>> Paul Wilson: Hello, students, this is Plants and Animals of Southern California. And we're at Towsley Canyon, or also known as Ed Davis County Park. And it's late April, springtime. There's flowers everywhere, and it's 72 degrees. So we have the [inaudible] are starting to warm up and come out. And this little lecture is going to be about bees in particular. So there are lots of different types of pollinators of course, which include bees, flies, beetles, hummingbirds, moths, moths are important pollinators, moths and butterflies are important pollinators here and elsewhere. And of course lemurs are important pollinators in Madagascar. [Laughter] Okay; so bees, what are bees? Bees are a branch on the tree of life. And this branch contains thousands of species, that little branch that comes out of a larger branch that includes the wasps. So a bee is a special case of a wasp, and it's really just sort of a technical detail. Bees have their hairs branched, whereas wasps don't have their hairs branched, which is like the silliest little stupid thing. But what it really is associated with is the bee branch of the tree of life has gone over to feeding its babies pollen; whereas before that there were wasps that were feeding their babies other things besides pollen, like for instance, other insects. Now, there are other species of wasps that have independently evolved feeding their babies pollen. So it's not that it's the thing itself, it's more like the metaphysical event of that one origination of -- >> They're picking the pollen or the nectar? >> Paul Wilson: Both. >> Oh. >> Paul Wilson: But pollen -- okay so nectar basically has no proteins in it. It's just candy. >> Oh. >> Paul Wilson: You can use it to run on, right, because you can flap your wings using nectar -- using carbs. But in order to build baby bee bodies, you need to have protein, and protein is gotten from pollen. So bees collect both pollen and nectar, and then they fortify their young with a little wad of pollen and sometimes that's moistened with nectar, and then they also might provide some kind of honey, and so on. Now, the bees are most familiar with -- or probably the most extreme and weird bees, just like the mammals you're the most familiar with are the most extreme and weird kind of mammal; like the mammals that you're familiar with they gestate their babies for 9 months. And then they have to take care of them for years, and years, and years, which is kind of weird. >> [Inaudible Comment]. >> Paul Wilson: The bees you're most familiar with are honeybees, apis mellifera. There are several species of honeybees, genus Apis, and they are super eusocial [phonetic]. So like they are like eusocial like ants are eusocial. They have a queen, and that queen churns out thousands and thousands of eggs. And then those eggs grow up to be workers mainly, and the workers take care of the eggs, and take care of the hive, and go out and do all the foraging, and do obviously, you know, so on and so forth. So there's this big division of castes between workers and reproductives, the queens and the drones in honeybees. And the hive is a super-organized operation. Also, you may know that the honeybees they do this waggle dance whereby they can communicate among foragers about the direction of a field of flowers, and how rich it is in nectar, and how far it is, so quite a bit of information can be communicated by that waggle dance. And they forage in that sense with some level of cooperation and teamwork. That's all very weird among the bees. Any other bee besides the genus Apis doesn't have that kind of elaborate communication. So we might think of bumblebees as another less elaborate level of sociality. And bumblebees the way they work is in late fall queens and drones are produced, and they fly around, and they have fun together very briefly, and then the drones just -- they sit on flowers waiting to die. [Laughter] And so then this queen, that's now carrying around a bunch of sperm, it finds a hole someplace, and it lives throughout the winter in that hole. It hibernates throughout the winter in that hole. And this is mainly in cold climates. Bumblebees are not a big thing in Los Angeles County. Bumblebees are a much bigger thing if you go to 8,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada. So during the winter, the solitary, the queens by themselves, one queen at a time by itself, is hibernating in a hole in the ground usually, and then after the snows melt, she comes out. And so in early spring, a month ago here, but maybe right now at 8,000 feet in the Sierra, you would see all these great big bumblebees foraging on flowers, doing work. And those are queens; because the first little month or so of foraging, who has to do the work? Well, there are no workers, so it has to be the queens. And they find a nest, a place to build a nest, and usually a hole in the ground like an old rodent hole or something like that, and then they lay some eggs and they make some -- a few honey pots, and they put wads of pollen on the developing larvae, and the developing larvae then eat that pollen, and depending on how big a wad of pollen they put on a developing larvae, that depends on how big the new bee will emerge. So maybe in a couple months, 6 weeks or something after you see the first queens, then the workers come out, and you never see any queens again, because the queens are staying at home now, and now that they have workers to do the foraging for them. And these workers, which are somewhat smaller and vary a lot more in their size, they are going around collecting pollen, and collecting nectar, and they're each doing it individually. They're not going back to the nest and saying, "Okay; I found this great field. Everybody come over here and do it." No; each worker goes out and starts finding some flowers, and then after a while they will have kind of found the type of flower that works for that individual, and they'll mainly major on that. They're like -- they could be brassica majors. But then they might have a couple minors too. So a brassica major might be a composite minor. And they just check out the composites, and in case the brassicas crash, then they know how the composites are doing and they might change their major. But of course the very fact that they're majoring on brassica is removing a lot of the nectar and pollen from the brassica, which is making it less valuable to the next bumblebee that comes along trying to choose its major. So then anyway they bring all of this stuff back to the nest, and a good nest might have a few hundred bumblebee workers throughout the summer. They make little pots then they put honey in them, and then they make other little cocoons that the queen lays eggs in, and they put pollen wads on those, and stuff like that. You can raise bumblebees; they're really fun to raise. They're nice pets. And it's really becoming -- like in my lifetime it's become kind of a thing to do in agriculture. Back in the day, if you wanted to raise tomatoes in the middle of winter in greenhouses, you had to go around with tuning forks and buzz the pollen out of the flowers during the wintertime. Now you can raise tomatoes in greenhouses by getting a bumblebee queen going out of sync with the year. She'll make a bunch of workers and they'll go around and do all the pollination for you. >> Yes. >> Paul Wilson: So bumblebees are a level of sociality that we would still call eusocial, but it's not like that really high developed eusociality of honeybees. [ Silence ] There's a whole bunch of other species of bees that are a little bit social, you know, like there are some that form lagragations [phonetic], but they all go out and forage. They just sort of share a nest or something like that. And those would typically be sisters of one another I think. And there's various other kinds of sociality that's just a little teeny bit social that's risen within the bees. But the vast number of species of bees are not social, they're solitary bees. So we call them solitary when they're not social at all. And those solitary bees they have a seasonal cycle too, whereby they might drill a hole in soft wood, and lay an egg, and then put a wad of pollen on it, and put some carbs in there, seal that up, lay another egg, put another wad of pollen on it, seal that up, keep on filling up these holes in the wood. And we have quite a few species that are doing that type of nesting. Then we have a ton of ground nesting species. You'll see little holes in the ground, and then bees -- every once in a while a bee will fly up and go into one; or a bee will come out of one. And that is a female bee that is doing her work; like she's laying eggs and taking care of all of those developing larvae. Now, they never see their offspring. That female is going to die. And the larvae won't hatch out until usually the following year. Like the following March it will get its kind of cues, and it will emerge from its pubie [phonetic]. They have pubie, right, so they'll -- they pupate over the winter typically. Now, we have a lot of species of bees that do all sorts of different things, in terms of like the way they forage and how they specialize and stuff like that. Honeybees are super generalists. You can take honeybee hives and take them out into agricultural fields, and they'll pollinate practically anything. And because of that, they are a kind of a lynch pin of our whole agricultural system. Like we rely on honeybees for an awful lot of pollination. The value of honeybees to humans is only very partially the honey we get from them. We do get honey from them, but we can live without the honey easily. But they're the ones that responsible for all your zucchinis, and watermelons, and any number of other things. That doesn't mean that they're great pollinators. Like on a per individual basis, some of these native bees would be much better pollinators. The thing is, you can truck in honeybees and get 10,000 of them without any effort. Getting 10,000 native ground-dwelling bees, that's a big deal. So there is some concern that honeybees could experience major crash. From time to time we do have big problems with the honey -- not getting enough honeybees. You know, one parasite or another or some other little problem, whatever, you know, the honeybee population will crash. And then -- and we've had a lot of problems with that recently. And so it might behoove us to try to come up with other alternative pollinators. Many of these other species of bees would be good pollinators. It turns out that even by providing undisturbed, unplowed rows in-between the fields it sometimes can really help. For instance, an alfalfa, there's a specialist alfalfa bee that loves alfalfa, and it's a great pollinator of alfalfa. And all it needs is just some ground in which to nest. So if every so often instead of planting alfalfa you just leave a place that's never plowed, that's where the soil can get compacted, the bees can live there and then they can pollinate the alfalfas; alfalfa plants. One thing I should say is most bees are kind of generalists, and they'll visit all sorts of flowers. There are some that are specialists, but what does being a specialist mean? It's not that they only visit a certain kind of flower, it's that they only use the pollen from a certain kind of flower. They might visit other flowers for nectar, or just to check them out, but if there's a community of flowers, and you have some bee, like say it's a morning glory bee, then there will be some morning glories there, but there will be a lot of other types of flowers, and they'll only use the morning glory pollen to fortify their larvae. They're called "illegalectic [phonetic] bees." They use few kinds of pollen. Now, here's an idea. I don't know if this is true, but it's possible that this pollen is of a certain value; like there's a certain protein value to morning glory pollen. And if they are a legal ex [phonetic], if they're specialists, then evolution can shape the instincts of the mother to give just the right amount of that kind of pollen to the larvae that's going to develop; whereas in polylactic bees evolution can't figure out the right amount of pollen. So the mother has to give the larvae way more pollen than is just the right amount, because the pollen varies so much in its quality as a protein source. Oh, maybe I should also talk about how they carry pollen. So in the group of bees that honeybees and bumblebees belong to, they carry their pollen on their hind legs wetted down. So they spit up a little bit of nectar, and add it to the pollen, and then they wad it up onto their leg. And that pollen once it's wadded up we think has almost no chance of getting on a stigma and successfully, you know, fertilizing a seed and being a good dad. Instead, it's all going to go to raising baby bee bodies. Most bees don't have that wet system, instead they have all sorts of elaborate brushes and combs, so a bunch of hairs like a comb, like a hairbrush comb, and they all pack the pollen into it dry. That means that it has a little bit better chance of being effective in pollination, but it's just a different way of carrying the pollen. And those combs and brushes, the ones that hold pollen, they're called "scopy" [phonetic]. >> Scopy? >> Paul Wilson: Yes; the singular is scopa [phonetic]; scopa. And the families of bees are easy to distinguish based on where they carry their pollen. So, for instance, amegacyladi [phonetic], which we have a lot of, they carry their pollen on the bottom of their abdomen. And then other bees like sweat bees, a hallicted [phonetic] bee, the family hallictity [phonetic], which includes the sweat bees, they have brushes on their legs.