Pollinator Week is Still Every Week
As National Pollinator Week (in the U.S.) is wrapping up this weekend, I thought I’d send a few further bee-related thoughts (and also, I have a question for folks)...
By the way, if you didn’t see my Pollinator Week newsletter on Monday, it may be hiding in your Junk folder. I made a ridiculously simple mistake with my email sending app, and almost all my emails were marked as spam. You’d be doing me such a favor if you click to identify it as ‘not spam’ if you see a way to do that!
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And now for something a little more buzzy...
In case you missed it, the Xerces Society (for Invertebrate Conservation, based in Oregon) did a Bug Banter podcast this Monday with a live Q&A from the audience:
https://www.xerces.org/bug-banter/all-about-bees-celebrating-pollinator-week
And in local (to me!) news, I only just learned about the digger bees of Sonoma County, out on the coast in California (just north of San Francisco). I was just there out on Highway 1, but I totally missed seeing the ‘sandcastles’ being built by the bees there! The diversity of lifestyle in our many wild native bees is incredible (around 3,600 species of bees call the U.S. home). Take a look...
https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=50491
Here’s a fun little riddle: Who has no father, but has a grandfather?
A male bee! He also has no sons, but may have grandsons. This is because bees are haplodiploid: female if they have two different copies of their sex-determining gene, or male if they have only one copy. Bees are also male if their two copies match, which is more likely in smaller populations with less genetic diversity.
For more detail, here’s Dave Goulson’s explainer from his book A Buzz in the Meadow (an excellent book)!
“To understand them requires a little diversion into how sex is determined in bumblebees. In many animals (including ourselves) sex is determined by which sex chromosomes we inherit. If we get an X and a Y, we are male; two Xs and we are female (some animals do it the other way round). In bees, it is quite different; sex is determined by a single gene. If an individual has two different copies of this gene, it is female. If it has two identical copies, or just one copy, it is male. Female bees, like us, have two copies of each chromosome - to use the technical term, they are diploid. In a genetically healthy population there are usually lots of different versions of the sex-determining gene, so the chances are that diploid individuals will have two different copies and thus will be female. Male bees, typically, have just one copy of each chromosome - they are haploid. To produce a son, a female bee has just to lay an unfertilised egg; the haploid gamete develops into a healthy son. This means that male bees have no father. To produce a daughter, the female bee fertilises her egg using sperm from a male; in bumblebees this sperm had been stored inside the queen since she mated the previous summer. So long as the copy of the sex-determining gene in the sperm is different from each of the two different copies held by the mother, then these diploid offspring will all be female.” —Dave Goulson, A Buzz in the Meadow
One of my favorite articles in recent memory, from the The Conversation:
This articles touches on the research done with bees playing soccer (from Lars Chittka’s lab in early 2017). It’s notable how much we’re finding in bees that’s akin to human experience:
“Their learning isn’t simply passive either. Bumblebees have been trained to push balls into holes to get rewards. During these experiments there have been observer bees who have learnt the skill either by watching (and no direct interaction with the teacher bee), or interacting with the teacher bee and then spontaneously improving on the technique.”
I think that’s all that’s on my mind to share bee-wise, this afternoon!
When I began, I mentioned a question too. I’m curious what’s on your mind, bee-wise? Feel free to reply with bee anecdotes, research, advice, or anything else that buzzes...

Oh, and if you’re interested in supporting me in any way, I have a number of bee-photo-related goodies (glitter bee stickers, even digger bee love temporary tattoos like I was wearing this week!) up on my Etsy Shop (most everything on sale through tomorrow):
https://enlightenedbugs.etsy.com
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