As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been helping a friend with her field work. She’s studying the squash bee and its taste for cucurbit pollen. One of the aspects of this work is to dig up the nests and collect samples of the pollen provisions the bees collect. I thought it might be interesting to share a peak inside these nests and their inhabitants, which we have fondly nicknamed “little pollen sausages” for reasons that should be fairly apparent.
We squirt baby powder down the nest holes so we can follow them in the soil , but sometimes we accidentally spray an occupant. Hence baby powdered bee butts.
A young larva on a pollen provision (yellow)
Larva that has eaten all its pollen provision…aka “little pollen sausage”
Hard to imagine that such ugly little pollen sausages will one day turn into such cute bees!
Fascinating, thanks. Do the larvae dug up survive, can they be put back in place?
Great question! I don’t really know the answer. We collect the ones we dig up to bring back to the lab. I suppose they would be okay if they were mature enough.
So what happens at the lab, do they get dissected or kept alive?
We have tried to rear some in the lab but most are used for dissections to study the gut biota and biochemistry.
I have never seen a bee larvae before! They are so squishy compared to the more adult bees! Does the baby powder do them any harm if they just walk through it, like boric acid kills the pests in house? What a unique perspective, powdered baby bee butts, sounds like a page from a kids book and I think they would get a kick out of it!
They are pretty squishy, haha. The baby powder does not harm them, they just kind of dust it off and fly away. Ha! It does sound like a kid’s book!
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