[Pollinator] Wearing Chains?

[Peter Bernhardt]

Research colleague, Dr. Retha Meier, asked me to share the following photo
she took a few weeks ago.  Retha is very busy right now and is having
problems catching up on her email.  The photo was taken near her home and
you can see what happens when a honeybee visits the garden-domesticated
milkweeds grown to attract egg-laying monarchs.  See the pollinaria
attached to the bee's middle leg?  Some milkweeds are not nice at all to
commercial honeybees.    Some honeybees never escape from the slit that
releases a pollinarium (every flower has 5 slits for 5 pollinaria) and die
of exposure.  In our studies of the threatened Mead's milkweed, Asclepias
meadii, up to 10% of the honeybees we collected on the flowers were missing
parts of their las pair of legs. Curiously the native Anthophora abrupta
(males and females) didn't experience such mangling although they are
pretty much the same size (and weight?) of the honeybee.

Peter
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