Author Gary Taylor ◦
With around 800 different species of native bees here in WA (estimated 2,000 Australia wide) I try to bring something new with every post, and although I have posted this little sweetheart before, this is the first time I’ve captured her bubbling…
OK, so most of you will know what “bubbling” is, a process where a bee regurgitates the nectar it has ingested into a “bubble” (which has a high water content) to evapourate the water and condense the the goodness within. A bit like the way your Mum (or Grandma, depending on how old you are) used to make proper pan gravy from the pan Sunday’s roast was cooked in before Gravox came along… but in this case it’s the sugars (energy) she’s after, and what you may not know is that a bee’s metabolism actually requires a certain concentration of sugar to power the wings for flight… You can’t run a high octane drag car on 91 unleaded… Give your horse a handful of barley sugars before a race, or for another analogy, putting watery gravy on a Sunday roast just doesn’t cut the mustard 😄
But this bubbling isn’t for personal use… Like the Hylaeines, Euryglossine bees don’t collect pollen externally for their offspring, they ingest it. Which is why the bubble is so dense, she’s making baby food, a nutritious mix of pollen and nectar (no doubt the finest, bee mums are awesome) that has to be thick enough to retain it’s consistency until her eggs have hatched and not just soak into the surrounds of her nursery chambers…
And last pic is for scale, it’s hard to tell the size of a bee from a pic when you don’t know how big the flower it’s on is 🙂
