A bumblebee “robs” from a flower, extracting the plant’s nectar without providing any pollination.Christopher Wren
We weave along a path beaten between Rocky Mountain wildflowers that bloom and bobble over our heads, chasing the elusive Orange 78.
She disappears into a cloud of white Sierra fumewort flowers. Then Yellow 54 sails into view and we rush to follow, angling through the surrounding green curtains to keep up. She makes a beeline for the Mertensia ciliate, or mountain bluebell. And it truly is a beeline — Yellow 54 is a bumblebee with a yellow dot and number superglued to her back. She was trapped, tagged, registered and DNA-sampled a few days earlier for research purposes.
Ecology undergraduate researcher Karen Wang drops her fine-mesh bee net, whips out a small recorder and leans in to observe Yellow 54 climbing into the bluebell’s long tubular blooms. “One,” she says of the bee’s quick entrance into the flower, “and out. Two … out. Three … out. Oh, four was a secondary rob! Five was a secondary rob! Six was a secondary rob! Ah,” her voice drops. “Now she’s legitimate again.”
Bees and flowers have one of the most studied mutualisms, the beneficial interactions that occur among species in most ecosystems and probably involve organisms from every kingdom. Flowers produce nectar to attract bees, which enter the flower and climb past the pollen-powdered anthers for a quick energy drink, sometimes mixing some of that nectar with pollen to feed their young. The bees emerge from the bloom coated with the golden grains. Then they move from flower to flower, paying for that nectar by unwittingly fertilizing plants with pollen, letting the plants to make seeds.
