Bumblebees love ice plants

Spot the ant queen

Bumblebees in the lab

Honey bees smell like bananas

Research on honey bees at the University of Sussesx is primarily carried out in LASI, a lab specialising in honey bees and other social insects. I won’t pretend to know much at all about honey bees, their ecology is very different from the wild species I study, but one of the many behavioural elements they study is the pheromones they produce. Over lunch we were offered a bottle of the collected pheromone to smell – because naturally this is the sort of thing we would be doing at lunch – and it has the particularly strong smell of banana-flavoured sweets.

The source of the smell is isoamyl acetate (or banana oil), an organic compound found naturally in banana plants - as well as in the pheromones of honey bees. There’s a myth that the strange banana-like taste in milkshakes and sweets is based on an old variety of banana that was supposedly wiped out by a fungus. There’s little evidence for this. Isoamyl acetate is found in all varieties and is extracted for food flavouring. Presumably though, it was nobody’s intention to also make food taste like honey bee pheromones. But for future reference – that’s what they smell like!

The wildlife patch in August

MRes results - which plants attracted the most pollinators?

My study identified that, predictably, the floral resource (flowers providing pollen and nectar) was the most important determinant of pollinator presence. I will post a more detailed discussion of my findings later on (after my viva!) but here is a quick summary of my findings:

Geraniaceae, Asteraceae, Rosaceae and Lamiaceae were the most visited plant families. From memory, here are some good examples of species in these groups:

Geraniaceae - Cranesbills

Asteraceae - Fleabane

Rosaceae - Spirea

Lamiaceae - Catmint

Results of MRes - the primary determinant of pollinator presence in gardens

I looked at a variety of structural and botanical characteristics of gardens, including their size, habitat composition, location, management, use and plant diversity.

Contrary to the findings of other studies on bumblebees and other insects*, there was no relationship between garden size and the number or diversity of pollinators visiting a garden. In fact, one of the small gardens I sampled contained the second highest abundance of pollinators in the whole study, as shown below.

The most important variables were plant abundance and diversity. Even in the smallest gardens, the right composition of plants made them hotspots for biodiversity. Based on the diversity of plants found in the study it is possible that gardens in Lewes are functioning not only as self-contained habitats capable of supporting pollinators independently, but also as ecological corridors, allowing pollinators to move through the landscape.

(Small solitary bees <8mm, large solitary bees >8mm)

References:

MURATET, A. & FONTAINE, B. 2015.Contrasting impacts of pesticides on butterflies and bumblebees in privategardens in France. Biological Conservation, 182, 148-154.

MATTESON, K. C., ASCHER, J. S. &LANGELLOTTO, G. A. 2008. Bee richness and abundance in New York city urbangardens. Annals of the Entomological Society of America, 101, 140-150.

DAVIES, Z. G., FULLER, R. A., LORAM, A.,IRVINE, K. N., SIMS, V. & GASTON, K. J. 2009. A national scale inventory ofresource provision for biodiversity within domestic gardens. BiologicalConservation, 142, 761-771.

Selfies with bees are hard.

I've hit the critical mark - plus 12,00 words in the dissertation and the minimum expected word count. The whole thing is a blur, separated by charts and coloured headings and the occasional bit of highlighted text which is supposed to encourage me to dig out that article I had in my hand the other day but which is now lost in the pile on my desk. And I'm not sure if I just have a very old version of EndNote, but I'm at the point now where, 197 references in, it takes about a minute to insert or edit a citation and crashes for a few seconds each time.

So I thought I'd go outside and take a bee selfie, inspired by Jeff Ollerton's blog post. 

Small victories (a new pollinator in the garden!)

I count any new species I see on the wildlife patch a small victory. The garden is in a great location as it is, surrounded by agricultural land which has a new wildflower margin every year, as well as woodlands and chalk grassland. So before the project we usually saw lots of honey bees and lots of vanessid butterflies, which take full advantage of all the stinging nettles, thistles, and buddleja.

And since using plants to attract pollinators I've seen a variety of other bees and butterflies over the last 3 years, and even more solitary bees now we have nest boxes for them, but yesterday was an amazing surprise, we had a hummingbird hawkmoth! It was feeding on the red valerian and I only had my phone so the pictures aren't great quality but hopefully it will visit again! So beautiful and really quite loud - like a miniature bird fluttering it's wings.

You may have to look hard to find it in some of the pictures but I wanted to upload all of them :)

For more info on hummingbird hawkmoths: 
http://butterfly-conservation.org/51-1087/humming-bird-hawk-moth.html

And a proper photo (by Umberto Salvagnin)

Mini garden meadow - best so far!

One of the volunteers for my surveys has this most wonderful mini meadow in her garden, thought I'd share to inspire!