The honey bee is collecting pollen and nectar.

Do you notice another insect in the photograph?

The fly is approaching.

Now it is sitting still.

Now watch what happens when the bee leaves.

It actually hopped off again when the honey bee came back.

Just a little drama around a dandelion flower.

By the way, because they bloom this time of year, dandelions are an important source of food for honey bees. Do you have any blooming in your yard?

These  are two digger bees in a flower called a prickly poppy.

Someone mentioned lately that you rarely see more than one bee per flower. I guess this flower has enough nectar and pollen to share.

Did you recognize the bee last week was a bumble bee?

How do you tell a carpenter bee from a bumble bee? Actually it is difficult to tell in the species that are yellow and black, but one clue is that a carpenter bee has a bare, shiny abdomen and the bumble bee has a fuzzy abdomen.

does this archive photo show a bumble bee or a carpenter bee?

Just for fun, here are some different kinds of bees caught in slow motion.

Shiny green bees like this are called sweat bees, family Halictidae.

For more extensive information about the sweat bee life cycle.

Bees sometimes gather a number of different materials from leaves, including water, resin or sap. Because the plant is infested with lace bugs, which produce honeydew like aphids, I suspect this bee was licking honeydew from the brittlebush leaf. It is likely an example of an insect often considered to be a pest supplying the needs of an insect considered to be beneficial. Isn’t nature wonderfully complex?

But then I spotted this little solitary bee on a leaf.

It appeared to be doing something with its mouthparts on the leaf.

Do you have any idea what it might be doing? I’ll give you a hint, the plant is a brittlebush.

Flowers dressing up with a bee for jewelry.

The warm brown seed beetle looks rather like the seed it was born inside.

Another kind of green malachite attracts your eye.

Captivating captive beauties.

Feels like we need some words of wisdom today. How about:

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.  ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Seems like every flower has a bee visiting.

Sweat bees seem to like the lemon blossoms.

Penstemons appeal to digger bees.

Fiddleneck (Amsinckia intermedia) is also a favorite.

No, that isn’t a bee. Flies like fiddleneck, too.

All these photographs were taken within a half hour in our back yard. The bees are very busy!

Do you have bees flying where you live?

The tiny brown slivers in this flower are actually thrips. The easiest way to see them is to dump a flower upside down onto a white piece of paper.

If you have a microscope, look at the wings of adults. Thrips have a fringe of hairs on their wings.

I tried to get a better photograph with a doubler, but it was too windy. The flowers were bobbing around.

Caught a great photograph of a honey bee with it, though. I wonder how they interact with thrips.

Have you ever seen a thrips?

(Trivia:  Thrips is unusual because both the singular and plural forms are the same word: thrips.)

Now it is time to sweep the cobwebs from the blog, check all the old links, delete the posts that are no longer relevant, and spruce up Growing With Science for the New Year. Time to reflect on what we have accomplished and plan where to go from here. Always a fun time of year.

A special thanks to all the regular followers who have made this blog such a wonderful experience! Please let me know if you have any comments/suggestions/questions to help us become even better in 2011.

How Honey Bees Keep Warm

In the last bug of the week blog post I mentioned that honey bees have a way to keep warm that is different from that used by butterflies. It turns out that the radio show Science Friday had a discussion last week (Friday, December 24th, 2010) all about honey bees called The Buzz on Bees. One of the show’s guests, Dr. Thomas Seeley from Cornell University, explained that even when it is very cold outside honey bees keep the temperature within their hives up to 90° F. That’s pretty warm! No wonder the worker bees are able to fly when no other insects are moving.

(Photograph taken December 28, 2010 in San Diego, California.)

How do the bees keep warm? They feed on the honey they have stored in the honeycomb, which gives them energy to shiver. Basically, honey bee shiver and shake to create warmth. They use about a pound of honey per week to accomplish this (you can hear the podcast here.)

Honey Bees Swarming

Dr. Seeley also talked about how honey bees make new colonies, a process called swarming. During the time that the scout  honey bees are looking for a place to make their new home. Check out the series of 10 videos on the Science Friday website for some fascinating information. If you are interested in honey bees at all, these videos are definitely worth watching.

Vocabulary from the videos:

• queen honey bee – the large bee that lays all the eggs in a bee colony
• swarm – a group of honey bees moving from a colony to find and start a new nest, usually contains a queen and about 10,000 worker bees
• scout bees- worker bees that search for new nests for the swarm, pick the most promising, and lead the rest of the bees to the new site
• waggle dance – the way the scout bees communicate with each other on the surface of the swarm
• piping- a sound scout bees make to rouse the rest of the bees in the swarm to get ready to fly
• buzz run- the actions and sounds of the scout bees letting the swarm bees know it is time to take off
• wax glands- glands on the underside of the honey bee worker’s abdomen that produce wax for the new honeycomb in the new nest
• aggregation pheromone- special odors produced by the honey bees to bring the swarming bees back together in a cluster

Making Honey

The other guest on the show was Dr. May Berenbaum 
from the University of Illinois. She explained how bees make honey from nectar and some of the special properties of honey. Basically the bees gather nectar from flowers, carry it back to their nest in a special stomach called a crop and then pass it to other bees for processing. The worker bees dry the moisture from the nectar, add some special enzymes to change the chemistry of the nectar and over time it becomes honey. When it is done, the bees cap the cells that contain honey with wax. The honey can stay fresh in the cells almost indefinitely.

Activity:

Make a Sweet Honey Book

First discuss how bees collect nectar and make honey.

Information Sheet: What Bees Eat

Secondly, explain that humans have long used honey for food and as a sweetener. Have your children gather stories and poems about honey bees, and recipes using honey from their relatives and family friends and /or the library (like these) or make up their own. Group stories, poems and recipes together to create a small book, decorate with honey bee artwork, and print for distribution.

For more honey bee-related activities and information, see this previous post.

Both Dr. Seeley and Dr. Berenbaum have new books out, written for adults.

Tom Seeley’s is Honeybee Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2010)
.

May Berenbaum is the 
editor of Honey, I’m Homemade: Sweet Treats from the Beehive Across the Centuries and Around the World (University of Illinois Press, 2010).

And for kids:

Note: If any of the links are broken for you, please leave a comment and I will try to retrieve them.