Bee Blitz

I participated in my first Bee Blitz on Saturday. I got the invitation from a former student of mine, Cindi, who is now a wildlife ecologist for the McHenry County Conservation District. While I cannot claim a large role in her success, my class was one of the first she took when she decided to go back to college and change careers. I feel a great deal of undeserved pride that she has done well. I am impressed that she was able to land a job in wildlife ecology without relocating.

I’m not sure when Bee Blitzes began. Colony collapse disorder has increased awareness of bees in the last 10 years or so. Bee Blitz is a citizen science program to get volunteers out to photograph bees. The University of Illinois has a Bee Spotter website (beespotter.org) where anyone can submit bee photos for identification. U of I then assembles all the data for bumblebees and honey bees in the state, which is also publically available. It’s a great idea because the volunteers don’t need to know anything about bees. The experts in Champaign-Urbana take care of all the hard stuff.

The Bee Blitz volunteers assembled at the Visitor Center. Promptly at noon, Cindi broke us up into four groups to visit different areas. She explained the degrees of difficulty of the different hikes. Cindi led the group with the easiest walking. I picked that one, even though I would have deferred to anyone who was more feeble. Most of the volunteers were younger than I was, but even those that were older volunteered for the most vigorous hike, probably because it was going through the highest-quality vegetation. Cindi’s group was the smallest. We walked a short way from the visitor center to a field where butterfly weed, purple cone flowers, and coreopsis were blooming. The butterfly weed had the most activity. We spread out and snapped away. After I'd taken many photos of honey bees and bumblebees, I tried to find smaller bees. That was harder because I couldn't hear them buzzing. 

The good thing about photos is that you can study them carefully after the bee is long gone. The bad thing is that the bees don’t always pose in the best positions. I also found that autofocus is a real challenge because at the last second, the focus will shift to something that is not the bee, such as the flower the bee is on. By the end of an hour in the field, I had 103 photographs. I deleted 30 right off the bat because they were blurry. Cindi uploaded the remaining 70 images to her computer so she could go through them and pick out any that were Bee Spotter worthy.I know a little about bees. Many years ago, I attempted to develop a bee lab for the Honors class I was teaching. I had a fantasy that some of the students would be so enamored with bees that they would pursue bee censuses as independent research projects. Nope. But I studied up on bees anyway. Distinguishing characteristics include jointed antennae, double wings, and hairy bodies. They also have characteristic mouthparts, but that does not seem very useful for field identification. Honey bees and bumblebees have pollen baskets on their back legs. I can see those if they’re full, but not otherwise. There are many species of bees that are small and solitary, unlike the honey bees and bumblebees that we know so well.

I won’t presume to identify any of these bees, but here are the best photos I got. There is one bee that I can identify, and that is the honey bee. They were everywhere. They are also alien invaders that compete for pollen with the native species.

Honey bees on butterfly weed

When I was taking the pictures, I noticed that some bumblebees had blacker thoraxes (I will refer to this as the “back”) than others. When I looked closely at the pictures, I was able to distinguish four different types. It should be noted that males and females of one species sometimes look different, so these may not be four different species. The back of this one is mostly yellow with a small black patch. It also has two yellow bands on the top part of the abdomen (under the wings).

Bumblebee on purple coneflower

The back of this one is like the previous one, but the abdomen seems to have an orange patch or band. The position of the wings makes it hard to see exactly what’s going on. It would be very exciting if this were an endangered rusty patched bumblebee. Cindi thought it could also be a brown belted bumblebee, which is more common.

Bumblebee with an orange patch on its abdomen

This bumblebee has a black back and one yellow stripe on the abdomen.

Bumblebee with a black back and yellow stripe on abdomen

This one has either a solid black abdomen or a mostly black abdomen with a brown stripe.

Bumblebee with an all-black abdomen (or maybe a brown stripe)

This photo shows the bent antennae of a sweat bee fairly well.

A solitary bee with the characteristic bend antennae

This bee on a penstemmon flower is a sweat bee that is all black.

An all-black solitary bee on a penstemmon flower

I also saw a green metallic bee.

Metallic green solitary bee

This “bee” is not a bee at all but a fly. You can tell because it has only two wings and its eyes are large and almost touch each other.

 A fly that looks like a bee

When our time was up, we went back to the Visitor Center. Just outside, several people were gathered around this black swallowtail that had just emerged from its chrysalis. The chrysalis is the light yellow structure to the right of the butterfly.

A black swallowtail just emerged from its chrysalis (pale yellow just to the right of the lower wing)

I enjoyed taking the pictures and studying the differences in the bees I saw. I should do this exercise at home some time.