Intimate Portraits of Bees

 Portraits of Bees

Researchers take advantage of photography technology developed by the U.S. Army to capture beautiful portraits of bees native to North America.

Text by Jane J. Lee

Photography by Sam Droege, USGS

BEAUTIFUL BEE

Bees are the workhorses of the insect world. By transferring pollen from one plant to another, they ensure the next generation of the fruits, nuts, vegetables, and wildflowers we so enjoy.

There are 4,000 species of North American bees living north of Mexico, says Sam Droege, head of the bee inventory and monitoring program at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Only 40 of them are introduced species, including the Europeanhoneybee. (See “Pictures: Colored Honey Made by Candy-Eating French Bees.”)

Most of the natives are overlooked because “a lot of them are super tiny,” Droege says. “The bulk of the bees in the area are about half the size of a honeybee.”

The native species also go unnoticed because they don’t sting, he adds. They quietly go about their business gathering pollen from flowers in gardens, near sand dunes, or on the edges of parks.

The bee pictured above is a species of carpenter bee from the Dominican Republic known as Xylocopa mordax. It nests in wood or yucca stems, and is closely related to the U.S. species that chews through the wood in backyard decks.

A GOLDEN DUSTING

Sam Droege, USGS

Droege and colleagues began to inventory all the bee species in North America in 2001. This was partly because the insects are so important to the agriculture industry.

“Almost all the fruits and nuts, and a lot of the vegetable varieties, that we eat require some insect—usually bees—for pollination,” he explains.

The crow bee (Halictus ligatus) pictured above favors sunflowers andblack-eyed Susans, Droege says. “That yellow pollen is almost for sure sunflower pollen.”

“East of the Rockies, [the bee is] everywhere,” he adds. “They’re very common in urban areas and disturbed sites.”

And that’s the second reason why Droege carries out his bee inventory—because the insects are an important component of the landscape. Knowing how bee populations are faring is important when monitoring the health of those urban and otherwise vulnerable environments. (See“The Plight of the Honeybee.”)

Finding out after the fact that “all the bees are gone and now we’re screwed,” says Droege, is not what he wants to see happen.

But to complete the bee inventory, the biologist and his colleagues needed to identify exactly which species were being sent to them by researchers from around the country.

That’s easier said than done, because so many of North America’s native bee species are so small.

Even those with some experience could look carefully and say at most, “yes, that’s a little bee,” Droege explains. “There are maybe five people in the U.S. who could identify bees.”

HONEYBEE HEAD

This species, a Hylaeus modestus captured near Washington, D.C., is half the size of a grain of rice. The head is so small that Droege needed to use an acupuncture needle to mount it for imaging purposes.

“Unlike other bees, instead of carrying pollen on the outside [of its body], they ingest it and carry it internally,” the biologist explains. They then regurgitate it back at the nest when they provision their eggs.

Since the bee photographs were originally intended for a scientific audience, Droege and colleagues include shots like this one of an isolated head, in case researchers need detailed views of certain body parts.

But last fall, Droege got a message from both of his daughters that someone had taken several of the bee pictures from his flickr.com site and posted them to a section of the popular website Reddit.com calledwoahdude.

“In two days [the post] had 200,000 views,” he says. Normally, Droege can’t get very far at parties once people find out that he studies bees. But now, the “general, general public,” he says, was marveling over the images.

“Once you blow [the bees] up to the size of a German shepherd and they have good hair, people start paying attention,” he says. “They’re like aliens from another world.”