When we hear a buzz in our gardens, the first insect we tend to think of is a bee. It is easy to overlook the other animals pollinating our precious plants. Many of them are not even insects, including bats, birds or monkeys. However, in Europe the main pollinators are bees, butterflies, flies and even beetles! Read on to learn more about the full variety of vital pollen participants.
When animals are looking for plant food, it is easy to see the sugary attraction of nectar. Plants produce this substance to lure animals, which will become covered in pollen during the process of feeding on the nectar. Other animals are after the pollen itself, but they will also inadvertently carry some of it on their bodies. As soon as they visit the next plant to feed, the animals will spread the pollen and accidentally fertilise the hosts of their banquet.
A bee by any other name
The picture-perfect pollinator is of course the bee. Solitary bees make up 90% of the species. This variety prefers a lone life to the honey hive. As they make their own nests for their young, they greatly appreciate the presence of a bee hotel in your backyard. Solitary bees are best recognised by their fairly hairy torsos, their long body shape and their muted colours.
Andrena fulvago, the hawk’s-beard mining bee
By contrast, honey bees enjoy the activity of their hives made from wax combs. The fruit of their hard labour, honey, is not meant for human consumption but for their own food. Honey bees have flat, wide hind legs and show colours varying from almost pitch black to bright stripes of orange. Solitary and honey bees rank among the 20,000 bee species.
Bumble bees and wasps (or, a bee and not a bee)
Then there are bumble bees, which some people might be surprised to learn are another bee variety. They usually have female workers, who make nests and collect the pollen. However, some species of ‘cuckoo’ bumble bees don’t have workers; only queens and males. These parasitic bumble bees take over existing nests. Bumble bees have white, red or orange tails and are even hairier than the solitary bees. They come in 27 species.
Vespula germanica, the European wasp
Photographer: Thomas Hotz
Wasps have a bit of a bad reputation, ruining your picnic or thirsting after your soft drink. Still, they are very useful as pollinators, since they can get to plants in places where the bees struggle to survive. They live social lives in nests together with as many as 10,000 workers. Although they can look a lot like bees, wasps tend to have a narrow waste and narrow legs. There are around 75,000 wasp species, some of which are very small and/or very dark.
Flies (hover or other)
Most flies, about 80% of all species, do not pollinate plants. Since the skies are covered with them, however, flies may rank as the second-most important pollinators after bees. Over 70% of all food crops can receive a visit from a fly. These insects can come in all shapes and sizes, from round to thin and from hairy to slick.
Chrysops relictus, the twin-lobed deerfly
Photographer: Erik Karits
If you see a fly suspended in the air next to a flower, however, it would most likely be a hoverfly. Among the most common species are bee-flies (though they don’t buzz) and marmalade hoverflies (which don’t make marmalade). Most hoverflies are slightly shiny or reflective. Unlike bees, hoverflies do not have a proboscis, a long tongue to stick out into the plant. They don’t just take the pollen; they also eat aphids and green fly, which are plant pests.
(Butter)flies and moths
There are flies, and then there are butterflies. They have a proboscis like the bee, which is handy to suck up nectar as though through a straw. In doing so, the pollen gets stuck to their bodies and legs. As soon as they make their way to another flower, they deliver their package and pollinate the plant. Butterflies come in all colours from white to black. Many have spots or speckles, some of them resembling eyes to scare off predators.
Attacus atlas, the atlas moth
Photographer: János Szüdi
Moths are the less-celebrated cousins of butterflies, as they are often active during night rather than day. They are both members of the Lepidoptera family (15,000 species in the world) and are really rather hard to distinguish. While butterflies have thin antennae with usually small balls or clubs at the end, most moth antennae are feathery without balls or clubs. A lot about moths is still shrouded in the mystery of the night.
Beetles and birds?
You may normally see beetles crawling on the ground, but many of them can actually fly. Around a quarter of beetle species (which number 400,000 in total) trap pollen in their wing cases when feeding on nectar. Beetles tend to have a straight line down the middle of their bodies, where the wing cases join up. They are among the earliest pollinators of flowers when these first appeared 160 million years ago. Beetles select plants to pollinate by smell.
Rhagium mordax, the black-spotted longhorn beetle
Photographer: Erik Karits
The next animal may come as a surprise, but birds also pollinate when they drink nectar. Some birds resemble bees in that they have a long, curved bill reaching into the flowers, like a proboscis. Other birds are similar to hoverflies: they feed while staying still in mid-air, such as hummingbirds. To accommodate such specialist bird visitors, plant species have evolved and adapted their flower shapes. Many of them are also brightly coloured.
Reptiles… and mammals?
You may not have thought of birds as pollinators, so can you imagine a reptile laden with pollen? This is exactly what happens in desert regions and tropical forests, where lizards and geckos will have a refreshing sip of nectar. In the process, they aid in the pollination. From some plants they eat protective flower parts, allowing other animals to pollinate. In addition, they can spread plant seeds and speed up floral reproduction in that manner.
Phelsuma grandis, the Madagascar giant day gecko
Photographer: Oleksandr Kuzmin
Might even mammals have a part to play in pollination? They sure do, whether they are rodents such as flying squirrels, bats, or even primates such as lemurs in Madagascar. In the tropics, mammals help pollinate large trees or distribute their fruits, and thus seeds. You yourself may smell the fresh flowers in a field, sneeze and spread the pollen across. The next time you see a bee, remember that it’s an important pollinator; but not the only.
