Ventura, CA 93003 Phone: 805.645.1451 Fax: 805.645.1474
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