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What’s hopping on my bottom board?

Tracey, a beekeeper in Seattle, wrote to say she and her husband noticed “little jumping bugs (wingless) hanging out with dead bees on the bottom board” of her hives and asked if I would look at some photos. She said, “It’s pretty tiny, maybe 1 mm, and it can hop straight up a good 4-8 inches when I ran my twig across the bottom board. Like popcorn exploding or a seedpod, almost.”

I could not identify the critters so I sent the photos to my friend Tim Eisele in Michigan, author of The Backyard Arthropod Project. He knew immediately they were a type of globular springtail. This was all news to me. Tim said:

They are fantastically hard to photograph, both because they are so tiny and because when they jump it is as if they vanish completely. I’m impressed that Tracey got pictures at all!

Springtails like these live pretty much everywhere that there is a bit of moisture and mold, fungus, or something decomposing to eat. As far as I know, none of them are parasites, predators, or harmful to bees or people in any way. They are pretty fun for small children once they find out that they exist. My daughters love poking them to make them jump.

Elated to put a name to the face, Tracey said, “It makes sense why I found them when/where I did: the bottom board and entrance had many dead bees, moisture, and fungus (on decomposing bees) so the springtails were definitely enjoying a picnic.”

It seems that poking at these little guys is quite the human thing to do. Apparently, Tracey’s husband was having as much fun making them jump as Tim’s children. Why do bugs bring out the kid in us? I have to admit I checked a couple of my own hives for springtails after I learned all this—but no luck.

Below are Tracey’s photos followed by a short video taken from the BBC’s “Life in the Undergrowth” documentary series. Very cool.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Springtail by Tracey Byrne.
Springtail by Tracey Byrne.
Springtail by Tracey Byrne.
Springtail by Tracey Byrne.
Globular springtail. Courtesy of Tracey Byrne.
Globular springtail. Courtesy of Tracey Byrne.

Are bees insects or animals?

The short answer is yes, bees are both insects and animals. In fact, all insects are animals, and pretty much anything that’s not a plant, a fungus, a bacterium, a virus, or a protist is an animal too.

I’m dating myself here, but when I attended grade school, everything was either a plant or an animal—those were the only choices. I remember being completely stumped by a euglena, a single-celled organism that could swim, surround and absorb food, or—if the pickings were slim—just manufacture some food with its personal supply of chlorophyll. How convenient. I’ve been in restaurants where that would have been a welcome choice.

But ultimately common sense prevailed and now we have a bunch of so-called kingdoms in which to divide all those single-celled half-breeds of life. Depending on whom you talk to, in addition to plants and animals we have fungi, protists, and two types of bacteria.

But for simplicity’s sake, we can rule out all those oddballs for this discussion, because we know a bee is not a fungus, a bacterium, or any other fringy life form. That leaves plant or animal.

Animals have several characteristics that are simple to recognize, and some more technical ones which we don’t need to bother with. Here are the easiest to understand:

  • Animals are multicellular, meaning they are made up of more than one cell.
  • Animals eat. They bring food into their bodies for energy and nutrients rather than manufacturing their own food the way plants do.
  • Animals move. At some point in their life cycle, animals can move from place to place under their own power. They swim, walk, crawl, hop, fly, slither, wriggle, or roll—but they get there.
  • Animals lack rigid cells walls. Their bodies are soft and pliable rather than woody like a tree, fibrous like hemp, or crunchy like a carrot.

Since a bee has many cells, can eat, can fly, and is not woody, a bee is an animal. No doubt about it—it’s not even close to being anything else.

What makes an animal an insect is a little more complex, but generally an insect has

  • An exoskeleton (a hard exterior instead of bones)
  • Three pairs of legs
  • Three body segments
  • Most have antennae
  • Most have external mouthparts

As you can see, a bee fits that description as well. I’ve greatly simplified things here, but I want you to see that these classifications are not mysterious—they are made of things we can observe. If you know some basic biology, you can pretty much figure out what any creepy-crawly might be.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Buy seeds, not ‘cides

While you peruse the seed catalogs in the coming weeks, don’t forget to provide food and habitat for beneficial insects such as lacewings, lady bugs, stink bugs, hover flies, assassin bugs, and parasitic wasps. By attracting beneficials to our gardens, we can get away from using insecticide . . . and avoiding insecticide is the very best thing we can do for our bees.

Beneficial insects are the ones that eat critters we don’t want in our gardens—pests like aphids, beetles, mealybugs, mites, thrips, leafhoppers, and grubs. But to keep the beneficials around, we must provide good homes for them, as well as a plentiful supply of flowers. Flowers that produce pollen and nectar provide the nutrients adult beneficials need to produce large numbers of eggs—all of which turn into aphid-munching, grub-slurping larvae.

Even when the “meat” is in short supply—as when they’ve eaten all your aphids—many of the beneficial species consume nectar as a source of carbohydrates and pollen as a source of fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals. To keep your beneficials happy throughout the growing season, you must provide a succession of flowers. Something must always be in bloom.

Conveniently for us, the Hudson Valley Seed Library has packaged a seed mix called “Good Bug Blooms.” Each packet contains cosmos, annual gaillardia, zinnias, blue cornflower, sweet alyssum, flax, chamomile, and several other varieties of beneficial bug food—500 seeds in all. Not only that, but the packets themselves are gorgeous works of art. As the seed library states it, “Heirloom Seeds and Contemporary Art, All in One Pack.”

By the way, it’s easy to get lost in the stacks at the Hudson Valley Seed Library. Have a look around their website—you’ll surely come away with more than one packet of seeds.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

Seed packet of Good Bug Blooms. Photo by Hudson Valley Seed Library
Seed packet of Good Bug Blooms. Photo by Hudson Valley Seed Library

On entoms, pesticides, and human extinction

Except for bees, my study of entoms has been sparse. Today I often wonder why I didn’t study insects—instead of agronomy—when I was an undergraduate. But when I look back at my courses, I remember.

I took two entomology courses as an undergraduate, one of which was called “Economic Entomology.” As I remember, it had little to do with either economics or entomology. The textbook was more or less a compendium of how to kill bugs with the popular pesticides of the day, including recipes like this: “Treat 1000 square feet of area with either 3 level tablespoonfuls of 50% chlordane wettable powder or 2.5 teaspoonfuls of 75% emulsifiable concentrate in sufficient water to give uniform coverage, or 0.5 pound of 5% dust.” [1] Not very inspiring, really.

The other course had to do with the biochemistry of insecticides. This was more interesting and held me in good stead when it came time to write a thesis—even though it was many years later. Still, there was a very negative aspect to all this killing that compelled me to study field crops instead.

Now there’s a subject. If you think you’re getting away from poisoning and mass destruction when you go from insects to plants, you are totally deluded. If I recall, we spent more time learning how to kill weeds than grow crops. I even took an entire year of herbicide science—the biochemistry of how to kill plants.

At this point, I am happy to have studied the ‘cides—in no small part because it’s good to know the enemy. I say that partly in jest, because I am not against all pesticides, just as I am not against all antibiotics or all drugs or all food additives. I believe there is a good use for some of these things some of the time.

But we have let corporate interests sell us a poison for every purpose to such a degree that now we are totally dependent on them. We live in a world where we simply poison anything we don’t like or don’t understand. But who are we kidding?

We humans may have big brains but we don’t have the amazingly flexible genetics that the entoms have. When we’re done poisoning the earth—which will inevitably include poisoning ourselves to extinction—the entoms will have the last laugh. Will they end up studying us? Hell no. They are smarter than that.

Rusty

[1] Davison, R. H. and Peairs, L. M. 1966. Insect Pests of Farm, Garden and Orchard. Sixth Ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.