- Hello, I'm Susan Carpenter,
and I am the Wisconsin Native Plant Garden curator
and native plant gardener
here at the UW Arboretum in Madison,
and today my presentation is
"Bumble Bee Conservation in Your Garden."
So just to step back, gardening that supports bumble bees,
which is mainly what I'll be talking about today,
will also support many other pollinators
and wildlife as well.
So these include, these other pollinators include
butterflies, moths, flies,
wasps, beetles, ants, and hummingbirds,
but bees and the entire group of bees
are the most effective pollinators.
So Wisconsin has a great many native bee species.
We have between 400 and 500 native bee species
here in the state, and most of these species
are very small, solitary species, about 85% of them,
and you might not even notice them.
They have small home ranges, they visit flowers.
They might visit flowers that you're not familiar with.
They're very tiny, as I said,
but they live in a solitary lifestyle,
so they're nesting either in cavities in logs
or in small hollow stems, or in the ground.
So we have a great many native bees,
and those are very important to the ecosystems in Wisconsin.
The 15% of our bees are social or semi-social,
and you can see on this diagram
that each of those squares represents a species,
and that upper left corner shows you
the social or semi-social bee species.
And within the social species, we have the bumble bees,
and I'm going to focus mostly on bumble bees today.
They are very familiar to us.
We have have quite a few species in Wisconsin.
You can see there are 20 species,
about 12 to 14 of which you would find
in the southern part of the state.
I do wanna point out that when we think about bees,
we often think about honey bees,
and honey bees are not a native bee in Wisconsin.
They are important agriculturally.
You could think of them as a domestic animal, basically.
They're kept in hives and humans care for them,
for the most part.
There's only one species of honey bee,
and that's why you see it there on the lower left.
One single species,
and it is a social species, perennial species,
and they originated in Europe, so those are the honey bees.
Just to keep that in mind.
They're not native to Wisconsin,
so they don't have special relationships
with any of our native flora here in the state.
Wisconsin bumble bees do need our help.
There are 20 species, as I mentioned.
One of them is federally endangered.
This is the rusty patch bumble bee,
which is found throughout many counties in Wisconsin,
we know now, and I'll talk a little bit later
about how you can add to that information
that we're gathering throughout the state.
Five more species are...
Yeah, five more species are considered to be
species of greatest conservation need.
So this means that they are showing signs of decline
or are relatively rare,
and they're ones that we're keeping a close eye on.
And three more species that are circled here in black,
that we don't have enough information about.
We just simply don't know enough about them
to know whether or not they are endangered or not.
We don't know what their populations are,
their life histories, and where they are living.
So how can we help bumble bees?
The main way to do this is to plant native plants.
That's a way that's accessible to all of us,
usually if we have a home garden, obviously,
or if we're involved with community gardens,
school gardens, civic spaces,
anywhere where plants can be planted,
and where people take care of plants.
If we plant native plants, this will create habitat,
and bring bumble bees to the area.
Then another way to help bumble bees
is actually to photograph them, make discoveries yourself,
and learn about bumble bees so that we can all learn more.
Then after you have a number of photographs
and discoveries made,
joining a group like the Bumble Bee Brigade,
participating in that project,
will help you share your photos, share your findings.
You can learn more from others within that group
and from the website,
and then you're contributing along the way
to statewide conservation projects
that protect bumble bees.
So, as I mentioned, the best way to create habitat
for pollinators and bumble bees
is to create native plant gardens.
This is a pretty simple formula.
We have pollinator habitat, we have native plants,
we have pollinator habitat, and it's pretty surprising,
after you start planting native plants,
how quickly you will see an increase
in the number of bumble bees
and the number of other pollinators coming into the area
as those plants start to bloom.
I'll go through a few of my favorite plants.
Everyone wonders, what are the best plants for bumble bees?
And I've drawn from several resources
that I'll mention in a moment,
but I wanna show you some of these plants
and show you some of the bumble bees that visit them.
I will travel through the seasons with this little tour,
and so the first one we'll start with is the shooting star.
This is a very lovely plant
that grows in the early, early spring.
It can grow in prairie settings or in semi-shaded woodlands.
It comes up before the trees have,
the leaves come up before the trees have leafed out
in a forested setting, and these flowers are pendulous.
You can see they are pointing downward
when they're blooming, and they're at the left.
You can see a bumble bee in the center
hanging on to the flower,
and it hangs onto the flower upside down,
and it creates a buzzing,
a special buzzing noise with its wings, wing muscles,
and it shakes the pollen from the flower down onto the bee,
and then the bee can groom the pollen
from its back and front, in this case,
to pack it into its pollen-carrying corbicula.
And there you can see in the center,
that bee has already collected a lot of pollen,
and it has the pollen collected in that yellow ball
there on its leg, and soon will fly back to its colony
to deliver that pollen to the young of the colony.
Wild geranium is another one
of our spring-blooming wildflowers.
This is very common in oak woods,
and it can be grown very well in home gardens.
It provides a mass of plants,
like you see in this photograph at the right,
and the flowers are fairly open,
and that will be visited by bumble bees
and by other early season pollinators.
A little bit later in the season here,
we see the spiderwort and the downy wood mint.
These are both obviously blooming
at the same time during the season,
and the spiderwort has an open flower.
You would want to go see bees
visiting spiderwort in the morning,
because each spiderwort flower only opens
for half a day, usually,
and by noon, that flower has finished blooming
and is closing up,
so there are a great many buds on a spiderwort,
and they continue to bloom for several weeks,
but each flower is only open for actually less than a day.
The wood mint is another,
it's a member of the mint family, obviously,
and it has tiny little flowers.
You can see at the right, the tiny little flowers.
The bees can move around
those little levels of flowers on the mint,
and take nectar from them, and that nectar is important
to provide the bee with nutrition.
The adult bees are gaining their carbohydrates.
It's a good source of carbohydrates
for the adult bees as they fly, forage,
and collect more pollen for their colony.
Wild roses are another spring to summer blooming flower,
and these wild roses, you'll notice at the left there,
are wide open flowers.
They have five petals, a lot of stamens in the center,
a lot of pollen produced there on those anthers,
and the bumble bees go into the roses
and use that buzzing noise, again,
to kind of shake pollen loose
as they tumble around within the roses.
Those are...
You might notice it's quite different
from a cultivated rose that has multiple petals
and doesn't really have that many stamens,
so I do encourage you to look at all different kinds of roses,
and see which ones are being visited by the bees.
There are a great many species of wild roses
that can be grown easily in gardens,
and they spread by rhizome around the garden.
So they will increase from, say, if you just plant one of them,
they will increase throughout your garden.
The plant at the right-hand side of this slide
is the pale purple coneflower,
and this is a lovely member of the sunflower family
with those strap-like leaves at the base,
and then tall stalks,
the blooming in, say, June or so,
and those tall stalks holding,
each one holding a flowering head,
and the flowering head has drooping,
the drooping ray flowers
that look like petals there dangling down.
And then that cone in the middle
is where all the pollinating will be going on,
because each of those little red points there on the cone
is an individual flower,
and the bee that you see visiting this one on the inset
is visiting the first few flowers on the cone,
there at the base of the cone.
They're in bloom, and then they'll begin through time
to bloom all the way up to the top of the cone.
And so bees can be visiting this plant for quite a while,
even though the details are rather small
and you have to look carefully to see what's going on.
The prairie clovers are wonderful,
are a wonderful plant for pollinators.
Lots of pollinators will use them,
but the bumble bees especially love them.
The purple prairie clover
has this bright, bright orange pollen,
and you can see the two bees here kind of in this picture
are gathering that pollen, and you can see how bright it is
from the pollen that they're carrying.
They have to move around.
Each of those little purple individual things
that you see on the column there are individual flowers,
and those, each one is visited then.
So the bees kind of turn sideways
and run around the circle there,
and then the plant will continue to bloom.
As time goes on, it will start at the bottom
and continue to bloom up toward the top
of that inflorescence.
The white prairie clover doesn't have the same color pollen,
but it's still a very good source for the bumble bees.
And you can see how it grows in...
This is actually many clumps
of prairie clover growing together.
It doesn't spread by rhizome.
It spreads by seed, so it can be,
these two plants can be grown in any area
that's kind of open, full sun, medium to dry soils.
Even gravel, rocky soils are fine for this one,
and so it's pretty easy to grow.
You can grow it in a sand prairie, sand area, rock garden,
those kinds of places.
And then of course,
bee balm is one of the very best bumble bee plants.
It's easy to grow.
This is the native one,
so there are some cultivated varieties
you might be familiar with,
but this is the lavender-colored native one.
And it grows, it does seed itself well.
It does spread throughout an area, but it's not...
When you see it blooming, you'll see it fill the area.
When it's not blooming,
it makes room for other plants as well.
This is the picture,
the close-up picture of the bumble bee visiting
is the rusty patch bumble bee.
This is our federally endangered bee,
which we have a great deal of,
or we have a lot of sightings of here in Madison
and also around the state of Wisconsin,
also in Minnesota, Illinois,
a few sightings in Iowa,
a few sightings a little further east,
but it's been lost over most of its original range.
So it is pretty exciting to be tracking this one,
and to be involved with conserving
and recovery for its populations.
So bee balm has long, tubular flowers,
and the bumble bees usually use the tubular flower
to take the nectar from the flower.
The nectar's at the base of the tube,
but you can see the rusty patch bumble bee
at the right-hand photo there is actually puncturing the tube,
and she is taking the nectar direct.
She's kind of cheating and taking the nectar
directly through that hole,
and that's called nectar robbing,
and rusty patch is fairly unique in in its behavior
to nectar rob on that plant.
Most of the other bumble bees will use the tube.
So bee balm is a great place to do your monitoring.
I'll talk about that in a moment.
Here, we have 2 of the 12 native milkweeds
that are living in Wisconsin.
The butterfly weed is the orange one,
and the whorled milkweed is this white one.
Those are both suited for dry areas.
The butterfly milkweed
can grow in a medium soil moisture as well,
and they're both, of course, very, very, very,
all these milkweeds are very attractive
for all kinds of insects.
They have nectar, copious nectar
in the little cups of the flowers,
but they have a very specific pollination system.
And so this pollination system is really only,
there are really only a few pollinators
who can effectively pollinate milkweed,
even though lots of insects will visit it,
and bumble bees are one of those pollinators,
and you can see the bumble bee in this picture
has little golden structures hanging on its legs
and hanging near its mandible,
and those structures are the pollen packets
from the milkweed.
So when we see a bee flying around like this,
we know that it's visited a milkweed,
and chances are it will revisit a milkweed
and be able to drop off those into the little slots
on the milkweed flower,
where the pollen packets are received.
So it's a special relationship
when you have a plant that requires pollination
by bumble bees or by larger pollinators.
We need to have all those pollinators active
in order to keep the milkweeds propagating
and have them producing seed.
These are the blazing stars,
and again, we have several species of blazing star.
I have just two illustrated here.
On the left is the meadow blazing star,
which is a favorite nectar plant for monarch butterflies,
if you're interested in butterfly gardening as well.
These are flower heads that you're looking at there
all scattered along this tall stem.
Plants probably three feet tall in total height.
And then at the right, we have the prairie blazing star
where the flowering heads are more clustered.
The blooming there starts at the top
and then works its way down the stalk.
Again, these would be plants about three feet tall,
if we don't have a drought.
If we have a drought,
we see these plants are surviving just fine.
They may be a bit shorter than on a moister year,
but they are perfectly able to grow to handle drought,
and that's one of the advantages of growing the native plants,
you know, with a varied,
with varied weather and varied climate.
These are some late summer blooming plants.
So the tall white spikes, that is the Culver's root.
And again, very, very good for all kinds of pollinators,
but especially for the bumble bees.
And then the shorter white flower in this left photo
is the mountain mint, again from the mint family,
and this is another great nectar plant
for the bumble bees.
It also has a wonderful scent to it.
These would be growing in medium to moist soils,
all of these plants that are shown in these two photos.
So if you have an area that has a drain spout
or even verging into a rain garden area,
you could grow these plants very successfully.
The pink one in the right-hand photo is the red milkweed.
And that's another milkweed, of course,
but also growing in a moister area
compared to the ones that I just introduced earlier.
And this is Joe-pye weed,
one of our species of Joe-pye weed.
This is a very tall plant.
It can get up to eight feet tall,
depending on the conditions.
It does well with semi-shade.
It blooms late in the summer,
so it's blooming in August, usually,
and the flowers are clusters,
and you could see in the close up of a rusty patch
visiting the Joe-pye weed,
that actually each of those long, narrow clusters
is a cluster of individual flowers.
This is a male bee, so it's kind of dusty with white pollen,
and the male bees don't collect pollen.
So they get the pollen on their bodies,
but they don't actually pack it into packets
and bring it to the nest,
so they're just doing nectaring and out looking for mates
at this time of year, late in the summer.
And then also in August, or later in the summer season,
we find the bottle gentian,
and there are actually several species of gentians, again.
The bottle gentian is this blue one,
and it's a fascinating flower, very beautiful,
but also very interesting as it relates to its pollination.
So these flowers that you're seeing on the left there
are completely and fully in bloom.
The flower does not open.
It's got a small opening at the top,
and the petals are folded and pleated
around that little opening,
so a very large pollinator like a bumble bee
has to force its way in to that little opening,
pressing the petals apart,
and when it gets inside, the petals close back up
and look just like what you're seeing in this picture.
So the bee is inside, moving around,
moving the pollen around to the parts of the flower,
and then the bumble bee has to pop back out
of the top of the flower.
So this one is fun to watch.
If you've got bumble bees around,
it's fun to watch them pollinating that one.
And when the flowers are fully pollinated,
you'll see they turn a kind of purple color.
So some of them in the cluster are purple,
and those are ones that have already been pollinated.
There is another type of gentian that's not very,
it's not very common, but it's present in our area,
and this is the cream gentian,
and that one opens a little bit more at the top.
The petals come apart,
so you'll see the bumble bees going in and out,
as you see this small half black bumble bee
peeking out after being inside of that cream gentian flower.
Another interesting floral structure or floral anatomy
is on this white turtlehead.
White turtlehead is another excellent bumble bee plant,
and you can see that the structure of the flower
requires the bee to kind of manipulate the flower a bit
and kind of grab on and get itself organized,
so that it can pop into that,
into underneath the hood of the flower,
and so this is also very entertaining to watch,
but also a good way to document your bumble bees,
'cause they're sort of sitting there, working the flower
and you can get some good pictures of them
while they're doing that,
and see their identifying markings.
So these are all good plants.
These would both, all three of these plants
would grow in a medium soil, and medium to moist
for the case of the bottle gentian and the turtlehead.
Rain gardens would be suitable for both of those,
and the cream gentian,
sometimes in a little bit drier area than the other two.
And then at the end of the season, of course,
we have the goldenrod and aster season,
and there are dozens of species in these two groups.
I'm just giving you the two here that are the longest lasting
or the latest ones to be blooming,
so after everything else is done blooming,
we have showy goldenrod
and New England aster still in bloom.
So these are visited by any insects
at the end of the season, migrating monarchs,
bumble bee queens that have come out,
just been born out of the nests,
and so they're very, very valuable,
and as everything else stops blooming,
these are present and continue to be...
The bees kind of focus on them or become focused on them
because of the lack of other resources
to use in the late part of the season,
so in September, usually.
So to create good bumble bee habitat, you want to plant
many and many different kinds of native flowers
that bloom from early to late in the season,
so we want things right at the beginning of the season
and we want things at the end,
and we want things blooming all the way through.
And usually not just one thing blooming at a time,
so enough plants that we maybe
have three different bumble bee plants
blooming at the same time.
And that may sound like a lot,
but as you get involved with gardening with native plants,
you'll tend to want to add more and more.
We want to leave suitable nesting and overwintering sites,
so this means that we leave some areas of loose, bare soil.
So even in wooded areas, we leave chipmunk burrows
and other small, like hollow logs, perhaps.
These would all be possible places
where bumble bees would be selecting nest sites
in our gardens.
And we do not use insecticides,
especially the systemic insecticides,
which are the insecticides
that are taken up in plant tissue,
and they remain in plant tissue
throughout the life of the plant.
They go into the pollen and the nectar,
so they can harm bumble bees and other pollinators
through their using the pollen and nectar for a food source.
There are many places
to learn more about these plants and other plants.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
has a rusty patch bumble bee plant list
that we put together for folks to use,
if they're specifically interested in rusty patch.
As I mentioned, rusty patch are fairly,
are fairly usual as bumble bees go,
so anything that encourages the rusty patch bumble bee
will also encourage lots of other bumble bee species.
The Xerces Society is an invertebrate organization,
invertebrate conservation organization.
They have lots of plant lists.
They have identification information.
They also are conserving other beneficial insects
besides pollinators, so that's a great resource
to get a lot of good gardening information,
as well as information about the insects.
The Pollinator Partnership has many planting guides
for really all over the country,
and that's a good place for some of these plant lists.
And you can check, depending on wherever you live,
you wanna have plants that are native to that area,
so you can check for your area
and then make sure that you're able to source the plants
that you need for your native vegetation.
Native plant nurseries are also a good source of,
of course of materials, but also of information.
So they have seed mixes for pollinators
in different types of settings,
and they have a lot of information
about the individual species as well,
and the Midwest has a lot of good native plant nurseries.
I wanna just look into the bumble bee life cycle
for a moment here.
This is something to understand,
because when you're gardening and you see bumble bees,
where are they and what are they,
where are they in their life cycle?
And this is important to interpret what you're looking at
when you see them.
So starting up at number one there,
right now in the winter, the bumble bees are,
the queen, future queens for next year
are each individually in a small cavity underground
that they have dug, and they're overwintering there.
So they're dormant, but they have already mated.
So keep that in mind that already mated females are now,
future queens are now individually
resting underground.
In about the middle of April for southern Wisconsin,
they will begin to emerge, and as they emerge,
they have to come out of their hibernation place,
and they have to find a suitable nesting spot,
and this would be a different spot
from where they spent the winter.
So it would be maybe a small chipmunk burrow,
and they go into there and they start to lay eggs,
and when they lay the eggs,
they have to bring pollen to feed the eggs.
So as the eggs hatch,
they begin to feed on the pollen that the queen brings back,
and she is raising now her first group of worker bees
for her colony.
This is an annual colony.
It's only going to last a year, so everything is riding on her
to get it off to a good start.
So the building part of the colony
is from the time that she starts laying her first eggs
until she's built up a good number of worker bees.
As soon as the worker bees are active and adults,
it takes a few weeks,
then they go and do the foraging,
and she can remain in the nest.
The queen can remain in the nest and just lay more eggs,
and the young workers will forage
and bring the pollen and nectar back to the nest
for the young that are still developing.
About midway through the summer,
the colony shifts from building up in numbers
to reproduction,
and reproduction is when midway through the season,
the queen will start laying eggs that will become males
and she'll lay eggs that become new future queens.
So what we see there at number four is the mating process.
This is going on anywhere from July, August, September,
and depending on the species
and depending on, you know, the conditions of that year.
And then after the queens are mated,
they will go into their dormancy.
So you see the mated queen there at the top.
She's a very large bee.
She's very fresh looking,
'cause she was just born in the end of the summer there,
and then she digs underground and goes into her dormancy
to start the cycle once again.
So we use photography to make discoveries about bumble bees.
I really recommend this, because it's a great way
not only to get pictures of them,
but also to just learn about them, to watch them,
to see what their behavior is.
We learn how to identify them from our photos.
We can learn about behavior.
We can learn about the timing of the queen emergence
and the males emerging from the colonies.
So it tells us about the seasonality of the colony.
And we can look at the flower use
by the different species of bumble bees,
and by any species that we're particularly interested in.
And some photography tips are to take a lot of pictures.
So you want to have a good picture of the back of the bee,
the side view, if possible,
and then maybe a front view of the bee, so a face view,
and that helps us see features of the face
and of the hairs on the face or the back of the head
that will help us with identification, possibly.
So I usually take a series of pictures of the same bee,
and then I take a spacer picture
so that I know that the next set of pictures
would be a different individual.
We can learn how to identify bumble bees.
Here you can see several examples of different species
with the different markings
of yellow and orange patterning on their abdomens,
different patterns of color on their heads and their faces
and on their thorax.
So these are pictures
that would help us identify bumble bees,
and sometimes one picture's adequate.
Like each of these pictures,
we could identify that bee from one picture,
but often it's good to have multiple pictures to be sure.
And we can document what flowers are used
throughout the season.
So rusty patch is using different flowers
throughout the season,
and if we can figure out what flowers they will use,
which we've pretty much done with rusty patch now,
we know what we could plant
and what gaps we would want to fill
if we were creating a garden or a large planting
that would support them.
We share our discoveries at Bumble Bee Brigade.
This is a DNR project.
It's in its fifth year now,
and so if you search for Bumble Bee Brigade,
it will come up.
We have online trainings,
basic and advanced trainings there,
descriptions of all 20 of Wisconsin's bumble bee species.
We have quizzes, maps,
and the IDs that you submit with your photos
are confirmed by experts for you,
so you have a good learning opportunity with this, too.
And then there is a bumble bee observers,
Wisconsin Bumble Bee Observers group on Facebook,
which is also a very good resource.
So I'd just like to thank
all the people who make the gardens
and this bumble bee conservation project possible,
and then all of you for your interest
and for what I hope you will be interested in helping with
on bumble bee conservation.
So thank you very much.