An Important Visitor

By the time I was free to go outside, the temperature was in the eighties and I decided to forgo the usual hike. Instead, I sat down beside the three Zigzag Goldenrod blooming in the front yard pollinator garden. During the twenty minutes watching the flowers, an interesting variety of bees, wasps, flies and beetles visited. A single, gluttonous Honey Bee nectared the whole time.

Before returning to work, inside, I wandered, camera in hand, to our back yard garden. What happened next is the stuff of legend. I noticed a bumble bee on aster flowers, black across the thorax like Black-and-gold and Golden Northern Bumble Bees, but it didn't have the right amount of yellow on the abdomen. Curious, I stepped inside the garden gate and began taking photos as best I could. The moment I had a good look at the abdomen, the orange patch surrounded by yellow . . . I knew. This was a Rusty-patched Bumble Bee. What a surprise to see it, and doubly surprising to have it visit our back yard. If the weedy margins of our property offends a few of our neighbors, at least it seems to please the insects.

Truly, I'd nearly abandoned all hope of seeing a Rusty-patched Bumble Bee, especially after watching Clay Bolt's brilliant documentary about his search for the bee, A Ghost in the Making. This bee finally received federal protection in January of this year, the original petition being filed in 2013 by the Xerxes Society. Once a common bee and important crop pollinator in the east and the midwest, it is now absent from close to 90% of its original range. In 2016, the city of Northfield, where I live, declared itself a pollinator friendly community. The appearance of this spotlight species (there are hundreds of other important native pollinators) rings a small note of success and brings some well-needed hope.

Posted on September 13, 2017 02:58 AM by scottking