Practical Pollen

Nice bit in the NY Times this week on the clever nature of pollen.

On Golden Pond

Got a little freaked out on Friday afternoon when this sulfurous yellow dust appeared on the surface of our pond. Being perpetually conditioned for bad ecological tidings, my mind immediately went to thoughts of evil pollutants and Hazmat suits.

Happily, after some eco-sleuthing (walkin' & lookin'), I realized that the "deadly fallout" was actually pollen blown by high winds from the locally abundant bog willows (one of the first pollen producers of spring).

Thus was my eco-fretting averted. Bouyant spring mood was restored by the unassuming little willow shrubs/trees that give the bees plenty to work with, pollen-wise, when they need it most. Joy to see the plants abuzz with honeybee industry and the butter-yellow pollen baskets of the workers arriving at their hives.

Dressed to Squill

Pollen counts and allergy-induced sneezing notwithstanding, pollen is a pretty exciting topic if you are a beekeeper or bee-watcher. I've written quite a few pollen-related posts on this blog, with photos of honey bees gathering pollen from jewelweed, crocuses, goldenrod, portulaca, and (as shown below) thistle.This weekend, Wren and I had a great time watching the bees gather buttery yellow willow pollen in the old pastures behind our house. We also saw, for the very first time, a bee packing her pollen baskets with the handsome shimmery blue (!) pollen of Siberian squill, which we'd planted a mass of two years ago with precisely that goal in mind. If you're looking for a great plant to provide early spring forage for your bees + the coolest colored pollen on Earth, look no further than Siberian squill.

This excellent pollen color-chart includes a photo of the blue pollen of which I speak, while providing a guide for those who wish to identify the various pollen types their bees are bringing home to the hive.

I only wish the little bee with the blue pollen hadn't eluded my camera lens. I'll be trying again soon, of that you can be sure.

Where Would We Bee Without Willows?

I spent a marvelous afternoon in the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens on Wednesday, bee-watching. Finally getting a few minutes to post images from the happy outing.I saw many honeybees working the crocus, lenten-rose, winter honeysuckle, and Cornelian cherry blossoms—all good things to plant if you're a city gardener looking to provide the bees with forage in early spring, when their options are limited and their need for pollen and nectar sources is great.

The really hot and heavy bee action on Wednesday afternoon was to be found at an unassuming pussy willow shrub that overhangs the little stream that runs through the center of the garden. At this subtle yet marvelous (and marvelously useful) plant, hundreds of honeybee workers painstakingly filled their pollen baskets with fiery-yellow pollen to bring back to the hive. There, other workers will store the pollen or, more likely, mix it with honey to make "bee bread," a nutritionally rich food that combines pollen-protein with honey carbs. This will be fed to the larvae and young bees to raise the next generation of strong, energetic workers, who, once they have matured a few weeks from now, will carry on the whole cycle again, drawing from a different mix of blossoms than those available in this, the first glimmers of spring.

Bee-Watching @ The Liz Christy Community Garden

The Liz Christy Community Garden, at the corner of the Bowery and Houston, is a fabulous little gem with the distinction of being NYC's first community garden.

Not much is in bloom there yet, but the lone honeybee gathering pollen from the miniature tulips generously allowed me to grab some nice shots of her beautiful self with my iPhone. With assistance from the afternoon sun, she cast lovely shadows on the tulip's petals. (As always, click the pic for a bigger, better view.)

Go Forth and Pollinate

We're getting a delightfully unexpected spate of warm weather and around here; the crocuses are going nuts and even some dandelions are blossom-poppin'.

This, of course, turns the mind toward bees. Wren and I were pleased to see a couple of honeybees hovering around the witch hazel blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Saturday, but may have arrived a bit late in the day to catch the action on the crocuses.

I remember our first spring of beekeeping, the thrill of realizing that our hives had successfully overwintered. We arrived upstate early one Saturday afternoon in April and found the bees gathering pollen from our purple crocuses. The photo below was taken on that day.As we all continue our blissful (if temporary) Vulcan mind-meld with Springtime, I've collected links to a few good sites on the pollen plants bees depend on.

For those of you who garden, I hope these lists will inspire bee-friendly choices. The more good stuff (nectar, pollen) is out there for the bees—especially in early spring and during "dearth" periods like late summer—the better off they'll be. For the rest of us, beekeeper and bee-worshiper alike, I hope knowing a little more about the pollination aspect of things will be enriching.

New Jersey Beekeepers Association list of pollen-nectar plants.

Nectar and pollen plants of the Pacific Northwest.

A list of good things to plant for bees if you're located down South.

An "intro to pollen" from Wikipedia.

A list of crop plants pollinated by honeybees.

A super-cool pollen color chart (also from Wikipedia).

Below, one of our honeybees packing her pollen basket with the asparagus blossoms' bounty.

Jewelweed

I first came to love jewelweed as a kid at camp. Also known as "touch-me-not," the pods of this lovely, commonplace plant "explode" when touched, posing an irresistible temptation to break the vivid commandment engendered in the plant's name.
Here's a seed and the spring-like mechanism that sends the seeds catapulting far and wide—a most ingenious and dramatic mechanism of seed dispersal.Even now—many years removed from being a kid at camp—I revel in the child-like pleasure of prodding fat jewelweed pods to make them burst.

The honeybees (and bumblebees, and hummingbirds) revel in the jewelweed, too, energetically working its blossoms from July through the end of August. This summer, their labors brought a bumper crop of popping pods disbursing the seeds far and wide.
The bee has to go pretty deep inside the fluted flower to reach the nectar spur.
When it does so, it rubs against the the cluster of stamens with white anthers that you can see here. This transfers pollen onto the bee's head and back. Ingeniously, the ovary is located just above the anthers, so as the bee moves from flower to flower to gather nectar, it transfers the pollen from one flower to the ovaries of another.Here's what the bee looks like when it's working the jewelweed. It took me a few weeks to figure this out. At the hives, I'd see bees coming in with these white stripes on their backs. I didn't realize it was pollen—I figured my queen had mated with some odd-looking drones.
Here are some shots of the bees combing the pollen off their heads and backs, and transferring it to their pollen baskets. Note the wonderful variations in the blossoms' color and patterns.
Jewelweed is, by the way, a native plant, possessing some pretty interesting properties, including great-tasting seeds.

Portulaca Honeybee

Autumn has been gentle so far, with no hard frost as of yet and none predicted for the upcoming week. Though there's been significant die-back of the bees' forage plants, there are still a few decent stands of goldenrod and a great deal of aster to continue provisioning the bees for winter. The weather has been balmy and the bees have been foraging intensively in their continuing effort to pack away as much nectar and pollen for winter as they can. (My beekeeper mentors tellme a colony needs at least 60 pounds of honey to survive the winter; an inconceivable amount of work when you consider the size of a honeybee. Happily, all three of my hives appear to have attained the necessary stores.)

This weekend, I observed the bees foraging on borage, sunflower, black knapweed, ornamental (late-blooming) milkweed, zinnia, squash blossoms, and salvia, along with aster and goldenrod.

I was particularly intrigued to see a bee working the portulacas I planted early this summer near the front of the house. Though I have seen bees scope out these flowers throughout the summer (and occasionally collect dew drops from the petals), I've never seen a bee gather nectar or pollen from these plants—probably because better options abounded. But with the forage menu diminishing daily, this busy bee put aside any scruples she may have had about delving into the portulaca and literally immersed herself in the task, till she was dusted from head to tail with pollen.

Autumnal Musings

Autumn has definitely come to Hooterville, complete with an explosion of aster and the first hesitant dropping of maple, birch and chestnut leaves.
It puts one in a reflective state of mind. As pretty as it is this time of year, I'm always sorry to see summer end. Yes, it's 90 degrees today, but it's still autumn! I know it, and the bees surely know it.
They're working hard gathering nectar and pollen off the aster, jewelweed, and goldenrod. These plants are providing the remaining nectar flow of the year—the last flow the bees have available to them before winter restricts them to a long period of waiting in the hive. It's truly a race against time, against the hard frost that will nail the remaining flowers and end the flow entirely, forcing the bees to survive the winter on whatever they have stored up until that point.

This girl's pollen baskets are packed, and she's entering the hive to store what she's collected. Then she'll go right back out again and collect some more.
I did a "hive dive" (inspection) of Rebel Rebel the other day. Things were looking pretty crowded in there and I wanted to see what was up (especially because—did I forget to mention it?—Hive Orange swarmed last weekend, just in time for my mother's visit!). During the visit to the hive, a little honey dripped from my hive tool and these bees were quick to gather it up. I love how pretty they look when they do that! Like girls at a soda fountain in an Archie comic book.

One curious bee decided to check out my record-keeping notebook. There's always so much to see and do in the hive that I have to write everything down right then and there to keep track. The record-keeping helps me follow the many changes that occur in each hive from week to week, as well as my own actions and the results of those. There is so, so much to learn. I hope my brain is big and wrinkled and grey-mattered enough to handle it all.


The notebook comes from a great letterpress printing studio called Foxglove Press.

Honeybees and Goldenrod

Last week, tightly clenched goldenrod buds appeared everywhere, suppressing their yellow but hinting at good things to come. I've been told that the nectar flow from goldenrod is one of the major honeybee forage sources in this area. Its appearance, like the blue jays calling, is also a signal that here in the Northern Catskills, summer has shifted into low gear for the steep decline toward autumn.
Two days ago, the goldenrod started really showing its stuff. And today, of course, the honeybees were on the case. This girl is plunging her proboscis into the flower's nectaries, and has packed a modest amount of goldenrod pollen on her pollen basket (located on her hind leg—a.k.a. the bee's knee).As this honeybee travels from one goldenrod blossom to another, she'll continue mixing pollen with saliva and then packing it into the basket. (Unlike other bees and pollinators, a honeybee will continue working the same type of flower, continuously, with different individuals working "monogamously" on various types of flowers at any given time. This week, along with the goldenrod, the bees seem to be mainly working the thistle, knapweed, and burdock.)

This honeybee has packed her pollen basket nice and full.
Here's a closeup of the pollen basket filled with a load of protein-rich pollen to fortify and sustain the hive.

A Tour of the Hive

Two weeks ago, I paid a visit to the bee yard to confirm that the (previously) virgin queens had mated and were laying "the next generation" in Hive Orange and Green Hive, both of which swarmed on June 21, taking with them the old queens and leaving newly raised, virgin queens behind. I was pleased to find plenty of evidence that all was well, reproduction-wise, in both hives. Here's a quick tour of what I found. (Click the photos to view them in a larger format.)

In these two combs, you see just what a beekeeper hopes to find: plenty of capped worker brood—the cells covered by the tan-colored, porous-looking caps in the middle of the comb. Notice that these capped cells form a nice pattern filling in the majority of cells in the the comb. This is suggestive of a good queen who has laid each of her eggs in a efficient pattern along the comb. Bordering the top of the comb, the bees store nectar (note the pale or yellowish uncapped cells) and capped honey (whitish caps).

Below that are some dark, uncapped cells in which pollen is being stored. Both food sources—honey for carbs, pollen for protein—are conveniently located above the brood cells to make it easier for the nurse bees to mix "bee bread" (pollen + nectar/honey) to feed the larvae numerous times a day over a period of several days. During this time, the larvae grow at a rapid rate. Once they are ready to morph into the winged creature we know as the honeybee, the cell is capped and the magical rearrangement of the bee's molecular biology begins.

Here you see larvae being fed and attended to by nurse bees. You also see some capped cells inside of which are larvae undergoing metamorphosis.

Once the bees have built out enough combs for a nice, big broodnest, they start building honeycombs—combs with larger cells for storing honey and pollen that will be used during times of dearth and, of course, during wintertime when nothing's blooming and it's too cold for the bees to fly. The dark cells in this lovely bee-composition contain pollen. Along the top and upper-middle right is capped honey. There are also some as-yet empty cells and cells containing uncapped nectar.

After the bees bring nectar into the hive and deposit it in the cells, it takes some time (and effort on the bees' part—mainly through the fanning of their wings) to reduce the moisture level to the point where it becomes honey. Once it does, the bees cap the cell with wax, keeping the precious substance clean and protected for future use. As William Longgood observes in his great book The Queen Must Die, "To the bee, honey is the ultimate reality."

Here's a closeup of the pollen, capped honey, and open cells. By the way, the pollen colors vary enormously as different plants come into bloom and are visited by the bees. I can't be sure, but I suspect this pollen is from white clover.

When I look at a closeup like this—and every time I visit the hive and watch how hard the bees are working—I can't help but think about how many dozens of trips by dozens of bees it takes to fill a single cell with honey or pollen. Truly, every teaspoon of honey and every grain of pollen represents a herculean effort on the part of the honeybees.
And that's leaving aside the genius of the comb itself...