Know Your Pollinators
By Tim Harris
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About this ebook
Did you know a honeybee visits about 50 to 100 flowers during each nectar-collection trip? You’ll discover loads of interesting facts about 35 common pollinating insects – from ladybugs, moths, and beetles to bees, wasps, flies, and butterflies – including appearance, history and breeding, and details of how to attract them to your garden. From ladybugs whose larvae love to munch on herbs like coriander, fennel, and dill, to nocturnal moths who prefer a flower’s scent to its color, this fun and fascinating pocket guide will turn both young and old into pollinator enthusiasts.
Tim Harris
Tim Harris has been fascinated by bird migration since as a young boy he witnessed Swallows flying in off the sea at Selsey Bill, while terns streamed past and recently arrived warblers sang from scrub. He has since been birding in more than 40 countries and has been inspired over and over again by the sights and sounds of migration on all the world's major migration flyways. Tim was Deputy Editor of Birdwatch magazine between 1992 and 2000. He contributed to National Geographic's Complete Birds of the World, and has written numerous articles and children's books about birds.
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Know Your Pollinators - Tim Harris
BEES AND WASPS
Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) covered with pollen.
Bees are pollinators par excellence. More than 20,000 different kinds are known. Most visit flowers to suck up energy-giving nectar. Pollen—essential for the raising of young—attaches to a bee’s body as it moves from plant to plant. Some are more efficient pollen collectors than others. For example, hairy bumblebees have pollen-gathering brushes
on various parts of their bodies. In moving from plant to plant, bees transfer pollen from the stamen of one flower to the stigma of the next, enabling pollination. Most of the pollen is taken back to the colony or the nest burrow to feed young bees.
The range of bee lifestyles is truly bewildering. In social species such as honeybees, female workers
perform most of a colony’s important functions. There is a clear differentiation between breeding queens, nonbreeding workers, and male drones. The workers make honey from nectar, pollen, and enzymes produced in their stomach, and this provides food during the winter, when nectar and pollen are unavailable.
Most bees are solitary, however, with a single female establishing a nest and laying eggs. And still more bees are kleptoparasites, breaking into the nests of other bees to lay their own eggs inside. Closely related, wasps are predatory insects but since they also visit flowers, they are pollinators too.
1Buff-tailed Bumblebee
Bombus terrestris
Characteristics
Length: Queen 0.71 in (18 mm); worker and male 0.51–0.55 in (13–14 mm).
Flight season: May–October.
Nectar sources: Very varied.
Habitat: Meadows, farmland, parks, gardens.
The large, furry, European bumblebee is a familiar sight as it forages on garden flowers. It can be identified by two orange collars
on a black background, one near the neck and one on the abdomen. The tip of the abdomen is buff in queens and males, but whitish in workers.
After emerging from hibernation in spring, a queen will start foraging busily on flowers such as sallows, plums, cherries, and gorse—and she will pick an underground site for a new colony, often an old mouse nest. Once settled, she lays eggs, which hatch into larvae. When it reaches its peak, there may be more than 500 bees in a colony, most of them workers (all females), which perform most of its important functions: foraging for food at flowers as varied as knapweeds, daisies, lavender, deadnettles, and ivy, according to the season. The workers also defend the nest from attackers and care for the larvae. Male bees, or drones, hatch from unfertilized eggs; they leave the colony when they reach adulthood to go in search of a mate, their only function.
2Eastern Bumblebee
Bombus impatiens
Characteristics
Length: Queen 0.67–0.82 in (17–21 mm); worker and male 0.39–0.67 in (10–17 mm).
Flight season: April–November.
Nectar sources: Very varied.
Habitat: Forest, farmland, parks, gardens.
This is one of North America’s most important pollinators. Abundant in the east, it is now used for greenhouse pollination in California and Mexico, far