Singing the Praises of the Bumblebee - Gardening - Gardens - New York Times - Annotated

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  By ANNE RAVER

  Published: April 24, 2008

• The bumblebee and other native wild bees are all the more important in the garden now that the population of honeybees is in such decline — down to 2.4 million colonies last year from 5.5 million in 1945, according to the Department of Agriculture, due mainly, scientists say, to mites infesting the hives and, lately, to a mysterious epidemic called colony collapse disorder.

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  E. R. Degginger/Photo Researchers

  Bumblebee (Bombus sp.) on thistle.

• There are more than 4,000 species of native bees, according to “The Status of Pollinators in North America,” a 2007 report by the National Research Council in Washington.

• The European honeybee, Apis mellifera, was brought here by the colonists in the early 1600s to make honey, said Tristram Seidler, the staff ecologist for the New England Wild Flower Society. “Its pollination service was only recognized later on,” he said.

• Until then, from the time the first flowering plant was pollinated by a bee 120 million years ago, native bees had been doing the job just fine. In fact, Mr. Seidler said, they are at least 10 times more efficient than honeybees.

  “They visit more plants per hour, at a fast speed, and make pollen more available,” he said.

  Native bees fly farther between flowers, thus doing a better job at cross-pollinating than do

• honeybees.

• Buzz pollination is a process that sounds very nice for both flower and bee: Bumblebees and some other native bees “use their flight muscles to vibrate the flower until the pollen is shaken loose,” Mr. Seidler said. Like honeybees, they use their middle pair of legs to gather the pollen into pollen sacks. “You can see these on bees when they’re flying by.”

  Sometimes they sit on the flower and vibrate; sometimes they hang upside down and do their thing. And when they fly off to other flowers, some of that pollen just naturally falls off and pollinates the plants.