Our native cucurbits, pumpkin and squash, rely on native squash bees for pollination. Ground-nesting, solitary squash bees (two different genera: Peponapis and Xenoglossa) look a bit like honey bees, but they’re hairier and slightly smaller. The hard- working single moms make a foot-long, pencil-thin tunnel in the soil with single nest cells off the sides. Though males and females both visit the flowers, only the females collect pollen, which they mix with the nectar to form a food mass (bee bread) for their egg, which is then deposited on the food.
Males, who don’t collect pollen (and don’t have a nest to go to) often spend the night in closed flowers. (Gently open one, and you might discover someone crashed out in his bachelor pad!) They’re still efficient pollinators, though, since they become covered with pollen grains overnight, transporting it to other flowers as they resume their enthusiastic search for females in the morning.
Photo: Heather Holm
