Bee & Pollination Links

Bees in General:

Bumble Bees (Bombus):

  • Live streaming video from inside a bumble bee nest! Narration and text is in Czech 9by Miroslav Pavelka). Way too cool!
  • List of World Bumble Bees . “List of the world’s bumble bee species, with notes on taxonomic and nomenclatural problems. Species can be accessed by biogeographic region, by subgenus, or from an alphabetic index to some of the more commonly used names. Also includes pages on subjects such as the decline in British bumble bees.” By the British Bombus Systematist Paul Williams.
  • Flight of the bumble bee. Reprint online of Michigan entomologist article, with very useful cartoons of color patterns for the species of the area. Not to be confused with the piano classic Flight of the bumble bee. by Rimsky Korsakov
  • The Wisconsin Bumblebee. Online key to Wisconsin species (but note that it uses some older terminology, referring to nevadensis as auricomis, andpennsylvanicus as americanorum)
  • Bumble bees of Canada. Lots on colony rearing. Also info on genetic, species lists, other information. By Robert Owen and Troy Whidden
  • Bumble bees of Florida. Key and images, biology. Part of the wonderful “featured creatures” site.
  • Key to and background on Western US Bombus. Excellent undergraduate project at evergreen college, with good images.
  • The Bumble Bee pages. British site with a wide range of good information, including how to mark and rear Bombus.
  • Bumble bee nest box construction. Also has a linked page with a nice list of print and electronic references.
  • Bumble Boosters is a cooperative project of the University of Nebraska Department of Entomology, the Lincoln Public Schools Science Focus Program, and the Folsom Children’s Zoo. Wonderful online key and photos of pinned specimens of Nebraska Bombus and Psythirus. NOTE:  The key and drawings and much of the information on the web can be bought in a cute little booklet (spiral-bound 3×5 cards with high quality printing) that might be useful. It’s only $5. I ordered a copy from: University of Nebraska Cooperative extension. PO box 830918 Lincoln NE 68583-0918
  • Call them to order at: 402-472-3023, and ask about the “bumbleboosters” book, item # ENT-EC1564.
  • Canadian Biodiversity Information Facility. Parts of the at the Canadian National Collection  (including over 8,000 bumble bee specimens) have been databased, digitized and georeferenced, with unique identifier labels added to each specimens. It is now available online at  http://www.cbif.gc.ca/portal/digir-toc.php
  • 2.5 minute BBC video of a Bombus lucorum – truly amazing. Click HERE, then click on the video that says “Bombus lucorum nest chambers”.

Commercial Bombus Sites:

Conservation:

  • The Xerces Society. International nonprofit organization, focused on public education about invertebrates and conservation projects that demonstrate their critical roles in endangered ecosystems around the globe
  • The Forgotten Pollinators campaign is an effort to call international attention to the critical role pollination plays in putting food on our plates, and in maintaining healthy wild communities around the globe. Parallels the book of the same name
  • The Vanishing Pollinators Great photos and some background info from the Smithsonian institution (US). Oddly, many of the Bombus photos are of European species.
  • A Special Feature on Insect Pollinator Declines in North America forms in the online journal “Conservation Ecology” (http://www.consecol.org/Journal/vol5/iss1/).
  • A very interesting project by Quinn McFrederick (graduate student at SFSU) involving the public in a survey to confirm the disappearance of bumble bees from San Francisco. http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~sfbee/. Includes keys and photos of the local bees . See also Newspaper article at. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2003/07/28/MN92594.DTL

Pollination:

  • Pollination Tool Kit — Assessment of value to society of pollinators. By Ecological Society of America and Union of Concerned Scientists
  • The pollination page. Primarily horticultural interests, but good information on native bees
  • On line pollination lecture, Part of a Virginia Tech distance learning course on insects and society. Some good visuals and information
  • The birds and the bees. Excellent images are featured in this danish museum exhibit, including quite a few bees.
  • Plant-Animal Interaction Course from Vanderbilt University. Make sure to visit the Pollination Review and Quiz for an excellent set of images and information about the match between plants and their pollinators by Olle Pellmyr.
  • Pollen tubes. Nice images, microscopy tips, and information about pollen tubes. Good links to british microscopy journal that has excellent micrographs.
  • Australasian Pollination Ecologists Society (A.P.E.S.)
  • Brain pop has a nice animation/movie about the basics of pollination (aimed at kids but fun for everyone) — http://www.brainpop.com/science/plantsandanimals/pollination/
  • Celebrating Wildflowers Pollinator pages on the U.S. Forest Service website: http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/index.shtml. This is a collaboration between the Forest Service and the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign and has a wide variety of resources and information about pollinators (courtesy David Inouye).

Apis:

Other:

Books:

Alford, D.V. 1975. Bumblebees. London : Davis-Poynter,

Exhaustive and exciting summary of the basic biology of this fascinating group, with a heavy emphasis on British species.

Heinrich, B. 1979. Bumblebee economics. Harvard University Press.

Engaging and challenging exploration of the physiological ecology of Bombus.

Michener, CD. Bees of the World. .to be released Summer 2000.

Magnum opus by the top bee systematist of them all.

Michener, CD, RJ McGinley, BN Danforth. 1994. The Bee Genera of North and Central America. Smithsonian Institution Press. Washington, USA.

If you’re between Panama and the Arctic circle, have I got a bee book for you! This is a great place to start in identification — great pictures in the key to help you out, good descriptions of genera, and some scant but useful information on biology. Note that the key has side-by-side English and Spanish couplets!

Mitchell, Theodore B. 1960. Bees of the Eastern United States. Published by the North Carolina Agricultural Experiment Station. 2 volumes.

Perhaps 18 pages of introductory biological background, then > 500 pages of keys, line drawings. species descriptions, and distribution notes. Good for technical ID, but not a book for reading. No, the author is no relation to me that I know of!

Christopher O’Toole & Anthony Raw. 1999. The Bees of the World. Facts on File. London : Blandford ; New York, N.Y. : Distributed in the U.S. by Sterling.

Wonderful source on basic bee biology of all groups, great photos.

Stephens, WP. GE Bohart, PF Torchio. The Biology and External Morphology of Bees. With a synopsis of the genera of Northwestern America. Published by the Agricultural Experiment Station, Oregon State University, Corvallis OR.

This book is packed with great information. The key to genera is nice, but there is an enormous wealth of information here on the basic biology of a wide variety of bees (emphasis on Nomia and other agriculturally important wild bees). The binding on this book is terrible — every copy I’ve ever seen has all the pages loose, but it’s worth the trouble.

Keys:

(I find Laverty and Harder, and Medler and Carney to be the most useful, though discover life is handy and clever).

Chandler, L. 1950. The Bombidae of Indiana. Proceedings of the Indiana Academy of Science 60:167-177.

Frison, TH. 1919. Keys to the separation of the Bremidae, or bumblebees of Illinois, and other notes. Transactions of the Illinois State Academy of Science 12:157-166.

Husband, RW, RL Fischer, TW Porter. 1980. Description and Biology of bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in Michigan. Great Lakes Entomologist 13:225-239.

Laverty, TM and LD Harder. 1988. The bumble bees of eastern Canada. Canadian Entomologist 120:965-987.

Medler, JT, and DW Carney. 1963. Bumblebees of Wisconsin (Hymenoptera: Apidae). University of Wisconsin Research Bulletin 240:1-47.

Milliron, HE. 1939. The taxonomy and distribution of Michigan Bombidae, with keys. Papers Michigan Academy of Science, Arts and Letters 24:167-182.

Pickering, J. Discover life – Maps of bee (and other taxa) specimens and valid bee names available online, with online keys and distribution maps. www.discoverlife.org.

My Material (RJM):

Quicktime movies of pollinators foraging on Lupine at Cascade Metropark (a small and disjunct population in Summit County OH) in 1997:

Bombus griseocollis – Foraging sequence – 1.2 meg

Bombus griseocollis – closeup – note how the flower is manipulated – 3.4 meg

Osmia sp. 2.2 meg. Notice her use of the middle set of legs to manipulate the flower and pump out pollen