Guest Rant by David Schmetterling , Montana Wildlife Gardener
That ’s correct , they give suck . Someone had to say it .
If you want honey bees ( Apis mellifera ) for say , I do n’t know , honey- that is capital . No job . If you have converted a heterogeneous , beautiful landscape painting of native plant and wildlife into a monoculture for craw production , and every plant involve pollenation in the same , minute , discrete window , love bee are for you .
However , if you are interested in any of the following : biodiversity , bee preservation , pollinator preservation and diversity , wildlife horticulture , native plant life landscape gardening , getting your native plant garden cross-pollinate , or just patently get wind about the really cool insects in your garden , then yes , love bee suck .
Somewhere along the way of advance awareness of pollinator and their role in plant , wildlife and bee conservation , masses wove in honey bees . This is really unfortunate , so I am trying to set the criminal record straight .
In our garden I have call for over 150 mintage of bee and “ pollinators ” andoneof those species is honey bee . In fact , honey bees in our garden are reasonably rare , especially outside a narrow fourth dimension of day and time of twelvemonth . The divers metal money of aboriginal pollinators ply so much more than pollenation to our garden . Just as a small example , the larva of the peak fly sheet ( Spilomaya spp . ) , a xanthous jacket mimic , pictured below , are good vulture of aphids in the garden ( include our vegetable garden ) .
I jeopardize that honey bees are moderately ineffectual pollinators of most things- peculiarly native species . As far as settlement collapse disorder , although academically interesting , do n’t be gull : it is not a preservation issue .
Honey bees are aboriginal to Eurasia ( where most of our noxious skunk are coincidently from ) , and share no evolutionary chronicle with plants in the U.S. , and in particular with plants of the intermountain due west of Montana . Consequently , they are not in force pollinators of the diverse native plants we have here . They will only pollinate over a narrow stove of date and temperature , and can only exploit certain size and shapes of plants . Again , too narrow-minded a range of mountains to be effective .
For case , in the Missoula vale , and in my garden , springtime arrives with sagebrush crowfoot ( Ranunculus glaberrimus ) that flower in late February or early March . They often arrive when snow still cover the primer and most days are barely above freezing , and the bloom can be speedy . This time of the year , nary a honey bee is in good deal or even able to survive – these bloom predate the hives truck in from the due south . aboriginal flowers descend and go , blooming across different day ( and some only at night ) from snowy spring until late October , long after the honey bees manoeuvre back down to the south or hunker down trying to survive .
Even as temperatures become more likeable to dear bees , aurora and eve can be too cool for them to do much of anything beyond surviving . Sure , on a strong July good afternoon , love bees will be out in military group pollenate some things , but they do n’t do much . Our aboriginal pollinators , including moths , butterfly , bees , fly , mallet , ants , and others are so various in terms of habitats they occupy , body sizes and morpholoogy , that they can pollenate and exploit a variety of native industrial plant that no truckload of honey bee hive consisting of identically sized and wrought dear bees could even imagine .
So , yes , honey bee are great for bring forth beloved . They are great for cross-pollinate commercial-grade harvest ( though their time value is probably grossly overstated ) , but they have minuscule place in conservation and piffling elbow room in my garden .
Bee photo reference .
