POLLINATORS. Robbers and thieves

Some flowers allow only specialized pollinators. They place their nectar out of the reach of most visitors and only those with a long enough tongue can reach it. Such is the case of the bee balm or monarda; a flower visited by hummingbird moths and bumblebees

A hummingbird moth unfurls its long tongue and sticks it inside the equally long throat of a bee balm flower.

The tongue of a bumblebee isn't as long as that of moths or butterflies, but by burying itself into the flower this visitor can reach the store of nectar without difficulty.
These visitors approach the flower the "legitimate" way, meaning that they touch the pollen carrying parts and also the female parts of the flower by entering it this way. When they do so they carry pollen from some flowers to others and accomplish pollination. Everybody benefits; the insects get nourishment and the flowers are pollinated. However this flower's strategy may backfire when clever and lazy flower visitors take a shortcut and steal the nectar. One very common robber is the carpenter bee; with its powerful jaws it can easily slash through a flower's tissues. Here a female carpenter bee is opening the throat of a bee balm flower. When this bee goes directly to the nectar bypassing the sexual parts of the flower it doesn't pick up or carry pollen. As a consequence, it doesn't help the flower at all.

A carpenter bee stealing some nectar

Pollinators: Partners and Robbers
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© Beatriz Moisset. 2010

DECEITFUL FLOWERS. Lady slipper

In most cases the relationship between flowers and their pollinators is a wonderful partnership in which everybody wins; but there are exceptions. In some cases, insects exploit flowers and take their offerings without returning the favor and in other cases it is the flowers that exploit their visitors.
Many orchids use a wide range of deceptions; some, such as the lady slippers, engage in a rather innocuous deceit that only causes the insect a minor inconvenience. This flower has a very peculiar shape, with the lower petal expanded into a bag. The purpose of this bag is to act as a temporary trap.

The drawings show a flower cut through the middle to illustrate what happens.
It is not known exactly what the attractant is, but it is powerful enough that several kinds of bees come to the flower seduced by its appeal.
The bee perches on the edge of the sac and often loses its footing and falls inside; once there it struggles to get out but the inside is slippery and the curled lip of the bag makes it hard to get out. Fortunately for the bee there is a escape route.
Toward the back of the flower there is a ladder made of hairs that leads to a tunnel. There is a sort of skylight at the end of it to guide the disoriented bee, so even though the passage is narrow the bee strives tenaciously headed toward the light. In doing so it rubs its body against the pollen sacs, called pollinia, which get glued to its back.
Once outside the bee flies away; its little brain can remember the unhappy experience long enough to travel some distance from the plant that it has just visited. But most likely, it will repeat this adventure when it finds another lady slipper some time later. At this point it will leave behind the pollinia that it has been carrying inadvertently, performing pollination of the lady slipper and getting no reward for its labor.

Hummingbird Moths. Where do They go in Winter?

Not all moths fly at night; some choose to do it during the day. One of them is the hummingbird moth, so called because it looks and flies and even hums like a diminutive version of a hummingbird when hovering in front of flowers. Just like their feathered namesakes hummingbird moths love long throated flowers, such as bee balm or horse mint. But unlike them, they don’t migrate south when the cold weather arrives. They resort to a different strategy to survive the harsh weather and lack of food.

Like all moths and butterflies they have a complex life cycle with dramatic transformations, called metamorphosis. The distinctive stages are called egg, larva or caterpillar, pupa and adult or imago. The one you are most familiar with is the adult, that colorful flying marvel; the other stages are wingless and prefer to remain out of sight and out of danger. The larva’s job is to eat almost non-stop and to grow; the pupa goes through a resting period and later through a tremendous remodeling job where all the parts are transformed to turn into the active, winged creature which we see during the summer. The flying adult’s whole purpose is to find a mate and to start the next generation; for that they need nourishment, nectar, which they find in flowers.

It is in the resting state of pupa that they choose to spend the winter. After the caterpillar reaches full size feeding on any of its favorite plants, such as hawthorn, black cherry or wild rose, it drops to the ground. There it spins a loose cocoon that lies partially buried under the leaf litter. Leaf litter is very important to this species; it provides some protection against the winter weather and against predators. When birds or squirrels go through leaf litter, scattering it here and there, they may very well be looking for one of these nutritious morsels.

If the pupa survives these attacks, it will complete its metamorphosis and emerge as a winged adult next spring, when nectar-laden flowers are blooming again.

Moths as Pollinators
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© Beatriz Moisset. 2010

POLLINATORS IN WINTER. Fritillaries

Where do pollinators go in winter? When all the flowers that pollinators feed on are gone and when the cold grips the land, what do the pollinators do? They have to find refuges and hanker down until the next season. There are many different strategies at their disposal, many sheltered places, many options as to spend the winter months as eggs, larvae, pupae or adult. But they all make themselves invisible for several months of the year, hoping that no predator or parasite gets to them and hoping that the next season be bountiful and take care of their needs.
Here is just one example of a wintering pollinator, a pretty butterfly that you may see flitting around the garden during summer months: a fritillary butterfly Speyeria cybele.

Adult fritillaries are colorful butterflies of orange and black patterns, often mistaken for monarchs. Their long tongues enable them to reach for nectar hidden in long throated flowers such as horse mints, however they are not about to pass out a good opportunity to drink nectar from more accessible blossoms. You may start seeing them as early as May; by October they will be mostly gone or will look rather worn out, missing wing scales or even a piece of wing where a hungry bird took a stab and missed the body.
In late summer and early fall the females start looking for places to lay their eggs. Their babies feed exclusively on violets, so they need to find these plants and lay their eggs nearby. But by this time of the year violets are drying up or they are all but gone; only the roots remain under ground in many cases. This does not deter the egg laying females; either they have a formidable sense of smell that enables them to detect the roots of violets, or, in some cases, they just take a chance scattering their eggs on the leaf litter in shady places that are most likely to grow violets. In this case, some eggs will be lost, but there will be plenty left which will find their target.

The eggs are no bigger than a period at the end of this sentence; the caterpillar that emerges from it shortly afterward is about the size of a comma. Packaged inside this tiny body is all the genetic information needed to make all the colors and the beauty that will visit your garden fluttering from flower to flower during the warm months. There is no food for this baby during the winter months. So what is there to do? It promptly buries itself in the leaf litter seeking safety from the many small predators and parasites that hunt it in that dark and mysterious world that is the soil of your garden. There, it has nothing to do for several long, cold months; so it goes to sleep.

Probably many, perhaps most won’t make it through the winter; but the mother had laid so many eggs that there will still be plenty to keep the species going. By the end of winter it will be aroused, by some unknown cues. By then, violet plants are beginning to grow. Long before they start blooming, this caterpillar goes to work, feeding and growing for a couple of months. It will eventually emerge as a fully grown butterfly.

More on fritillaries life cycle in:
Pollinators welcome blog
Pollinator of the month
List of articles © Beatriz Moisset. 2012

Only friends welcome here

The wildflower Beardtongue or Penstemon gets its name from the hairy area that runs along the floor of its "mouth" looking like a bearded tongue. It is one of those flowers designed just for bumblebees. The size fits them like a glove; the length of its throat, where nectar is stored, is just right for the length of a bumblebee's tongue and the sexual parts of the flower are arranged so they rub the pollen against the back of the visiting bees so they carry it to the next flower.

But when it comes to other insect visitors they are not so welcoming. The outside of the flower is coated by glandular hairs, with shiny droplets of a gooey fluid at their tips. They feel sticky to the touch and, to a small insect, they are a death trap from which they can't disentangle themselves. I assume that they do it for protection although I can't imagine what protection they need from midges and the like.

Here you have one performing both functions at the same time, a welcoming host and a killer all at once.

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES. The True Story

When October comes along we stock up on bird seed for the winter and try to make the right choices; some cheap brands are no good. A visit to the Cornell University Ornithology lab website would help us know what is best. Here we learn that some of the most common seeds are: sunflower, safflower, millet, cracked corn, peanut hearts, flax, sorghum and rape seed.

A house finch eating sunflower seed

Sunflower tops the list of preferred bird food because it is nutritious and rich in oils, badly needed by winter birds to generate the energy that keeps them warm. Some types of millets and flax are regarded as fillers and the Cornell lab doesn’t recommend them.

Woodpecker feasting on peanuts

The visitors to your bird feeder are wild animals that can survive on their own without your handouts. They are resourceful and can find wild foods through the winter; in fact many of them simply have no access to birdfeeders. They eat wild seeds similar to the ones you provide and berries of many sorts. If you are a birdwatcher you know that a good way to spot finches and other small birds in winter is to look at shrubs, preferably the ones laden with berries.

Let us examine these foods from a different angle. It is said that thirty percent of all the food that humans eat comes to them courtesy of pollinators primarily bees, what about bird food?

Long-horned bee pollinating a sunflower

Millet, corn and sorghum are cereals; the plants that produce them are wind pollinated. All the other bird seeds are from flowering plants that require the services of pollinators to produce seed. We are familiar with the flashy sunflowers and may have seen bees visiting them. Safflower is a type of thistle, also a blooming plant. Peanuts are members of the pea family with complicated flowers that require skilled pollinators to trip them and get to the pollen; these plants sometimes dispense with pollinators and simply fertilize themselves, but they produce more seed when pollinators are present. Rape is mustard, also dependent on pollinators. Finally, berries are dependent on pollinators.
So this is the true story of the birds and the bees.

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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