learning about bees

In between trying to re-write the paper (I don't have that much left to do on it, but it becomes an increasingly Sisyphean task as you reach the end), I'm still working on planning the summer bee research.

I read/am reading a couple of more "popular press" or "educated layperson" type books on pollinators: "The Forgotten Pollinators" (Buchmann and Nabhan) and, last night, I started Bernd Heinrich's "Bumblebee Economics."

Heinrich strikes me as a good science writer - his writing is enjoyable and, I guess the right word is "accessible" - some people who are scientists, when they write books, they are so into I AM SO SMART LET ME SHOW YOU HOW that their writing is very dry and dull. Or it's all about them and what they have done in their lives and how great they are. Heinrich really loves his subject, and so he lets the subject shine. He has written several other natural-history books; I am thinking I might want to read some more of them. Even when it's information I already know, I like seeing others' perspective on it; sometimes it gives me a different way of thinking about it or talking about it in class.

Anyway. The Forgotten Pollinators is, you might guess, mainly about non-honeybee pollinators (they actually make a case that, in some ecosystems, honeybees could be seen as an exotic invasive species, crowding out the native pollinators - which are often more efficient at helping the native plants than honeybees are). Towards the end of the book, though, they relate one of those charming and slightly quixotic things you find in the conservation/nature-fan community. They write of Miriam Rothschild, whom they describe as "born...to an eccentric family of British naturalists" (And also a wealthy family - they were, apparently, "those" Rothschilds). She developed an interest in trying to restore pollinator ecology in Britain, so she started butterfly gardening on her family's estate, planting what was essentially like an unmanaged hayfield. And she wrote with delight of how the butterflies returned.

(The authors also quote her, and I like this quotation: "You can really abandon the romantic idea of creating a home for these angelic creatures. The best you can do is provide them with a good pub.")

Apparently she wrote about her butterfly gardening; I may have to look that book up if the lengthy passage Buchmann and Nabhan quoted was from it.

She had a number of degrees, but according to the Wikipedia biography, they were all honorary, and she considered herself an "amateur" scientist. (O, to be able to be that, and never have to apply for grants or feel pressured to write publications!)

I dare say, the more I learn about her - well, the more I want to put her alongside Beatrix Potter in my little list of women naturalist heroes  that I have.

Amazingly - I had never even HEARD of her before, and in several of my classes in college there was some discussion of Women In Science. I suppose because she was a Brit, because she was an "amateur" (and perhaps because she was wealthy), her name never came up.

I just started the Bernd Heinrich book last night but it also promises to be good. Reading this kind of information makes me realize just how little I do know. Until just a year or so ago, I wasn't even aware how many different species of bumblebees there were. I knew about honeybees, and I knew there were some different species of halictids ("sweat bees"), mainly because I've been stung by several different ones. And I knew about carpenter bees (mostly genus Xylocopa), commonly known as "wood bees." But I guess I lumped all the bumblebees into a single group, which is wrong: there are some 50 different species in the US and far more worldwide.

Bumblebees are kind of semi-social insects. Honeybees are truly social, and there are other bees (like mason bees) and many of the wasps that are solitary. The queen honeybee hibernates over the winter (having been impregnated in the fall, she is ready to lay eggs as soon as she emerges). When she wakes up in the spring, she makes a nest - often in an abandoned fieldmouse nest - and builds a "honeypot" out of wax to store the nectar she collects (bumblebees make honey, but only in minute quantities: they keep maybe a 3 days' supply of food on hand, unlike honeybees, who store up for the winter. So while beekeepers and honey-hunters can rob honeybees without it being too much a drain on their survival, you can't take a bumblebee's honey - though Heinrich did note he and some of his co-workers did "taste" the honey, and found it superior to honeybee honey). She raises a brood of workers, and towards the end of the summer, new queens and drones - because she will die at the end of the summer and the new queens will go out and replace her.

But there are also those odd little facts, the things that will probably stick in my head, and when I can't remember exactly how many broods an average bumblebee generates in a summer (3, according to the diagram in the book, with the last one yielding virgin queens and drones), I will remember the odd little fact about bumblebee defense.

That besides the sting (though I have found bumblebees to be mellower and less defensive than the average honeybee, despite the fact that, unlike honeybees, bumblebees don't die after stinging), some species will spray liquid feces when threatened. And another one disables marauding bees bent on taking their brood by vomiting honey all over them.

And okay, I'm kind of juvenile that way, but that mental image made me laugh. And then I thought: I guess that's why they came up with Spiderman as a superhero, and not Bumblebeeman, because vomiting honey is just really gross.

But then I realized: but there already IS a Bumblebee Man:

"Ai yi yi, Vómitos miel, no es bueno"

Heh.