06/16/2023
"Bees and the Plants They Love", part 3:
European honey bees, Apis mellifera, are probably the most well-known, ubiquitous bees found throughout landscapes. Despite being non-native to the United States, including California, they are pollination powerhouses and contribute greatly to human food crop pollination and more. There are several reasons for their successful naturalization into nearly all kinds of human dominated landscapes.
First, European honey bees have an enormous breath of diet. In my research they found to be foraging on 265 plant genera out of the total 304 total! Next, European honey bees are active most of the year, found every week of sampling for my fieldwork. That means European honey bees are active when other bees stay home due to colder temps and/or precipitation. Finally, know that European honey bees are the extraordinarily different than our California native bees. These bees live in social hives and the individual European honey bees work together in various roles as a superorganism. If you've been stung by a bee, it was probably one of these ladies, fyi!
While European honey bees are not native to the U.S., they have naturalized and are here to stay since we depend on their amazing pollination skills.... and for humans, that's a good thing. Other current research is helping us to understand how European honey bees affect pollination webs. Most studies so far point out that European honey bees are not good news for bee community conservation in general, but in terms of conserving pollination ecosystem services into the future they are the top U.S. pollinator.
With that said, European honey bees are also the ones you hear about in the news with population crashes due to "colony collapse disorder". This phenomenon is likely due to a confluence of disease, pesticide and also lack of habitat. To be clear, the main issue facing most organism populations today is lack of habitat. The Pollinator Seed Library was invented specifically to help reverse habitat issues facing bees and pollinators alike today.
This brings us to what Apis mellifera’s preferred foraging plants. Here are the Apis mellifera’s top visited plants from my fieldwork. Numbers after plant genus names refer to the number of Apis unique* plant visits for the year. *This is a complicated and technical definition from my dissertation, but don’t worry about it too much here, larger numbers demonstrate most-favored plants. There are more plants under the 20 count, but we will leave those for another day…
Salvia (189), Teucrium (102), Rosmarinus (100), Lavandula (93), Rosa (89), Origanum (78), Perovskia (65), Eriogonum (62), Nepeta (54), Grevillea (49), Vitex (49), Epilobium (47), Eschscholzia (46), Myoporum (45), Scabiosa (42), Trifolium (42), Gailardia (40), Gaura (36), Heteromeles (36), Heuchera (35), Veronica (34), Eucalyptus (33), Penstemon (29), Westringia (28), Thymus (27), Erigeron (26), Mentha (26), Geranium (22), Lagerstroemia (22), Leucophyllum (22), Prunus (22), Fremontodendron (20), Isomeris (20), Sedum (20), Verbena (20).
In conclusion, while Apis mellifera may not be a California native bee, they are extremely important for human diets and pollination ecosystem services today. While their populations are stated to suffer from habitat fragmentation and degradation anyone can help their populations by simply planting Apis’ preferred foraging plants. Just by planting some of the plants listed above, you can and help to save the bees… with scientifically backed foraging plants!
