 Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Spring Fever Garden Forums, where we connect you, the gardener, to the experts at North Dakota State University. And my name is Tom Cobb. I'm an Extension Horticulturist in the Department of Plant Sciences, and I'm joined with Scott Swanson. He's an electronic media specialist in the Department of Aeroculture Communications. Today is the last of our four Spring Fever Garden Forums, and tonight our theme is special topics. Now, the format that we use tonight is the one that we always use. We have a series of brief presentations. So we'll start with a 15 to 20 minute presentation, and then we'll follow that off with about 10 to 15 minutes of your questions. And we really do invite and we enjoy your participation in the forums. And if you have a question, make sure it's relevant to the topic, and then just slide your mouse down at the bottom of the screen, and you'll see a Q&A box appear. And you can type your question in the Q&A box, and we'll get to as many as we can, but we will stay on time. So let's get started with tonight. We're talking about bees. You know, bees are very common pollinators, and they are important in our gardens. And here to teach us how to identify bees and related insects is Jan Kanotl. Jan is the professor and extension entomologist at North Dakota State University. For the past 26 years, she provides leadership in extension entomology and the North Dakota Integrated Pest Management Program with an emphasis on field crop insect pests. Jan's an active gardener, and she enjoys studying pollinators. Jan, welcome to the forums. Thank you. Welcome. Okay, well, tonight we're going to learn a little bit about bee identification, but to be honest, I don't have time to cover all the different groups or anything, but I will mention a few of the most common ones. And then we'll talk about bee mimics that we see in the garden, and then also some of the flowers that bees love. And again, it's just going to be a brief overview of some of my favorites. So there's a lot of different bees. We have a total of 4,000 species in North Dakota. And I've seen estimates in North America, excuse me. And I've seen estimates in North Dakota of anywhere from 250 to 300 different species of bees. And there's about two different key groups. We can divide them into short-tongued bees, then dreadons, and the collidons, and then the long-tongued bees, the apidae, polysidae, and the megakioled. And you can see the difference in the length of the tongue. Let me bring up the laser pointer. And here you can see the short tongue. And again, these will be feeding from different types of flowers you might have in your garden. And then here's much longer the long-tongued bees here. And here's some of the flowers the two different groups feed on. I'll let you read the list here. But again, the nectar reserves in the pollen are generally in the short-tongued bees. It's very shallow. Whereas in the long-tongued bees, it has more of a tubular structure that they're going to be using to feed on for the flower. So some of my favorites are the Monarda, Pemstima, Salvia, and Snapdragon, Hosta. There's a lot of different ones that you can grow. And here's a few from my garden, these pictures. So what makes a bee a bee? Well, for identification, as far as an anemologist is concerned, there's four wings on a bee. There's a four wing that you see here. And then there's a hind wing. And they're attached together by some hooks that we call Hamuli. And under a microscope, you can see the hooks here. And it is attached to the hind wing. And then it will form to the front wing. So you have the wings kind of working in unison. Again, there's a key characteristic of bees that you'll notice. And you can see this under the microscope. It's that all the hairs on their body are very branched. And this is what they use for carrying the pollen. And also these branch hairs are one of the reason why there's successful pollinators. They are responsible for more pollination services than any other type of insect. So they're very efficient in pollination. In fact, some pollinators are very specific to just a small group of flowers or characteristic flowers. They don't pollinate everything, but they're specialists, some of them. And they only pollinate maybe one or two different species of plants. But again, there's different types of pollen collecting devices. One is the hairs like we talked about. And we call these Scopi. And over here on the right, you can see some hairs in the middle of sodies that are attached to the hind leg. Here under the megakylid, you can see the hairs are mainly on the underside of the abdomen. Then we also have the pollen baskets. We call them corbiculi. And it's on the femur. And they have a kind of a smooth area. And then on the sides, you can see the hair, which helps form the pollen basket. And usually the pollen, they kind of make a pollen ball, which is, you know, both nectar and pollen together. And then they use that pollen ball to feed their young as they develop. Now bee eyes, obviously are different from our eyes. You may think they just have the two eyes, but that's not true. They actually have five eyes. Here is the large eye on the side of the head. This is called a compound eye. And it's made up of many little lenses to gather and hundreds of them. And that forms a complex image that the bee sees. And then on the top of the head is three simple eyes. They call Ocellae. And they're used to for specific function like detecting movements or the orientation of the sun. And all this helps the bee survive, you know, avoid predators and find the flowers that they need as a food source. And they don't see things like we do. They use ultraviolet wavelength. And that's how they find the flowers. So here this is the wavelength of a human eye. You can see it's anywhere from 400 to about 550 for a wavelength, which we see. But if you look at the bee's eye, you can see it has a wider range, anywhere from 300 to 650. And then the ultraviolet is in the 300 to 420 range. So what the flowers look like when you look under an ultraviolet light at a flower is this. You can see that the ultraviolet wavelengths kind of focus in on where the food source is here, the pollen and the nectar. So it really helps the bee find its food source. Now one of the most common bees we're all familiar with is the European honeybee. And this one is not native to North America. But it is very popular in North Dakota's number one in honeybee production. And we have more hives in the summer than any other state in the US. And we use it commonly today in our canola and sunflower crops are two of the key crops that are used. But they also use it in a lot of other crops as well. Aphis malifera, it's again, you know, we're all recognized this one. It's very easy to identify medium size, very hairy body, typical of the bee, you know, the pollen basket on the hind leg. And they can nest either in, you know, our man made boxes there in colonies, or they can use, you know, open structures and trees that are dying, for example, or an old woodpecker hole or anything like that. This is my favorite, the bumblebees also in the family apidae. And most of them are in the genus mambas. And we have in our area about 20 species. And they're pretty easy to identify to this group, you know, they're large, they make a buzzing sound. They're very hairy, usually black and yellow or just black. And then they also have, just like the honeybee, this pollen basket, and you can better see the structure of it with the hairs and everything in this picture. And the interesting thing about bumblebees is they're very specific in tomato production. They're very important because they do that buzz pollination where they grasp the tomato blossom and hold it with their forelegs. And then they vibrate at a certain wavelength to get the tomato plant to release the pollen, so it gets fertilized. And it can actually increase the production of tomatoes in your garden by about 45%. So it's significant. So make sure you plant some friendly flowers for the bumblebees. And here's a couple common ones that I have in my pollinator garden. I got the common eastern bumblebee, this one Impatiens, and then the western yellow banded bumblebee terracola. And this one's actually starting to go into decline. Most of our bees are solitary bees, 90% of them. And you can see here's where they nest in the ground. You can see it kind of looks like an earthward moan, but if you look closer and you watch it, you'll see a bee come out of it instead of an earthworm at night. So sometimes they're solitary or other times they'll nest in groups. So another family in the Ape Day is the Longhorn Bees and the Digger Bees. This includes the Melisotes, maculata, this one had the hairs for collecting pollen on the leg. And then here's your Digger Bee. The males have much longer antennae and the females have shorter antennae. And these Digger Bees are pretty common here and especially in areas where you have drier soil and sandy soils, they can be a past. I get quite a few calls from home owners saying they want to get rid of these bees because they're afraid of being stung or they have children that may get stung. But they're very docile bees and they won't really sting you and they don't have very big stingers like a hornet wood or a yellow jacket. They're much smaller, it's more like just a little pinch. So unless you're allergic to some of the venom that they inject, it's really not a big concern. And I just tell them to turn the sprinklers on. A lot of watering in the area where they're nesting, they usually nest together in large groups. So if you water that area frequently, you can discourage them and then they'll move out of that area. And moving on to the Megacalidae, the Leafcutter Bees. I just love these bees. They have the hairs on the underside for collecting pollen and you can tell when you have them because you'll see these circular holes on the edge of your leaves of some of your flowers. And they're generally nested in holes or cavities either natural or man-made. I had some nesting in a window that I had in the garage. There was like a hole where the screen fit in and they nested in there. It was kind of fun to watch them. But 30% of the bees that we have nest in cavities. Then the Osmia, which is pretty common, it's the Mason Bees and this one is well known for use in crops as well for pollination and fruits and vegetables and other states. But we've been using them in canola to help increase canola pollination and you can buy them even in these nesting materials and then they'll continue to nest in here throughout the summer. They're pretty easy to identify. They've got a metallic blue, purple or blue, coloring, green. They're very efficient. In fact, some of these native bees are more efficient than our European honeybee. They often collect, you can see some of the mud here, plugging up the holes and you can put those bee hotels in your garden to try and track different species of them. Sweat bees. Helic today. Again, these are another one of my favorites. And as the name Sweat Bees infers, they're attracted to your sweat and they feed on some of the nutrients that are in your sweat. And they're very beautiful. Agaposcommon is, you know, beautiful metallic green and it's really brilliant in the sun. And here's Agaposcommon for essence. They're very difficult to identify and the taxonomy of this group is not very well defined. So speaking of bee taxonomy before we move on, it's actually been changing quite a bit for bee identification. We used to use physical characteristics of the bees, but with the use of DNA typing and use and identification, we're seeing that everything is being kind of reorganized because we're finding new linkages within the bee groups. So we're having to redo some of the taxonomy. So some of it is sort of a mess right now, because a lot of folks are working on DNA coding of the bees. So that's sort of being revisited. There's many bee mimics out there that are also pollinators who hover fly in the surfidae family. Again, you can tell the difference by just looking at them out in the field. Again, the bees have two pairs of wings where a fly has one pair of wings. So you can see it has one pair here. And then the second pair has been made into a globular structure called the halters. And that's used in balancing. So the fly knows if it's right side up or upside down. And then bees generally have a more longer segmented antennae. And then flies have a very short three segmented antennae. So you can see how much shorter it is. And then bees have narrow eyes on the side of the head and then, you know, the three on the top of the head. Whereas the fly has huge eyes that take up just about the entire head. That's why they can see you coming with the fly spotter. And then the bees do not hover. Very rarely do they, they just go fly directly to the flower and land. Whereas the fly will hover above the flower and so forth. So that's how you can identify the difference. But other than that, the hoverfly gets a lot of benefit from mimicking being a bee. Again, the other one is the wasp, the family vetsma day. Again, you can tell the difference because the bees have many hairs on them. Whereas a wasp does not. You can see there's not any hairs, some up on the head there, but very few. This is a paper wasp and then this is a yellow jacket here. And then again, a bee has a waist, but it's very robust and not as well defined as a wasp is. Very narrow. A bee has pollen collecting hairs or a basket. And they don't have anything on a wasp. No pollen hairs or a basket. And then the coloring again is usually black and yellow or black or metallic green, blue. Whereas the wasps generally have bright colors, yellow and black or brown. So those are some of the characteristics you can use because I do get a lot of questions. Is it a bee or is it a wasp? So those are the characteristics that are easy to use to sell in the field. Incidentally, we give the hornets and yellow jackets a bad name a lot of times because we know that they sting us and they can sting us repeatedly versus a honeybee that will sting you. It injects its stinger into you and then it rips out of its body. So you it ends up dying from that. But a hornet is the complete opposite. It doesn't have a hook on the stinger like the honeybee. So it can sting you repeatedly. And it doesn't affect the vitality of the wasp. But anyway, wasps are actually beneficial in your garden. They eat many caterpillars. They're good predators and they furnish their nest with these prey that they capture. So they're actually good to have around. It's just that you don't want to nest near your house or anywhere that you walk frequently because they can get very agitated, especially in the late summer. So just to end here with some flowers that we did some work on with Dr. Esther McGinnis, the next speaker, and then my postdoc, Dr. Keles Torres. And we worked on looking at some different flowers in several different groups. And we tried to compare native versus cultivars and just see how common they were for attracting bees and honeybees and butterflies. So we have the whether it's native or cultivar here. And then in the next column, we have bumblebees, this icon here. And this is honeybees. And then I included butterfly just for your information. So if there's no icon, like here, you know, there was no visits. So the more icons, like three here, the more common it was. So two would be moderate, three is heavy and four very heavy. And it's based entirely on the number that we saw visiting these different varieties and or cultivars, I should say, and the native plants. So I looked at two natives, fissula and puntata here, and then several different cultivars that we tested. And the best ones were the wild bergamot spotted bee bum, which is absolutely gorgeous. It's here, but it's so small. It's hard to see how beautiful it is. And then grand parade, Marshall Delight, purple, purple mildew resistant and raspberry wine. So they all did quite well. And they were twos for the honeybees. So you can use this information to select varieties that are more popular. Okay, moving on to the tall sedums. We had just cultivars here on different ones. The most common one that was liked by the bumblebee and the honeybee was autumn fire or autumn joy and night embers. Mr. Goodbud had some trouble. It ended up not standing very well and didn't do quite as well. But any of the tall sedums is great for a late flowering food source for all pollinators. And Aster, again, we tested some native one, the New England and the oblong depholium and the smooth blue Aster. And the top ones are at the top here with the New England and all my posts. I'm not sure how to say that one, Aster. But those did the best and they also did really good with the honeybees. So October skies and smooth blue Aster also did fairly well. The ones with the red star indicated that they weren't able to bloom before we had our first fall hard frost. So that's part of the problem we have with some of the Asters. It takes them quite a bit of time to get all their flowering done. So anyway, I think everyone knows that, you know, our bees in general are having trouble. We really need to help save them. A lot of it's due to the lack of habitat and food sources. You know, we have a lot of lawn out there. And if people would be willing to put in a pollinator garden or switch over to natural prairie grass with flowers, that would help a lot. If we could get some more patches of native habitat for them. It's due to a lot of different reasons, but the lack of food and habitat I think is number one. And of course, there's always disease issues out there and then pesticide use. I don't recommend spraying pesticides at all, unless you absolutely have to and then spraying late at night and avoiding any spray on the flowers. But I don't spray my pollinator gardens at all. I prefer to just dig a plant up. It's really heavily infested. And then also, you know, global warming is obviously going to have an impact on whether the bees can survive. So they're, I guess, fighting against uphill battles. So everything we can do to help save them is needed. We have a number of extension publications. This summarizes our research that we did with the postdoc of Veronica. And you can download this as a PDF free and then print it out for your information if you're interested. And then there's the beautiful landscapes and then the bees that insects that look like bees and then pollination fact sheet. And then also, I'd like to thank all of my collaborators. Pat Bosay is an expert bee identification taxonomous and then Dr. McGinnis and Dr. Torres. And then we had several hourly workers that helped us and did all the pinning and preparation for the bee specimens. They have to be actually blown their hair with a blow dryer to get them to stand up correctly for identification. I know there's apps out there for bee identification, but I think they'll work for some species and groups. But other groups are very difficult to do. And you really need a specialist in that area for identification. And our work was funded through the USDA North Dakota Department of Ag Specialty Crop Block Grant. So that ends my talking. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them. We've got a few already. One is, you mentioned how bumblebees are important for tomato flowers. But this person asked, can I tap tomato flowers with a pencil to make the flower to release pollen? Never tried that. But it's a certain wavelength that releases the vibration is a certain wavelength that is special for tomatoes that releases the pollen for the fertilization process. So I'm not sure if tapping on would work. Has anyone else tried it? I remember you can use like a vibrator. There's a vibrator that you can use to just near the flower to just shake the flowers a little bit. And it kind of reminds me of an electric toothbrush type of thing. That was very similar to electric toothbrush. So that would be like many. Yeah, that would make more sense. Yeah. And wind. Wind can also pollinate two minutes a little bit. And of course, we never have a wind in North Dakota. So we're going to be okay with that. But okay, this, you did talk about a few good points about wasps. But there's a question about what good are wasps anyhow? Well, I did mention, you know, the predator is a good role. And then they do some pollination as well. But they're not as efficient as a bee or honeybee or a bumblebee. But they're beautiful. There's birds that eat them. I've seen birds eating. So they're important food source for other animals. And just got to stay in your ground in the fall. Just be careful. Know your enemy. Right. Yeah, in the fall, they do get a little agitated. And that's because they know they're all going to die. Everyone dies except for the queen that overwinters. And then she's the one who emerges in the spring the following year to start the new colony. Like in a hornet's nest, like for example, doesn't that the old queen's been there all summer? She dies with her daughters, right? And but before the winter comes, she releases a new brood of like a new group of queens. So but your mother, she just stays around with her daughters and they just die together on the cold day. Yeah, the females, the new females that are born get fertilized by the males in the fall. And those are the ones that survive. Yeah. How about speaking of fall? Do you have a strategy about cleaning perennial flower beds? Like how soon can we clean them without harming the insect habitat? Do we have to wait till a hard frost or? Well, it depends on what types of bees you have. A lot of them are, you know, 90% are ground nesting bees. There's only a few that are nesting in the stems. So it depends what species of bees and the types of bees you have. Any hollow stems, those would be the ones that you might have some stem nesting bees in. If it's a solid stem, they're not going to be tunneling in there. So it depends on the plant and what the stem is like. If it's a hollow stem, you could have some nesting in the stems. If you get in those bee hotels, if you get some bees in those, that means you probably have some stem nesters around. Okay, speaking of bee hotels, how about bee houses? Is there a recommendation for how close the ground should they be located? Yes, it's generally, I think it's about four feet to five feet. Again, it depends which species you're trying to attract. But I put mine up about four feet high and I have it facing the east. So it gets the morning sun. How about cleaning out the bee houses? Do you have to clean them out on a regular basis? Yeah, I use tubes and I just buy them from a supplier gardening supply place. And I'll, after they emerge in the spring, right now I have the old tubes up and the ones that are fall all take out. Once they emerge, they give them, you know, maybe a month or more to emerge. And then I take the emerged ones and put them somewhere in the back of my garden in case there's a few late emerges. And then I'll put new ones into the, I got the little round tubes, big round tubes, that all the little tubes go in. And then the bees like different sizes of tubes too. So you can buy, you know, different sizes, you know, for the small bees, they need the smaller tubes. And so yeah, you do have, there's some maintenance. You got to, you know, make sure you put new tubes out for them. They only last usually they like cardboard ones made a cardboard and so they're only going to last so long. Okay. How about our bees attracted to some collars more than others as far as flowers? Oh, oh, yes. They do like I have this in the faxing. I should have mentioned that. Make sure I get it right here. Yeah, they like the purple, blue, pink, yellow flowers. So but yeah, the wait is usually more for flies, attracting flies and butterflies. That's interesting. So, okay, there's so many species of bees and flies. Do you have any idea about what percentage of flies actually do any pollinating? Yeah, they do as much because they don't have the hairs and the hairs are really key for being an efficient pollinator. But they will pick up, you know, they do have some hairs on their feet and their legs. So they will pick up some pollen, but they're, I don't know what the percentage is for how efficient they are. Okay, let's see if we got any more about the bees. You know, I never knew where there was green bees, green metallic bees. That's that was different. Yeah, I've seen some of the black and drennen bees out already. Oh, really? Wow. Yeah. Well, I hope this garden this weekend, so they're starting to emerge. Jan, like you talked about with bees, you need to provide them with the food source through the whole growing season. Do you have any certain flowers that you really recommend for the early season or maybe the late in the season? Yes. All the bulbs are good, like crocuses, and then also oh, I kind of think it's a real pretty little white purpleish flower hyacinths. Oh, the native one, the red one that It's red? Yeah, it's a little red little bell. It hangs down. There's many shrubs too, choked cherry, lead plant, but that's later on. Let me get the pollinator back sheet. I'm a little rusty. Ellie's at the beginning of the season. Right. You have to shake off that winter rust. I know. Yeah, I don't know about a little red hanging one. It's like, like there's a glory in the snow, Siberian squill, but they're bluish. Yes. Yeah, squill is what I was thinking of. Yeah. Okay. I got some white ones with the little bluish type on them. Sure. They're very good. Oh, here we go. Crocuses hyacinths, squill, past flower, pretty small because that's what I was trying to think of. Mine are just starting to, they're up and they have the buds on them, but they're not open. Columbine is really important. And of course, the dandelion is actually, but unfortunately thing with the dandelion is the nectar and pollen is not very nutritional for bees. Okay. We just got a time for a couple more questions here. When in the season do people put out a bee house? Well, you could put it out anytime, but it's best to get them out in the early spring before the bees emerge. And then when they do emerge, they'll start looking around for a place to, you know, they bring their new brood for the next summer. How does a bee survive winter? Well, most of them over winter in the nest, in a lot of them are in the ground. Others are in tree structures. So most of them will just create a chemical that is, you know, similar to our antifreeze in our cars that prevent things from freezing up. So most of them do that and then they're in the ground. So they're insulated. Okay. All right. That's good. That's, I think that's all the questions about bees that we have tonight. And Jan, that was so fascinating. I did. No idea. There's so many different kinds of bees and all their special qualities. That was really great. So thank you so much for your presentation today. Thank you, Jan. I appreciate it.