I write to you from Arapahoe, Ute, and Cheyenne land. I am interested in learning about the different animals that live in the place where I was born. Before we start with today’s animal, I want to emphasize that biological classification as understood by western society has its roots in racism, sexism, and transphobia – here’s a good explainer about why.
I have to confess that I have been woefully uninformed about bees. I know they’re important for pollination, some of them (?) make honey, and their populations have been declining, and also that they’re not wasps? Or hornets (I think?)? And there ends my knowledge. So let’s learn about Colorado’s native bees!
Colorado has the fifth most bee diversity in the United States! We have 946 native species of bee – a lot even when you consider that there are around 20,000 species of bee worldwide. Fossil bee species are also known from the Florissant Fossil Beds in Teller County (age ca. 34 million years old). Honey bees, of which the Western and Eastern versions of the species have been domesticated, are both from the Old World. Europeans brought the Western Honey Bee to North America in the 1600s. (Other bee species have also been domesticated – for example, the Maya at Tulum kept stingless Meliponi bees for their honey.) Native bees are important because they have evolved to pollinate the flowers that are native to our environment.
Take, for example, the 24 species of bumble bees that are native here: they are the most effective pollinators in alpine environments because they can fly long distances and generate their own body heat – an important thing to be able to do in cold, high elevation locations. Their queens – the only member of each colony to live through the winter – spends the cold months burrowed underground in abandoned rodent tunnels. They pollinate by “buzzing” their wings at a certain frequency while they stand on a flower that shakes pollen loose. However, their pollination methods are evolving because of climate change:
“Two of these bumble bees, Bombus balteatus and B. sylvicola, have long tongues to reach into the corolla of alpine flowers, such as Indian paintbrush and alpine skypilot. These bees grew their long tongues through a co-evolutionary relationship with alpine flowers that have a tube-like structure. These long-tongued bumblebees are seeing changes as our climate changes. We have seen a 70% decrease in alpine flower density since 1970 because of drier conditions in the alpine life zone. Within 40-50 years, scientists have already found that these bumble bees' tongues are getting shorter to become more generalized pollinators, an example of rapid evolution. A recent study has shown that these bumble bee tongues have already decreased in length by almost 25%. The adaptation of a long tongue, which was once evolutionarily successful, is being lost as the bees need to become more generalized to access different flowers.”
Aside from bumblebees, the rest of Colorado’s native bees are solitary, living by themselves either in tubes or in the ground. You can make your own tube nest to help out local bees! An important tube nesting bee in Colorado is the Mason Bee, which pollinates fruit trees in the spring. Another bee you might encounter is the Leafcutter Bee, which cuts round, dime-sized holes out of flower petals and uses these pieces to build her nest. Then her offspring will eat the nectar and pollen within the nest in order to reach adulthood.
You might enjoy reading through Jefferson County’s Bee of the Month website.
Here’s a bumble bee I drew:
