Springtime flowers for springtime bees!

As insects begin to become active in the spring, one of the first things they need to do is find a food source. Spring wildflowers are one of the earliest food sources for many insects, but they are especially important for the bees that gather the nectar and pollen from these flowers to feed their offspring. 
Willow flowers are one of the first places you'll see a lot of bees on a sunny day in the spring. The larger bee in the picture below is a honey bee (Hymenoptera: Apidae, Apis mellifera) and the smaller bee is a halictid bee (Hymenoptera: Halictidae).  Springtime is a very important time of year for social bees like honey bees and bumble bees because this is the time of year when they start to build up their colonies of hundreds and thousands of worker bees that will collect resources for the hive all summer. 

This bee (below) might be a species of Ceratina (Hymenoptera: Apidae, Ceratina sp.), commonly called the small carpenter bee because they excavate holes in the stems of pithy plants in order to build their nests. 

Many plants, like willow, provide nectar and pollen that is easily accessible by a variety of insects. Other plants, however, make it a little bit harder for insects to get at that sweet sweet nectar. The flower pictured below, called a fringed polygala (Polygala sp.) requires a bee to land on a specific part of the flower in order to access its nectar. 

The polygala flowers are mainly pollinated by bumble bees because they are the only bees heavy enough to trip the mechanism that opens the flower and that have a long enough tongue to reach the nectar at the bottom of the long nectar tube. 

In order to access the nectar and pollinate the polygala flower, a bee has to land on the purple fringed structure at the tip of the lower petals. This will open up the flower to expose the pistil and stamens, which the bee will contact as it reaches its tongue down into the corolla to drink nectar from the base of the flower. 

Another of my favorite spring flowers, Spring Beauty (Claytonia spp.,below), is not so picky when it comes to choosing its pollinators. 

As you can see the pistil and stamens of this flower are right out there for any insect to access, and the corolla is not long and narrow, so they don't need a long tongue to get at the nectar. 

Interestingly, however, there is a bee that only gathers nectar and pollen from spring beauty and almost no other flowers. It is called the spring beauty bee (Hymenoptera: Andrenidae, Andrena erigeniae) and it is a solitary bee that nests in the soil under the leaf litter in forests where spring beauty grows. I didn't get a photo of one so I won't spend too much time on it today, but you can count on a future post on this charming little bee. 
Thanks for reading!