It's a boy!

A bit of 'closure' and some happy stories tonight. 

Final Goodbyes

We finally buried BLB under some of our Lavender - it seemed a fitting end for him and he'll continue to be part of the bee community in his own small way. We took photos of him today so that we could finally try and identify his gender - and finally we could confirm that he was a boy.

Amongst other things, one way to tell is from the segments on the antennae - from the joint to the front tip boys have 10 segments and girls have 9. Yet another amazing fact of nature that would've have ordinarily have gone unnoticed to this casual observer! Here's a close-up of his antenna (it also shows the long tongue and sheath):

Male Bumblebee Antennae

He created a lot of laughter for us while we had him, not mention a lot of curiousity about his behaviour. RIP BLB! 

Goodbye BLB

We found BLB ("Big Little Bee"), our second disabled bee, crawling on the lawn on 28th May. He breathed his last in our care on 7th June, just 11 days later. He was probably somewhere between and 11 and 14 days old. A very short innings.

Though we wonder about the care we provided, the reality is, there is nothing more we could do than provide, warmth, safety, honey, water and some fresh flowers and we surely extended his life beyond that of limping round the lawn as imminent prey. 

He seemed to expire over the course of about 18 hours - the first obvious sign being fairly motionless, flat on his back. Although he eventually righted himself, wandered around his box, and eventually spent the night under his pine cone, this was a sign of sad things to come.

It was a surprisingly sad moment when BCW let me know the news today - perhaps because we had been able to give the gift of extended life to such a small fragile life form; perhaps because of the joy and laughter he caused us through his mad bumblings and inexplicable behaviour. Perhaps just because he Was.

Anyway, I was moved to poetry:

Goodbye our dear "Big Little Bee", 

gone so soon and so sadly.

 

In youth, so bright,  so energetic,

in truth, so bumbly, so chaotic.

 

You loved to dance and dive and preen,

though destined not to find your queen.

 

A pine cone was your choice for rest,

beside a sumptious five-star nest.

 

You overcame one-sided odds,

lame and bent before the Gods.

 

Big little Bee you brought such joy

to the weary days of this small boy.

 

Alas, you never could fulfil your role,

but BLB, you filled this soul.

Upsizing

Just over a week ago we found a second disabled bee - "Big Little Bee" as we are calling him. We added BLB to the same tub as Holly, but within 48 hours we soon realised this was a bit small and together they were causing chaos, going from this:

before: organised box with moss on one side and flowers nicely arranged..

to this:

moss moved shunted all over the place, flowers cast aside!pretty quickly. And although after 24 hours they were co-habiting amiably, they were still disrupting each other a lot, walking over one another while the other was sleeping, shoving each other around. Not to mention the fact they were not getting true darkness in the way they would be if nesting underground; is it really fair to expect to adhere to our human cycle?

So, we had the idea of migrating both bees to a much larger tub - large enough, in fact, to include the entire wooden nestbox that was now redundant in the front garden. The plan was also to include some real flowers/plants, e.g. lavender, so that they could get as close to a natural experience as ever. So, the design of the box was as follows:

• A layer of stone to stablise the box and provide a foundation to embed plant pots and slightly sink the nestbox to prevent the bees going underneath it
• A layer of "fake grass" over the stone to protect the bees - made from hanging basket liner. 
• real lavender
• pine cones to climb over (and as it turns out, rest under)
• some tubing to climb through and rest in
• daisys to carry honey-water (as previously)
• "flower-tower" and "flower-mountain" (also to carry honey water as previously)
• White LED lighting strip to provide additional "sunlight"
• HD USB webcam for local monitoring and remote monitoring over skype
• The original nestbox from outside, complete with 2 internal infra-red cameras

Here are some pictures of the setup:

overall tub set upview inside nestbox - cameras visibleBLB resting at the box-edgeinside the tub - honey water on daisies and "flower tower"BLB resting again!

What's in the basket?

Today I did a little search to find out what pollen the bees outside on our lavender are carrying. So, that may seem rather stupid, but it's not necessarily all lavender - most of them have bright orange pollen, but some have yellow.

bright orange pollen in the baskets with flecks of yellow pollen all overyellow pollenIn the process I discovered this delightful little blog entry discussing exactly that topic - it contains some useful links to online resources for pollen matching. 

Lavender pollen, as it happens is bright yellow - so the second bee above may be collecting lavender pollen, the bright orange isn't. I have a suspicion that the orange is actually asparagus, as we are located very much in farming region and surrounded by fields outside of the town. Indeed, the nearest field is broad-bean, so there could easily be something like asparagus nearby; and theasparagus  crop was said to be early and good this year due to the unusually warm spring. 

Check out the electron microscope pictures of pollen - they are amazing!

Pattern Matching

So, we finally came home and were able to examine the mayhem created by our two disabled bees in their plastic tub. Actually when we saw it in person, as opposed to the limited remote camera view, it probably wasn't quite as bad as it seemed. That's not to say they hadn't moved loads around, but it seemed to be slightly more organised that we imagined. 

Organised? That's not a word we've been applying to Bumblebees! 

Here's (more or less) how we left the box:

original layout - the moss is all along one side of the box

The easiest way to describe what they'd done was move moss away from the edges and corners towards the centre. What's not obvious is the cause and effect - whether the movement of the moss is merely a result of the endless patrolling of the perimeter of the box (e.g. a security or escape motivation), or whether the intention is to collect the moss centrally by wearing a path round the edges (i.e. keep the edges clear with a fixing/nest building motivation).

The box as we found it after the bees had it for 48 hours

We surmise there is a possiblity it is the latter - and that the bees are programmed to keep their nest material away from the edges of the nest in order to keep it dry. Certainly we have read this as advice when preparing a nest box, which would mimic what would happen underground. 

Is there method in the madness?

So, although much of their behaviour seems quite erratic, every once in a while it does seem to follow certain patterns. I'd classify these as:

• Traversing the perimeter, although often this involves traversing part of it, then returning to a designated "safety spot", more centrally located
• exploring outward in a "hub" fashion from said "safety spot" - i.e. heading out to explore a portion of the box, then returning (or partially returning) before tackling the next segment
• circling the same area, usually in fairly tight circles. When this behaviour is done on in amongst the moss or nest material, it moves it and creates the tunnels and "whorls" that (for example) we've seen the Queens create in bedding. It also creates the space in the corners. 
• Sticking the face in the moss and the bottom out/in the air - this seems to happen when one bee wants to ignore the other (e.g. appears to want to rest without disturbance) but there are also other times when they are resting. In a way it seems quite a vulnerable position, not being able to see any threat, although the sting is foremost. Also, the camouflage of the bands works in their favour and perhaps they just need a bit of dark once in a while. 
• There are times when they seem to take turns with role swapping - for example, one bee will be taking a rest, buried in the moss while the other is scurrying about circling the box and the moss. Then after 15 or 20 minutes it will approach the rest bee and prod it and shove it and basically wake it up! Then it will tend to take over the scurrying and "nest fixing" behaviour. Although Holly (the smallest) was the main protagonist ("agitator") to begin with, we've subsequently seen both bees demonstrating this behaviour. 

 I was keen to do some experiments, for example to see if they would exhibit these behaviours with different materials, with different box orientations and layouts. However, it's difficult to devote the time to study this with sufficient scientific accuracy, so we can really only report anecdotal observations.

Moreover, events have taken over us, in that we've now moved the bees to a larger habitat - more on that on a follow up blog :-)

Here's a little bit of exploratory behaviour...