Drinking their fill on a Saturday night!

Posted by Jon on Aug 15, 2010 in Bee behaviour, Wild bees | 2 comments

Heads down at the Squash Bar – that’s where I found some of our bees when I checked out the squashes in the veg garden yesterday. They have a choice of several different types ranging from courgettes to butternut and pumpkins and last night they were at the pumpkin bar!

As squashes have female and male flowers they need flying pollinators to cross pollinate the flowers and ensure healthy fruiting. It surprises me that even with all the bees we have here, we still get small fruits sometimes because the pollination wasn’t successful. It shows just how important these pollinators are to some species of plants, and how many visits each flower needs.

So, back to the bees who I had found heading into the long tubular flowers of the squash plants. They were heading down to the base of the flowers where three small holes can be seen – the three bar stools for the lucky insects. These give access to the precious nectar – the payoff for the flower being that the bees collect the pollen on the way past which they then transfer to the next squash flower they visit. The bees definitely appreciated the nectar spending far longer on these plants than I’ve seen on other flowers. At times it was almost as though there was a queue building to the most popular watering holes!

Firstly, a honeybee coming and going, coated in pollen:

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Next a bumblebee, Bombus terrestris – their large size means that they become covered in pollen as they search for nectar at the base of the trumpet.

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In this trumpet, the three small holes leading to the nectar have been enlarged, presumably by an insect – you can see one hole clearly in the third photo of the set (image 11). With this easy entry to the nectar below, a honeybee, a bumblebee and a beetle had all taken up residence in the same flower! Whilst it’s cheating a bit to have enlarged the nectar holes, at least the insects still collect some pollen on the way past, one step better than the insects that go straight through the side of the trumpet to reach the nectar and bypass the pollen completely, the nectar thieves of the squash underworld.

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Finally, a tiny striped bee does its bit by transferring pollen, you can see how small he is if you compare the picture of the bumblebee in the same flower…..

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So tell me, what do your bees get up to on a summer’s Saturday night?