Tag: bee flowers

The Wool Carder Bee and a little from Gilbert White.

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I was trying to adopt a “less is more” approach for this post as I had written about the Anthidium, or Wool Carder bees when I painted Anna’s Bee back in December and included some of Fabre’s lovely writing about what he called “The Cotton Bee”.

But there is so much to know about these really attractive rather wasp-like little bees. So, I can do no better really than to send you over to biologist Blackbirds’s excellent Bug Blog, to read the posts tagged with Anthidium manicatum here.

There are 4 excellent posts with some wonderful photographs and observations of behaviour and links. Here are just two photos: the male with his lovely yellow face and the shy little female.

Male feeding     female A manicatum

Photos by Blackbird from Bug Blog.

This is a short quote from the post entitled “ Wool Carder Bee Watching 2: the Female”

“The first time I came across Anthidium manicatum, the Wool-Carder Bee was after hearing it, not the usual humming noise bees make when flying, but that produced by a female’s jaws cutting the hairs of a plant I had recently planted in the garden, Lamb’s Ears (Stachys byzantina). Since then, this has been a plant that has not been missing from the garden, just because it is a sure way of attracting Wool-Carder bees.”

If you are interested in these bees and others there are many other wonderful posts in the blog. The Anthidium family have many fascinating variations on the black and yellow patterning.  There is a very good page showing different types on the French “World of Insects” site, compiled by Alain Ramel here.

Gilbert White and Selborne

It’s inevitable that we who like bees will find the same references from the great Natural History writers or a nicer way of putting perhaps the ‘natural philosophers’.
Blackbird has also included Fabre in the anthidium posts and this passage from Gilbert White’s summer observation from “The Natural History of Selborne” which, on a gloomy cold rainy day here made me smile!  His entry is from July 11th 1772.

“Drought has continued five weeks this day.  Watered the rasp and annuals well. There is a sort of wild bee frequenting the garden-campion for the sake of its tomentum, which probably it turns to some purpose in the business of nidification.  It is very pleasant to see with what address it strips off the pubes, running from the top to the bottom of a branch, & shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver. When it has got a vast bundle, almost as large as itself, it flies away, holding it secure between its chin and its forelegs.”

But I came across this passage from a different  source .. from the lovely annotated site “The Natural History of Selborne,  Journals of Gilbert White” compiled by animator Sydney Padua. You can read entries by month and date which show Gilbert White’s simple observations from different years, here are 2 entries for tomorrow, the last day of February.

  • “1769: February 28, 1769 – Raven sits.
  • 1768: February 28, 1768 – Wet continues still: has lasted three weeks this day. Pinched off the tops of the cucumber plants, which have several joins.”

Reading back over passages from this wonderful book, which our family, as many others, has never been without, I had forgotten..( how could I!) about Timothy the Tortoise, and had a flash of memory about our much loved childhood tortoises.
The site is full of links to Gilbert White, the Journals, Selborne  etc. and one of my favourite quotes is .. in response to people writing to her and asking if their version of the book is valuable (there are thousands)..

“The best reply was my husband’s, to an email that read in its entirety, “I have a copy of “The Natural History of Selborne is it worth anything” — “If you read it, yes.”

Sydney, by the way is one of those excellent animators I was talking about yesterday whose drawing skills are so very good. See her animation site and wonderful sketches here.

The Painting

I had a small dilemma. I want to paint the male bee as his markings are slightly more showy and wanted to show that rather intimidating spiked tail,  but I also wanted to include the wooly plant Stachys byzantina (Lambs Ears) which the bees use to make their nests.

This could be thought of as misleading because it is the female who makes the nests but I was encouraged to read that the males also feed on Stachys flowers, and, of course, hang around the plant too in search of a mate.
I initially thought about including a bigger leaf with a tiny drawing of the female carding.. but common sense prevailed. I was able to use Anna’s specimen again too, but had a slight accident and lost half of it on the floor..after an hour searching with a torch I did retrieve it. Half a bee is not easy to find on a patterned carpet.

But anyway, here is the male heading hopefully  over to the Lamb’s Ears!

anthidium sketch sm woolcarder sketch small

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The Wool Carder bee, Anthidium manicatum and Wooly Lamb’s Ear Stachys byzantina

woolcarder bee sm

Watercolour and pencil on Arches HP. 7’” square approx.

The Common Carder Bee and Lavender

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Back in September while I was home in Lincolnshire I was beginning to take a bit more notice of the bees that were still around in the garden. There were the big bumbles and honey bees, but also lots of these pretty dainty gingery bees which I now know are Bombus pascuorum (L. Pascuum: of the meadow) the Common Carder Bee. They don’t look like the archetypal bumble bee because they are not so obviously striped and, like yesterdays B pratorum, are small and dainty.

 

pasc indentity sm

B Pascuorum: male 13 –14mm, left,  and Queen 16-18mm /worker 10-15mm right I watched them, one sun drenched afternoon, picking their way through the last of the lavender flowers which I had been sent to trim. (you can see the dead heads on the right.)

There were just a few remaining blossoms which I could not bring myself to cut down, much to my father’s bemusement and slight irritation! I left them, untidy stragglers that they were, for the bees.

my pasc lincs sept sm

What I now know is Bombus pascuorum on the remaining lavender in Lincs in September.

The bee above is, I am pretty sure, a male, due to the long antennae and I can’t see a pollen basket either.  They are called “carder bees” because of their habit of using “combed “ bits of vegetation and moss to cover over their nests which they will make in tussocky grass or in old deserted animal burrows.

They are very hairy little bees, never losing the thick tufty gingery hair on their thorax. Some bumble bees develop  a definite bald spot here, as did my bombus hortorum,  see my post “A Forlorn and Balding Bee”.

Again my source for nearly all my bumblebee info is from the excellent  Bumblebee.org. I sat and watched them for some time buzzing round the lavender and saw how they have a very endearing way of  swinging their little front legs forward when approaching a flower, preparing to land or grasp the flower.. so here is my carder bee approaching the last of the lavender.
carder sketch 2 carder bee sketch3

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The Common Carder Bee, Bombus Pascuorum and Lavender 

bombus pascuorum sml

Watercolour and pencil on Arches HP.  6 x 8 inches.

I realise that this is the last of the Bumble Bees I intended to paint for the exhibition, but of course there are others, and some very interesting ones, that we could see in the UK.
So I just might try to fit in a “Shrill Carder Bee” or the recently arrived “Tree Bumble Bee” or even the Short Haired Bumblebee who is coming back to us from New Zealand.. you can read all about these at the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

The White Tailed Bumble Bee and the Short but Merry Life of the Male Bumble Bee.

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This is another of the Natural History Museum’s “Big Six” common UK Bumble Bees and very similar to B hortorum.  (I think some of these bees are very hard to distinguish from each other).
Bombus lucorum has an all white tail (mostly)and the yellow stripes are a clearer more lemony yellow, than those of B terrestris.

 

lucorum ident

Bombus lucorum: male left and queen/worker right

The males may have varying amounts of yellow on their thorax too! Its all quite difficult for a beginner. I have chosen to paint the male. He has the most charming moustache and it gives me the opportunity to write a little about the male of the species.

Males are much smaller than females and have no pollen baskets on the hind legs, which is fine as they don’t really have much fetching and carrying to do!

shutterstock_463463

White tailed bumble bee by Steve McWilliam from Shutterstock.com.

The Life of the Male Bumble Bee

“Short” really sums it up, but by turns frantic, in his search for a lovely mate, and lazy, in that he does no work to help with the colony. But then it’s hard to blame him as he really has little chance to contribute much.
One of the last bees to emerge from the nest, the males are not even a twinkle in the Queen’s eye until after she and her workers have established the colony. As Bumblebee.org explains, the arrival of the males signifies the decline of the colony.

“The production of males usually signals the beginning of the end of the co-operation and organisation of the nest. The males drink the stores of honey, but do not forage to replace it. “

Once he has left the nest he is not, generally, allowed to return so must resign himself to a hedonistic life of chasing queen bees, drinking nectar and sleeping in flowers.  His sole purpose is to mate. (Although its seems that some more enlightened American bumble bee males,  a breed of “new bee” I guess, do lend a hand in incubating the young.)

After the males have left the new young virgin queens will begin to emerge and the game is on. Courtship rituals depend on the species but all the males will spend a considerable time on the look-out for a mate.
Sometimes they will perch on some high vantage point and adopt a “knock ‘um dead” approach, zooming in and literally knocking the female to the ground, some lay sweetly smelling pheromone trails to attract a mate and some, abandoning all semblance of romance just hang around the nest entrance and pounce.. something like a night club I suppose.

Some people, noticing a sudden increase in bumble bee activity in the summer, become nervous and think the bees may have suddenly become more aggressive, but stinging you is the very last thing on the male bees mind!
It’s interesting that different species of bees will patrol for mates at specific heights. Bombus lapidarius, terrestris and this little lucorum male will conduct tree top high romance while sylvestris and hortorum hang out nearer the ground.

This patrolling behaviour was noticed by Darwin .. here is a passage from “Bees of the World” by Christopher O’Toole and Anthony Raw:

“He observed that several male bumble bees flew along well-defined routes in his son’s garden. He enlisted the help of his grand children in following them and it transpired that the bees flew along circuitous routes. Darwin’s notebooks show that he speculated correctly as to the nature of these circuit flights. He notes how several males of Bombus hortorum patrolled the same circuit and landed repeatedly  at the same spots, which he suspected were scented by the bees. He wondered of the bees at their landing places “Is it like dogs at a corner stone?”” ….

Nice to be Darwin’s grandchildren..if a bit dizzying..

The Painting

I decided to have a front  view of this little bee to show off moustache, perching on some leaves.  I was researching about how important willow trees were to bees, especially as they are an early nectar source for spring bees, and happened upon James’ blog Musings of a Surrey Beekeeper.

He was feeling guilty about cutting back his willow.  Being a new bee keeper as I am a new bee artist, he was not aware of how important willows are either. But they didn’t make it easy for him:

”Willow has this uncanny knack of reminding you that it is a very efficient whip.You turn your face towards it and out of nowhere this little slither of willow just whacks you across the face and it stings – especially in the cold weather. It is almost like it is getting you back for something!” Read more..here

It was the bees James.. the bees…. Anyway I included some willow leaves for James, and to appease his bees!

luc sk 2sm

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The Delightful Little Bombus lucorum male.. on the lookout for a girlfriend.~

bombus lucorum sm

Bombus hortorum and the Cornflower

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We are back from an unexpectedly eventful break, mainly because we, the non sports aware Brits had managed to arrange a night in Miami on Friday, not realising it was Super Bowl weekend.

So South Beach was one big party and our visit to Jungle Island was completely fascinating as we had Jeff with us, who designed the whole ecosystem there. But it’s back to bees now, and number one for the proposed show.

The Garden Bumble Bee, Bombus hortorum.

I have written about this bee before, when I first started the bee project back in October. This is the Bumble Bee with the long face and the longest tongue.

Their tongues may be 12 mm long, almost the length of their entire body, but can reach just over 2 cm when at full  stretch.  These long tongues help them to access the nectar from flowers with long tubular structures as in red clover, cowslips, foxglove, vetches and lavender. If you can watch these  bees you will see them unfurling their tongues as they approach the flower

Here from Shutterstock is a wonderful photograph by Niels van Gijn which shows what I am sure must be B hortorum about to make contact with a tall delphinium.

bee delphiniums

This passage below explains a little about how they achieve pollination of such tall flower spikes and comes from Val Bourne’s excellent UK Gardening, site here.

“If you watch bumble bees visiting a foxglove, or any other flower spike, they always start at the bottom and work upwards. These lower flowers are rich in nectar and as the bumble bee diligently works up the spike, it eventually reaches flowers without any but which are pollen rich. Liberally dusted the bee goes in search of more nectar – so transferring pollen from the upper flowers of the first spike to the lower petals of the next it visits. Thus cross pollination takes place and seed is set.”

She has more information about bumble bees and bumble bee plants too which I shall be returning to in a future post.

The Cornflower

All bumble bees like flowers from the Knapweed family (Centaurea), which includes one of my very favourite “wild” flowers, the Cornflower, Centaurea cyanus.

In its truly wild form it is a rare thing and I can’t remember when I  last saw it actually growing wild.
At Plantlife, the UK charity working to protect Britain’s wild plants, you can adopt one and help prevent them from becoming extinct, however I am not sure how the wild species differ from the garden variety, which I would always include in annual sowings.

shutterstock_44570143

Image by David Koloechter from Shutterstock.com

it’s a fascinating flower with its beautiful blue colour, anthocyanin, a pigment which is  responsible for the red, purple, and blue colors of many plants.

The  blue dye  obtained from the petals is edible, as are the flowers, which you can use to pretty-up a salad.  And, surprising to me, they are included in Twinning’s Lady Grey tea which is favourite of mine… especially with toast and honey:)

The Painting

The main focus for this set of paintings is, again, on the bees.
But this time I planned them to contain more than the studies I made for Deborah. So most will have a simple pencil addition of some sort.  I dithered for almost a day about this, how big, how small, how much, what position?

I am not fulfilling a strictly scientific brief here and never really could or would want to. My aim is rather to portray something of the essence and character of the bees and add something that relates to them.

In the end I made a bigger gap between the flower and the bee than I had originally planned on my tiny thumbnail sketch. I prefer the separation and therefore, (following in my hero Mark Catesby’s footsteps) don’t have to worry too much about relative scale.

I may add more later but will live with this for now. This is really a development of the first hortorum I painted but a slightly altered pose and more refined (and correct) detail.

The Garden Bumble Bee, Bombus hortorum, with Cornflower, Centaurea cyanus.

 

Bombus hortorum with cornflower sm

Watercolour and pencil on Arches HP.  6 x 7 inches

Biodiversity and More Bee Flower Notes: Flowers 10 to 20

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It’s the last day of January and next week I have to seriously start my work for the “20 British Bees”.

For this next project I will be making some simple paintings of plants/flowers too and writing about them as I go.

They really do go hand in hand. The pencil and colour drawing of lovely “Lili” was a try-out for the bee series, as I will aim for a bit more of a sense of place to these next paintings.

Five a Day for Bees.

So here are some more flowers which bees like. I am learning that some they use for nectar and some for pollen and how important it is to keep a supply of bee friendly flowers as mixed as possible and spread throughout the seasons.

Earlier this month there were some interesting findings from French researchers showing that, just like us needing our 5 fruit and veg, bees are healthier if they have a mixed diet of five different pollens.

For a bee, foraging on just one crop is rather like us being fed exclusively on big Macs devoid even of the token bits of green stuff.  It’s a very interesting read..here from the BBC. David Aston, who chairs the British Beekeepers’ Association technical committee says this:

“If you think about the amount of habitat destruction, the loss of biodiversity, that sort of thing, and the expansion of crops like oilseed rape, you’ve now got large areas of monoculture; and that’s been a fairly major change in what pollinating insects can forage for.

As a consequence,  bees often do better in urban areas than in the countryside, because city parks and gardens contain a higher diversity of plant life. “

Go.. City Gardeners.. go!!.. my balcony is important. Elaine Hughes, expert gardener for the London Wildlife Trust says this!

“Would-be urban gardeners without a front or back lawn need not despair. Gardening in areas as small as windowsills or balconies is essential in that it creates sheltering areas and provides stop off points for insects and birds as they weave their way through neighbourhoods.” from the Ecologist, on creating a Wildlife Garden here

I have a feeling that bees are something of a “fashionable” cause at the moment.

I just hope the eco luvvies will not move onto something else too soon, because I don’t think reversing the decline in bee species will be a quick fix.

Someone said to me the other day. “Oh.. I thought bees were ok now”.

I don’t think they are quite yet.

Ten more Flowers

I did not sketch these flowers in any particular order or category,  just as I read about them. I should have been a bit more organised, but it will be nice to fill up the sketchbook, only ten more pages to go.

For flowers 1 to 10 see here.

Clarkia/Godetia  and  Borage Borago officinalis

godetiasm

Harebells Campanula rotundifolia  and  Purple Cone Flower Echinacea purpurea

Cotoneaster and Hawthorn, Crataegus oxyacantha

Kidney Vetch Anthyllis vulneraria and Sea Holly Eringium maritimum

Wallflower Cheiranthus /Erysimum and Cranesbill Geranium

geraniumsm

Also, I have just received a wonderful pack of seeds from Hometown Seeds, with enough vegetables for more than half an acre and planting guides etc.

I am looking at the 6ft by 3 ft balcony and wondering where to start :).

Flowers need Bees and Bees need Flowers:Bee Flowers 1 to 10

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I have been out the last couple of days enjoying some sunshine but also seeing the terrible frost damage at Leu Gardens. I know it will grow back but seeing so many brown and leafless trees and shrubs is quite depressing.

There are not many flowers and fewer bees, but I always seem to find the indefatigable honey bee. Here is one enjoying one of the few camellias that survived the frost.

honey bee

who was then joined by a tiny ant..

bee and ant

When writing about bees at some point you do have to think about plants too.
They all need each other.
I have started keeping a notebook about the flowers that bees really like, so when I do eventually have a garden again I can plant a bee heaven.

There are of course many bee friendly flowers and I have a long long list, but here are the first ten, very rough, colour notes in a small moleskine.

Knapweed Centuaurea and Californian Poppy Eschscholzia

Cornflower Centaurea and Fleabane Erigeron

Dandelion Taraxacum and Forget-me-not Myosotis

Globe Buddleia Globosa and Grape Hyacinth Muscari

Hollyhocks.. Alcae (a real favourite with me) and Indian Blanket Gaillardia

They are simply notes, but useful quick reminders for me and could be developed into a nice complementary series to the bees… if I ever have enough time.

USA readers !! Flowers for your bees..

Scott at Hometown Seeds is offering a discount of 10% to blog readers “By entering the coupon code “thanks”, 10% will be reduced from the total cost of any order. The code will be good through February 28, 2010.” see Survival seeds, or Wildflower seeds..

Get some veg for the family and flowers for the bees…and let some of the veg run to flower, the bees will thank you!