“Save the Bees!” has become a common phrase in the past decade, but it was spurred by the colony collapse disorder that ravaged imported honeybee operations. Although we love those honeybees and their gifts to us, we are shifting our attention to the plight of our native bees, perhaps less known and loved. I admit I have a lot of learning to do about identification of bee species and their specific plant associations, so perhaps you can learn with me.
One of the first important bits of information for us is that there are many native bees who are known as Specialists. This means that they depend on specific types of flowers and sometimes just specific species of flowers for food! This is why we must recognize habitat loss (via development, invasive species*, plant species endangerment and extinction, or other) as a cascading effect to the health of our local ecosystems.
Featured in these photos is the Brown Belted Bumble Bee. The Bumbles are a great place to start bee identification. They are big and fuzzy and seem to have funny dawdling personalities, as if they’re not taking their work completely seriously all the time and are out for a bit of fun.
The Brown Belted can be recognized by the brown colored belt worn just below the rear yellow stripe on their abdomen. I didn’t get a great photo of the brown patch, but you would notice in person from above. These bees are very widely distributed in North America and feed on a wide array of flowers. This is why they have so far been resilient to the habitat loss many of their relatives have suffered declines because of. These little bumbles (they’re actually average sized bumbles at 1.5 to 1.9 centimeters long) live in small colonies of up to 50 indivduals, nesting under or on ground, all pulling together to raise a brood of young ones to carry on their bumbling legacy. If you’d like to read more about the roles they play in the different castes of their society, check out the Wikipedia page here.
Thanks for learning about the Brown Belted Bumble Bee with me!