By Dan Zarlenga, Missouri Department of Conservation
Photo caption: A spring beauty bloom with its special companion, the spring beauty mining bee. Photo by Noppadol Paothong, Missouri Department of Conservation
The month of March is the first to welcome spring. And one of the very first signs of the new season is the spring beauty. You may be seeing these flowers even now. But do you know of this flower’s special companion? There may be no such thing as pink elephants, but it turns out there can be pink bees.
Spring beauty is one of our early ephemeral spring wildflowers. It can most often be found in woodlands before the leaves appear and the canopy is still open. You can also see them in fields, and perhaps your own backyard. The first of these may appear as early as the end of February, but the months of March and April are when they tend to emerge in full force.
Spring beauties are small flowers that grow inches from the ground. They feature five white or sometimes pink petals which have prominent pink veins and five pink stamens. The pollen they produce is even pink.
These flowers possess corms, or underground stems, that are surprisingly like potatoes. Both the corms and spring beauty leaves are edible, and were a source of food for Native Americans. Due to the time-intensive effort it takes to harvest them, few people use spring beauties for food today.
However, spring beauties are vital food to a certain species of native bee, aptly named, the spring beauty mining bee!
These mining bees do not live in a hive like European honeybees. As with so many of Missouri’s native bees, this species is solitary and nests in the ground under dry leaf litter within the woods. Both males and females emerge from their winter sleep in the ground early in the year. They mate even before spring beauties begin to bloom, after which females begin excavating a nest for the young.
Spring beauty mining bees dig deep into the spring beauty flowers once they bloom, and only these flowers. This species does not visit any other species of flower and remains uncompromisingly loyal to the spring beauty.
Spring beauty mining bees emerge adorned in pink pollen from their “mining” exploits. The bees bring this pollen back to feed their young, and it comprises essential nutrition for the next generation. Apparently, their larvae are very particular about what they eat. In return for the meal ticket, as they go from flower to flower the bees provide equally essential pollination for the spring beauty.
Curiously, researchers have discovered that mealtime is remarkably consistent. Studies show that spring beauty mining bees always do their work between 10 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., and on sunny days. It’s probably not a coincidence that spring beauties open their petals late in the morning, and close them at night, and on days that are rainy or cloudy.
The special and exclusive relationship between the spring beauty flower and its companion spring beauty mining bee is another one of nature’s amazing balancing acts.
Two disparate yet codependent species. And both look pretty in pink.