Bees & Blooms

Form and Function

• Bees are the primary pollinators of flowering plants, and several species carry out this work. They include the honeybee (Apidae apis), bumble bee (Apidae bombus), and carpenter bee. Honeybees and bumblebees live in large colonies, while the carpenter bee burrows into wood, where it builds a nest and raises its young alone and apart from others of its kind. A bee's primary function is to obtain as much nectar and pollen as it can to take back to the hive, where it is used as food for the queen and for young bees still in the larval stage. The bees you see hovering around flowers are the worker bees, young females that collect the nectar from deep inside each bloom.

Pollination

• Pollen is produced by a flower's male reproductive organs and collects at the end of the anther. From there, pollinators, such as bees, move it to the blossom's female part, called the stigma. A single bee may revisit the same bloom more than once in the course of a day to extract as much nectar and pick up as much pollen as it can before returning to the hive. Bees don't do this intentionally, as their primary objective is to take the dust-like pollen back to the hive for food production. Some of it falls off in the process, however, and it is this action that all plants depend on for their survival. The survival of the bees in the hive also depends upon how successful the worker bees are in obtaining enough food, resulting in what is called a mutualistic relationship between them and the flowers they visit.

All About Blooms

• In the interests of conservation and helping bees with their mission to pollinate plants, you can grow the types of flowers to which they are most attracted. Your goal should be to incorporate as many different types of colors into your garden as possible, as this attracts the most bees. Columbines (Aquilegia), flowering in April and May, are hardy from U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 3 to 9, and come in a variety of colors that bees find attractive. The purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) is hardy from USDA zones 4 to 8, and flowers from June to October.

Considerations

• In recent years, scientists have dealt with the dying off of millions of bees worldwide, a condition they have named colony collapse disorder. For reasons that remain unclear, entire colonies of honeybees are disappearing at an alarming rate, and a solution to the problem has yet to be found. Honeybees are not native to North America, but were brought here from Europe during colonial times. Thus, agriculture in the U.S. depends heavily on managed bee colonies, which have seen a serious decline during the last 60 years. The United States Department of Agriculture reports that, during that time, the number of colonies has dropped from 5 to 2.5 million, a situation made worse during the 1980's by the introduction of new diseases and insects that affect honeybees.