The pure magnificent green bee

A female Augochlora pura gathering pollen on her leg baskets

Among the many metallic green bees that you see in the summer there is a particularly beautiful one, Augochlora pura. It doesn't have a common name but its scientific one means "pure magnificent green" and it is a very fitting one.

You may have seen this little jewel diligently visiting flowers to gather food for her family. You would be surprised to find out where she takes her load of pollen and nectar. If you could follow her, which isn't easy, you would see her arrive at an old fallen log and disappear inside a crack of the loose bark. That is where she has started building a home for her babies, in the space between the bark and the log. She builds chambers using her own saliva, some wax from her abdominal glands and loose debris, abundant in such places. Later on, she kneads the cargo that she brings from flowers into tiny loaves that look like golden tiles with which she paves the inside walls of the chamber. When there is enough food to feed one baby all the way to adulthood she deposits just one egg and seals the cell; afterward she starts building another one and so on.

A dead log, home to a few metallic green bees

An unhappy mother whose nest has been disturbed when I lifted a chunk of bark. You can see the ripped open cell, where the larva lays surrounded by a nice supply of "bee loaves" made of pollen and nectar

The babies grow on such rich food and emerge in the fall. By then the mother is approaching the end, her wings are torn and frazzled. The bees of the new generation, on the other hand, have a youthful look, with glossy wings and nicely coated by delicate hairs; these are the ones you are likely to see in October and November.

Young females getting ready to hibernate in late fall, November

The young bees mate promptly. This is the end of it for the males who die shortly afterward. But the recently mated females visit some of the abundant fall flowers stocking up on food to see them through the long winter and get busy finding cracks under wood to spend the cold month in safety. By the end of November you are not likely to see any more activity from these handsome bees; but rest assured that they will emerge from their seclusion next spring when the sun warms up the land and when blooms are ready and waiting for them.


 
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© Beatriz Moisset. 2010

Bees in the Garden

A bee house for mason bees. These bees are solitary, meaning that each one tends to her own brood, about six to eight babies, and all each one needs is a hole the size of a pencil in a block of wood. They do not live in large hives with thousands of workers like honey bees. You can get fancy and create a handsome bee house like the one my son in law did for me.


Watching the comings and goings of your little tenants can be almost as much fun as watching birds at your bird house, and there is no reason to fear their stings. Unlike honey bees they are very gentle; I have let them climb on my hand without problems. They emerge in early spring and are busy through April and May and, perhaps early June. You won't see more activity until next year. You can see the video.


This one emerged from its long winter sleep shortly before Easter, so I call it my Easter bunny bee.



Let us provide a habitat for some of the numerous helpers to our gardens, pollinators, a few tips provided by:
Urban Bee Gardens
Selecting Plants for Pollinators

You may also want to build nest boxes for those bees that make their homes in cavities.
There are instructions in several websites:
National Wildlife Federation
Audubon. Bring on the Bees.

Or you may choose to buy a bee house from one of the several companies that make them, such as:
Northwest Nature Shop
Mason Bee Homes
Knox Cellars
(I am not endorsing any one, just saving you some leg work or mouse work).

Beginners Guide to Pollinators and Other Flower Visitors

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The Life of a Flower

© Beatriz Moisset

Let us take a simple flower, the simplest you can think of, the one you drew when in Kindergarten. A yellow circle surrounded by petals. It looks like a daisy or a sunflower or an aster or a number of flowers with petals arranged like sun rays and a circle or disk at the center. Well, there is a surprise here; such a flower is far from simple. It has a very complex structure, in fact it isn't just a flower but a whole bunch of tiny flowers. Look at the little parts that comprise that yellow center. What a surprise! Each one looks like a tiny flower all by itself: five petals and a center with little things inside that resemble the center of many other flowers that you have observed at various times. Well, that is exactly what they are. Each one is a flower, called a floret; they are all clustered together.

Each floret contains all flower parts: petals, anthers, stigma

© Beatriz Moisset

You may wonder about the petals that surround this cluster of flowers. Here is the answer: there are two kinds of flowers in this interesting bouquet; only the ones that make the outside rim have petals, the large petals that we see. They are called ray flowers while the ones in the center are called disk flowers. It would be nice if all technical jargon were as obvious as this.
In a newly opened sunflower or helenium, the disk flowers are just like little knobs. The next day the outer line of disk flowers has opened and you can see the sex parts, the pollen and seed producing parts, sticking out. Afterward, each day or so a new row of flowers open. The old ones begin to wilt; they look open and a little dry. Eventually one smaller circle after another opens and passes its prime.
Now let us observe the pollinators that come and visit the flower. They go directly to the freshly opened florets. They have nothing to do with the unopened ones, nor with the wilted ones. They find pollen and nectar only there and they know it. All this goes according to the plans of the flower; this works just right to ensure pollination.

© Beatriz Moisset

One interesting thing is to look at the older flowers that have completed their cycle. The ray petals stay fresh and bright for a few days longer although that flower is no good to pollinators any more and it doesn't need visitors either; right now it is busy growing the seeds that will mature later on.
You may wonder why it continues to look attractive to pollinators. The reason is that a large clump of flowers is more likely to attract pollinators that are passing by than a smaller clump, with many dry blossoms in between. It is like you going shopping; a mall where many stores are closed or vacant is likely to drive you away rather than attract you. Once there, you aim for the store that interests you. Pollinators do the same; they notice the larger displays of flowers than the smaller ones, with the certainty that they will find some food there.

Helenium. The flower on the left is young, only a few florets opened

The one at right is older, most florets are past their prime

© Beatriz Moisset

Such flowers are skilled engineers, and good marketers. They know their clients and how to satisfy their demands, and they get good returns. Other flowers are arranged differently; they use different attractants; their timing varies; but they all know how to maintain a successful partnership with their pollinators.
The clients, on the other hand, know how to use this resource. You can see a bee visiting methodically all the florets and probing them with its long articulated tongue in this video

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© Beatriz Moisset. 2010

THE WEB OF LIFE. The Bear, the Waxwing and the Bee

You may be wondering what bears, waxwings and bees have in common. We'll get to that later.

Let us start with a black bear, the formidable resident of forests and broad spaces. An encounter with one of them can be an unforgettable experience. It is surprising to realize that an animal built up with such powerful claws and jaws is seldom a hunter; in fact perhaps only 10 or 15 percent of its diet consists of animal matter and a good part of that is carrion or insects. So, what does a bear eat? With great versatility it finds a wide range of plant food in the course of the year. In early spring, fresh out of hibernation it may find skunk cabbage to its liking as well as sprouts from plants in the pea family, horsetails and sedges. Later in the season it will find the growing cow parsnips and dandelions, as well as flowers of several kinds. It may supplement this vegetarian diet with some animal protein, from caterpillars to the occasional newborn elk; but still about 80 percent of the summer diet is vegetable. In the fall, it is the time to feast on berries; blueberries, raspberries and everything in between. It can devour enormous quantities of this food because it needs to fatten for the long winter ahead. It is hard to believe that such diet can become many pounds of fat in the short period of a couple of months.

And now for cedar waxwings, those attractive birds that are so much fun to watch. They are especially interesting when they are engaging in their peculiar tradition of passing berries from one to another. Cedar waxwings eat an assortment of berries through the year. In summer, when they are raising young, they enrich their diet with insects; but berries are the main staple of their diet.

Finally, let us talk about bees. Let us make it clear that I am not referring to the domestic honeybee but to any of the numerous native bees and bumblebees that feed on pollen and nectar of wild flowers. If we want to be more specific we can choose the blueberry bee. This industrious little bee is very specialized on the pollen it chooses to feed her family. It goes almost exclusively to blueberry flowers. When doing so it carries some pollen from flower to flower and from plant to plant, providing the plant an invaluable service, pollination. Once the flowers are pollinated they can start setting seeds and developing fruits.

Now, you see the link between bees and birds such as the cedar waxwing and larger animals such as the black bear. They feed on the berries that have been pollinated by the bees or, in the case of the bear, on other plant parts that also require pollination to multiply.

Experts on pollination remind us frequently that one third of our food comes to us courtesy of pollinators; most fruits and vegetables require the services of these little go-betweens, most of them bees. What they forget to mention is the large number of other species that also depend on pollinators for a good part of their diet. The bear and the waxwing are just two examples of a very long list that intertwines the little bees with the more visible birds and mammals.

Another twist in this intricate web, the bear and the waxwing digest the berries but not the seeds. So they end up dropping them farther from the mother plant and surrounded with an amount of excellent fertilizer. So, the pollinator, in turn, also depends on the seed dispersers.

But the final, and perhaps most marvelous twist, is that the plants, so dependent on pollinators and seed dispersers are actually making use of them. They are very skilled in attracting their attention and supplying their needs, either with rich pollen and nectar or with juicy, nutritious fruits. At the same time, they make sure that not all the pollen gets eaten and that the seeds can safely go through the intestines of the berry gluttons.
Thus the web is complete: flowering plants need the pollinators and the seed dispersers; bees need the flowers and the seed dispersers and, finally, bears and birds need the plants and the pollinators. When you walk through the woods or the meadows, think about this invisible web and what it is doing to make everything possible.

Bear feeding: BearDiet

Cedar waxwing feeding: Appalachian Mountain Club: Bird of a Feather...

Metallic green bee, a good pollinator

The pure golden green bee, Augochlora pura, is a singular bee, smaller than a honey bee and looking like a shiny metallic little robot bee. There are several other metallic green bees related to this, they compete in beauty and they are all good pollinators of many wild flowers.

In the spring she builds her nest under the bark of rotten logs. If you thought that dead trees or large dead branches had no use you were wrong. To this very nice pollinator they are prized real estate, just the right place to raise her family safely and well protected. She searches for the right dead tree diligently and, if your garden is one of those perfectly manicure ones, you will not have the pleasure of her and her family's company.

She builds a small chamber in the space between the loose bark and the solid wood using her own saliva and secretions. She packs it with a storage of pollen and nectar very carefully kneaded and shaped as tiny loaves. She encrusts the inner walls of the chamber with these loaves arranged like tiles. When she has enough to feed one baby from birth to maturity she lays a small egg and shuts the chamber. She surrounds it with loose debris which abounds in such places and starts the construction of other chambers. You may find a couple of rows of four or five of these cells. The mother bee dies at the end of the summer and the new generation spends the rest of the year comfortable and safe until the next spring.