Pollinator Post 9/1/26 (2)
Overlooked by most passersby, the Pacific Glasswort or Pickleweed, Salicornia pacifica along the shoreline of Bay Farm is in bloom!
Pacific Pickleweed may be perfect, monoecious or dioecious. This plant appears to be female with protruding stigmas. The feathery (plumose) or hairy stigmas are specialized to trap wind-borne pollen. Because pickleweed lacks showy petals to attract insects, it relies entirely on wind pollination (anemophily) to reproduce in harsh, coastal salt marsh environments. Each tiny, inconspicuous flower contains a single pistil that lacks a style but splits into two spreading, hairy, or feathery stigmas. This design dramatically increases the surface area of the stigma, allowing it to act like a biological net to catch minute pollen grains floating through the air.
A Honey Bee, Apis mellifera (family Apidae) is foraging on a flowerhead of Oregon Gumweed, Grindelia stricta. Watching the diligent worker bees forage tirelessly for nectar and pollen, one would never guess that these are senior bees close to the end of their lives. I first learned this astonishing fact from an entomologist friend. Bud has taught, half in jest, that every honey bee worker out foraging should be treated with respect as they are all “little old ladies”. Bud was absolutely correct. All Honey Bee foragers are indeed female, and they are the oldest of their hive mates.
During the busy summer season, a worker bee lives for about six weeks. Her jobs change as she gets older in a system called temporal polytheism. How do honey bees get their job assignments within their social organization?
“A bee’s job is, first of all, determined by its sex. Male bees, or drones, don’t do any work. Making up roughly 10% of the colony’s population, they spend their whole lives eating honey and waiting for the opportunity to mate with the queen. The queen mates with up to 20 drones and will store their sperm in her spermatheca for the rest of her life. That’s where male duties end. Female bees, known as worker bees, make up the vast majority of a hive’s population, and they do all the work to keep it functioning. Females are responsible for the construction, maintenance, and proliferation of the nest and the colony. When a worker bee emerges as an adult, she immediately starts cleaning the cell from which she hatched. Her first 3 days are spent cleaning cells to prepare them for the queen’s next round of eggs. Then her hormones kick in to initiate the next phase of work: nursing the young. The worker bee spends about a week nursing the brood, feeding larvae with royal jelly. Next, the worker bee enters the third phase, as a sort of utility worker, moving farther away from the nest’s center. Here she builds cells and stores food in the edge of the nest for about a week. A worker’s hormone shifts into the final phase of work at around 21st day: foraging. This work is the most dangerous and arguably the most important. It’s only done by older bees who are closer to death. As the worker bee approaches her fourth week of nonstop work, she senses her end of days, and removes herself from the hive, so as not the become a burden to the colony. If she dies in the hive, her hive mates would have to remove her corpse. Thus is the life of a female honey bee during the active seasons of spring and summer, compulsively working from the day she’s born until the day she expires.” – excerpt from an article in National Geographic by Richie Hertzberg.
Female Summer Longhorn Bees, Melissodes sp. (family Apidae) are easily recognizable in the field because of the prolific scopae on their hind legs, especially when these are filled with pollen. Because of these large scopae, the females tend to have a spread-legged posture.
The Summer Longhorn Bees, Melissodes sp. (family Apidae) are medium to large bees, stout-bodied, usually with gray hair on the thorax and pale hair bands on the abdomen. Males usually have yellow markings on their faces and have very long antennae from which their common name is derived. They are active May to September, with peak flight in late June to early August. The females prefer flat, bare ground for digging their solitary nests, though they sometimes nest in aggregations. Pollen is transported in scopae on the hind legs. Pollen loads are often copious and brightly colored and thus very distinguishable. Melissodes are specialists on Asteraceae – females gather pollen from flowers of Aster, Bidens, Coreopsis, Cosmos, Encelia, Gaillardia, Helianthus, and Rudbeckia ssp.
The bee’s spread-legged posture reminds me comically of the horse-riding stance of sumo wrestlers!