Bee Town USA: An Educational Tiny Town of Beehives

Honeybee - Apis melifera   photo by C. Netter

Greg, the beekeeper has started a Kickstarter project to fund Bee Town USA. This will be a project to promote bee conservation through art by creating a curiosity that attracts the community to visit. Read all about it here. Greg is the person who educated me about bees - both honeybees and our Colorado native bees. Beetown's purpose is to educate the public about these bees in a fun way.

Peponapis pruinosa Probably Pollinated the Pilgrim's Pie Pumpkins Perfectly

I'd always heard that honey bees were necessary for pollination for many of the plants we eat. That is quite true, but there are some plants that are pollinated quite well by our native pollinators.
This is especially true for New World plants - plants that originated in our hemisphere. Pumpkins are native to North America, so they have been pollinated by North American pollinators for a very long time. One such pollinator, and probably the most important pumpkin pollinator is the squash bee.
The pumpkin bloom is a short live bloom that doesn't even last an entire day, the squash bee rises early in the morning, before the honey bee, to visit the pumpkin flowers and the blooms of other cucurbits. In my garden, the pumpkins and squash blooms are full of the squash bee Peponapis pruinosa from early in the morning until the blooms close up. Sometimes I see a honey bee try to get into the flower but she often gives up when she sees it already full of these other, honey bee sized, long horned bees.
Peponapis pruinosa is a solitary bee that nests in the ground. They dig holes for their nests near the pumpkins and squash that they pollinate. This may explain some of the holes I see in the ground near the garden.
The most common view I have of them is of their butts sticking up out of the flowers.

The Ecumenical Sunday Sunflower Service for Bees

This past Sunday I was out taking pictures of the sunflowers and noticed four different species of bee on this particular blossom. All bees seemed to be getting along fine. Several of them are species I hadn't noticed before.

In the upper left was a Long Horned bee, Melissodes  Subgenus Eumelissodes. It was a fat bee about the size of a honeybee, with legs covered in yellow pollen.

In the upper right, there was a little green sweat bee. I've seen them before.

 In the lower right was a little bee that is new to me, Pseudopanurgus.

 And closer to the center was the familiar honeybee.

More Colorado Native Bees

Continuing from the previous post...

I used to think that honey bees did the vast majority of pollination in my yard here in Jefferson County, Colorado. The more I look, the more I notice just how many other insects are in my flowers and many of them are native Colorado bees.

This little green sweat bee, Augochlorella aurata, is often seen in the flowers of my sedum or dill weed. It is a very tiny bee with such a beautiful metallic sheen.

We also seem to have quite a variety of leaf cutter bees and their relatives. Besides this fellow from the last post, Lithurgus apicalis,

we also have other bees in the Megachilidae family such as this tiny white faced bee:

this little bee:

this little green eyed Anthidium oblongatum on sedum:

and this honeybee sized Megachile perihirta with the incredible orange butt:

And there are the bumble bees. Here's one in my Salvia transylvanica:

Here is the cute little orange striped bumble bee, Bombus huntii in Penstemon Red Rocks:

Native Bees of Colorado

I knew that there were native bees, but I didn't know there were so many native bees until Greg, of Dakota Bees, told me. There are four thousand species of bee in North America. So, I started looking at my blooming plants and noticed that there were many bees other than honey bees. Many of the native bees are very tiny.

Here's teeny one. It's a small carpenter bee, Ceratina, on the flower of Centaurea. Look at all the white pollen on it's leg.

To show how tiny it is, here it is with a honey bee:

Another tiny one is this sweat bee, Halictus:

Here it is with some honey bees to compare with.

On the opposite side of the scale are the Bumble Bees. Here is a biggy, Bombus nevadensis, having trouble getting into Penstemon strictus otherwise known as Rocky Mountain penstemon.

A much smaller bumble bee is the brown belted bumble bee, Bombus griseocollis, here in my spotted gallica rose:

Here is a ground bee, Anthophora bomboides, with an amazing mouth:

This is a leaf cutter bee. I've seen plenty of it's workmanship on my roses, but hadn't seen the culprit until now. Lithurgus apicalis: