There has been a worldwide decline of bees that has caused concern about these vital insects that pollinate about a third of the food produced in the world. People who want to help may want to consider feeding bees in the winter when the temperature gets above 50°.
“The only bees that really overwinter that we need to worry about feeding this time of year are the honeybees,” said Ken Trimble, who heads up the Eureka Springs Pollinator Alliance. “They are the only ones that maintain any size colony over the winter, and they drop in numbers from 60,000 in summertime to 10,000 to 15,000 in spring. That is still a lot of feed needed, and there is not of food out there this time of year.”
Witch hazel and some maple trees bloom late in the winter, providing vital pollen and nectar. But the problem facing honeybees is by January and February they are trying to build their colonies back up.
“That queen will start laying quite a lot of eggs early in the season before the flowers have a chance to emerge,” Trimble said. “They will be dependent on honey reserves that they have stored up the year before. A lot of times beekeepers are guilty of taking more than they should. Bees need sixty pounds of honey to get through the winter. They have a lot of jobs to fulfill even in the winter. They need a lot of energy resources, so they rely on that honey to get by. What happens this time of year is they are beginning to deplete the surplus but their numbers are increasing.”
That can be a problem for the hive. If there isn’t enough food, honeybees can starve this time of year. Beekeepers need to make sure honey bees can get through the winter.
“When we start to see the dandelions, we breathe a sigh of relief,” Trimble said. “When that starts to happen, we can all look at our hives and say, ‘They made it another year.’”
Native bees don’t have the numbers to feed like honeybees. Most of the native bees are solitary bees; they don’t live in a colony. Trimble said the queen will raise maybe 50 or 60 bees in her lifetime, so there aren’t as many bees there.
“They are pretty critical, though, as far as pollination goes,” Trimble said. “We think of honeybees as great pollinators and they are. Fortunately, we have an incredibly diverse array of native bees to help with pollination. Native bees are very specialized in the types of flowers they pollinate. We have a lot of bees out there and we need them all. Some have long tongues and some short. Honeybees can’t pollinate a lot of deep-throated flowers, so we depend on some of the solitary bees, the native bees, to do that type of thing.”
An easy thing to help the bees is putting out a little sugar water this time of year. It can be a simple as a cookie sheet with some cane sugar moistened by spraying water on it.
“It doesn’t have to be elaborate or fancy,” he said. “They will find it. They are good at finding things. Just don’t make the water too deep because bees can drown. They are very poor swimmers. This time of year, the native bees start coming out to begin foraging. But they don’t fly very far, so it is little harder to entice native bees if they haven’t been in your area for a while. A solitary bee, like the mason bee and leaf cutter bees, don’t fly much more than 300 to 400 feet from where they were born. Their queen is the responsible party. She doesn’t have any helpers to raise her brood, so she counts on resources being close at hand. She doesn’t want to expend more energy than she needs to raise her young.”
Native bee queens make provisions for one egg at a time. She brings back nectar and pollen, makes a kind of bee bread, and puts it in the cell with an egg. Then she usually partitions the eggs off to feed through different stages of metamorphosis until they become adults.
“She will be done with egg-laying process by June and that is pretty much the end of her life,” Trimble said. “That’s kind of the way all the solitary bees operate.”
Some types of bees have specialized pollination. For example, the bumblebee has adapted its skills and can do what is called buzz pollination. It holds its wings steady, and rapidly vibrates wing muscles while holding onto plant. It sets up ultrasonic vibrations that cause pollen to release and pollinate the flower.
“That is how the tomato plants get pollinated, by bumblebees,” Trimble said. “Honeybees and mason bees can’t do that. It is a very specialized world out there considering eighty percent of the plants need some kind of pollination. It is kind of a miracle that all these specialized bees have developed to accommodate these plants, and plants have evolved to accommodate the bees. There is incredible cooperation between the plant and animal kingdoms. It is something of a dance.”
The other thing he recommends is planting flowers to feed the bees.
“We just need a strong variety of nutritious plants, our native flowering plants and trees,” Trimble said. “If you can do that, even if it is a windowsill with plants outside, the bees will find it. Eventually if you start providing for native bees, they will come find you. It can just take a while.”
As summer progresses bees, like any other living animal, need water. Trimble said putting out fresh water for bees will help their survival rates. They won’t have to fly so far or end up with water that’s not clean.
“Honeybees need not just for water for themselves, but for cooling the hive,” Trimble said. “It gets warm in the hive. It can’t get above 93 degrees. The job of a lot of the bees during really hot days is to carry water. As it gets hotter, the water gets harder to find.”
For more information about the Eureka Springs Pollinator Alliance, see the group’s Facebook page.