By Marge Hermans and Bob Armstrong

In fall, as we enjoy pies and jellies from the summer’s berries, eat fresh vegetables from our gardens, and hunt animals that make their living feeding on plants, we are indebted to a myriad of insects who performed valuable service during spring and summer. These are the pollinators — bees, flies, beetles, butterflies, and moths — who take pollen and nectar from flowers to feed themselves and their young, then end up carrying pollen grains from one flower to another.

Most of us take for granted the flowers and fruits that provide foods we eat (berries, zucchini, corn, wheat), products we use (cotton and many life-saving drugs), and natural wonders we enjoy (glowing fields of fireweed, leafy green skunk cabbage that feeds our deer, flowers in our gardens and public places). But we would have none of them without the natural process of pollination, in which pollen grains from the male parts of a flower are transferred to the female parts of the same flower or another flower.

Plants, unable to move around freely, face a challenge in transporting pollen from their male parts to their female parts so they can produce seeds for a new generation. An even greater challenge is to transport pollen from the male parts of one plant to the female parts of another. This cross-pollination produces offspring that are often larger and with more genetic variation — a benefit in coping with changes in the environment.

As plants have developed over time, many of them have devised ways to enlist insects to do the job for them. They’ve developed showy blossoms, colorful petals, attractive shapes, and appealing odors to attract insects to come feed on their nectar and pollen. Some, such as the heart-leaved twayblade, an orchid found in Southeast Alaska, have developed rather specialized techniques. When an insect lands on a twayblade blossom, the flower blows its pollen out explosively, complete with a fluid that glues the pollen to the insect.

We spent some time studying and photographing insect pollinators around Juneau this past summer, and we were fascinated by how various insects go about gathering their harvest — and how plants have evolved to help or hinder them. Here’s some of what we discovered.

Bumblebees

Bumblebees are important pollinators for a number of plants in Southeast. They are particularly important to many alpine plants because they are able to fly at low temperatures when most other insects are too chilled to be active. They are also important, however, to plants at lower elevations as well.

Queen bumblebees, which winter over as adults, emerge in early spring before other pollinators such as flies and butterflies are around, so they are probably especially important to early-blooming plants such as early blueberry and purple mountain saxifrage. When queens begin their nests in underground cavities, they collect pollen in clumps, then lay eggs for their first brood on the pollen. When larvae emerge from the eggs, they feed on the pollen, which is rich in protein. Meanwhile, the adult bees eat mostly nectar, which is rich in energy-packed carbohydrates.

Bumblebees are particularly attracted to blue, irregularly-shaped flowers like lupines and beach peas. The bees are heavy enough to force open blossoms of vertically symmetrical blossoms like those of lupines, and their proboscises, or tube-like mouth parts, can reach deep into the base of a blossom where nectar is stored.

As the bees delve deep into a flower, pollen grains stick to the hairs on their bodies. The bees use their legs to comb the pollen into special storage sacs on their hind legs for carrying it back to the nest. But inevitably some pollen grains rub off the bees’ bodies when they visit subsequent flowers, so the insects end up distributing pollen from one male blossom to the female parts of other blossoms, achieving the pollination and cross-pollination that is so important to their plant hosts.

In his book on the natural history of the Cascade and Olympic areas of Washington state, Daniel Mathews describes the close relationship bumblebees have with monkshood, a blue- or purple-flowered plant commonly found in many parts of Southeast. He says that monkshood’s odd-shaped flower excludes from its nectary all insects except “highly motivated, intelligent bumblebees;” and he notes that once bumblebees have been rewarded with monkshood nectar, they will tend to visit only monkshood blossoms. Apparently this “loyalty” to a single type of flower benefits both the bees and the plants. Assuming it takes time and energy for a bee to learn how to extract nectar from a complex blossom, it would be to the bee’s advantage to specialize in feeding on one species of flower rather than spending time and energy on learning how to deal with others. For the plant, on the other hand, pollen distribution would be more effective because the bees would carry pollen to other monkshood blossoms rather than to flowers of another species, where they would be of no help in producing a future generation.

Hoverflies

Some other important pollinators in Southeast look like bees, but they are actually flies in elaborate disguise. Hoverflies, or syrphid flies (members of the insect family Syrphidae, who often hover like helicopters when they are flying) masquerade as bees or wasps, presumably as a way to discourage predators. They often have black and yellow bands, and some of them even buzz like bees and wasps. But they do not sting, and if you look closely you can distinguish them from bees and wasps in three ways: They have only two wings, while bees and wasps have four. When at rest they hold their wings slightly out to the sides, while bees fold their wings over their backs. And their antennae are shorter than the length of their heads, while bees’ antennae are longer than the length of their heads.

Hoverflies have shorter mouth parts than bees, so they visit flowers with more shallow blossoms such as dandelions and daisies. They also eat mostly the protein-rich pollen, consuming only enough nectar to help dissolve the hard shells of the pollen grains. Still, their bodies brush against the blossoms as they eat, so they carry sticky pollen grains as they move from flower to flower.

Other Flies

Besides hoverflies, other varieties of flies are important pollinators. If you look at blossoms of plants such as cow parsnip in summer you will see flies of many different shapes, sizes, and colors feeding on the pollen and nectar. As they move about, of course, they carry pollen on their bodies from male parts of blossoms to female, and from flower to flower. Flies, like beetles, may be attracted by carrion-like smells. This summer, in fact, we noticed large numbers of flies on skunk cabbage blossoms at high elevations.

Though most of us think of mosquitoes as vicious predators out for blood, they are important pollinators, too — and the males do not even bite. As one of our sources noted, “Male mosquitoes drink only sugary fluids such as flower nectar. Since they vigorously probe the flowers of certain plants, and can distinguish between different types of sugars, they play a role in the pollination of certain plants.” Female mosquitoes also drink sugary fluids, but most of us get to know them shortly before or after they’ve mated, when they suddenly go looking for a blood meal to provide extra protein for their eggs.

Beetles

In terms of evolution, beetles may have been the earliest plant pollinators. They visit plants to feed on pollen, which besides protein includes a little starch, oil, and more vitamins and minerals than nectar.

Beetles are clumsy fliers, so they often visit flowers on which many blossoms are clustered close together, such as Labrador tea. They are one of the primary pollinators of skunk cabbage, where they climb back and forth over the closely packed male and female blossoms on the plant’s large flowering spike, or spadix. As they move around the spadix they carry pollen on their bodies, dropping or rubbing it off onto the ovules or “little eggs” and fertilizing them. (We wrote about Mary Willson’s fascinating research on this process in “Skunk Cabbage, Shining Beacons of Spring” in the May 1999 issue of the Alaskan Southeaster.)

Beetles seem to be especially attracted to flowers that emit what to humans are unpleasant odors, similar to the odors of rotting fish, carrion, dung, or urine. Skunk cabbage, of course, is one of those, though Willson’s work suggests the yellow spathes, or hoods, of skunk cabbage do much to attract beetles to the plant’s male flowers and their nourishing pollen. Many studies suggest that specific plants’ odors attract distinct species of beetle pollinators — a tactic plants would benefit from in the same way they benefit from bumblebees’ “loyalty.”

Plant Adaptations for Pollination

Plants have developed a wide variety of methods to ensure pollination. Some, such as our Sitka spruce trees, rely on wind to transfer the pollen. Others such as columbine and paintbrush are especially adapted for pollination by hummingbirds. Aquatic plants often rely on water currents to distribute their pollen. So insects are not the only pollinators, but they are by far the most important for the vast majority of plants in Southeast Alaska. Some plants have developed remarkably complex ways to take advantage of them.

Bog orchids, found in muskegs throughout Southeast, make it tremendously difficult for insects to extract their nectar (while apparently making the nectar tremendously attractive). Their nectar is housed in a narrow pouch or “spur” that projects backward from the lip of the blossom. When the insect sticks it head into the blossom it bumps against tiny adhesive discs that stick to its forehead and proboscis. At the same time the plant releases clusters of pollen that stick to the disc. The orchid blossom also has a cluster of proboscis-entangling hairs through which the insect must thread its way in order to reach the nectar deep within the spur of the blossom. These delay the insect just long enough for cement on the adhesive discs to set. When the insect visits the next bog orchid blossom it is almost inevitable that it will brush pollen from the discs onto the female part of the blossom waiting to be fertilized.

Shooting stars, those brilliant pink flowers with their petals swept backward and their anthers forming a sharp-pointed cone, take a different approach. They discharge their pollen in an explosive cloud when a bumblebee grasps their petals and vibrates its wing-muscles to produce a high-pitched buzz. The bee produces the buzz that dislodges the pollen by vibrating its flight muscles at up to 300 cycles per second. When shaken by the bees’ vibrations, the shooting star discharges its pollen from tiny pores in its tube-like anthers, dousing the bee’s body so that the bee not only receives a load of pollen but also carries pollen to the next shooting star it visits.

Our Unappreciated Benefactors

We have talked mostly about pollination of wildflowers in Southeast Alaska, but throughout the world insect pollinators are crucial to fruit and seed production in the plants upon which much of human society depends. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, both wild and managed pollinators are disappearing at alarming rates because of habitat loss, pesticide poisoning, diseases, and pests. The number of commercial bee colonies in the United States plummeted from 5.9 million in the late 1940s to 2.7 million in 1995. In 1994 local bee shortages forced many California almond growers to import honeybees from other states. And recent monitoring of pumpkins in New York State showed their blossoms still laden with pollen five hours after they opened in the morning, long after they had typically been stripped of all pollen by bees in seasons past.

We know a number of Southeast Alaska gardeners who pollinate their outdoor plants using paintbrushes because they do not feel they can rely on pollinators to do the job naturally. While we are far from many of the factors that threaten pollinators in other parts of the world — invasions by pests such as Africanized bees, extensive spraying of insecticides, and loss of habitat and host plants for pollinating insects — it would be good for us to recognize the importance of the role pollinating insects play in a thriving natural world. We can help assure their continuation by limiting our use of pesticides, including nectar and host plants for pollinators in our gardens, and purchasing organic produce grown with a recognition of how important insect pollinators are to our daily lives.