North American Prairie Is a Source of Pollen for Managed Honey Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae)

Prairie was a dominant habitat within large portions of North America before European settlement. Conversion of prairies to farmland resulted in the loss of a large proportion of native floral resources, contributing to the decline of native pollinator populations. Efforts to reconstruct prairie could provide honey bees (Apis mellifera) a source of much-needed forage, especially in regions dominated by crop production. To what extent honey bees, which were introduced to North America by European settlers, use plants native to prairies is unclear. We placed colonies with pollen traps within reconstructed prairies in central Iowa to determine which and how much pollen is collected from prairie plants. Honey bee colonies collected more pollen from nonnative than native plants during June and July. During August and September, honey bee colonies collected more pollen from plants native to prairies. Our results suggest that honey bees’ use of native prairie plants may depend upon the seasonality of both native and nonnative plants present in the landscape. This finding may be useful for addressing the nutritional health of honey bees, as colonies in this region frequently suffer from a dearth of forage contributing to colony declines during August and September when crops and weedy plants cease blooming. These results suggest that prairie can be a significant source of forage for honey bees in the later part of the growing season in the Midwestern United States; we discuss this insight in the context of honey bee health and biodiversity conservation.

Winter

Winter at the Shack was always a great time, and some weekends it was a big challenge just to get in. After a good snowfall we would park near Mr. Lewis’s farmhouse and ski in the mile and a half, carrying our grub. We have a picture I especially love of Mother skiing through the woods, wearing her denim skirt and winter coat. What a great sport she was! And she would holler “Whoopeee!” while sliding down a short terrace in the woods. We were proud of her. Skis were not much in those days—just two waxed boards with a leather strap. But they were better than walking, and fun too. Passing through the snowy winter landscape was always, in Dad’s words, a “search for scats, tracks, feathers, dens, roostings, rubbings, dustings, diggings, feedings, fightings, or preyings collectively known to woodsmen as ‘reading sign.’ ” We could often see many of these signs on the snow. I can remember skiing through the woods with Nina one morning after a heavy snowfall and seeing little “bursts,” places where a partridge or two had spent the night in a snowbank and then burst out in the morning to feed. If one wonders how our songbirds survive a cold snowy winter, the answers are revealed on a fresh snow surface: the prairie plants hold their seed pods up away from the snow, and the songbirds land on these dark stalks and remove the seeds. Their dear little tracks show where they were picking up seeds. A way to make a living in winter. For our wood-gathering efforts, our tools were the two-man saw, a double-bit ax with an extra-long handle, two regular axes, a heavy sledgehammer, and two iron wedges. Some of the logs we cut in the woods, though of fireplace length, were too big to carry, so we would split them right there before loading them on the sled. Our favorite place for the cutting operation was west of the Shack, down the slough and bearing south at what we called the “branch slough” and “the fallen bee tree.” Our dog (then Flicky) was always running along with us.