Dandelions: Healthy Fast Food for Bees (Ep. 25)

If you have a garden, which “weed” is the most frustrating for you? Dandelions are tenacious flowers, seeding and growing seemingly overnight. Today, we’re talking about how amazing this flower actually is.

Dandelions offer both nectar and pollen in abundance, making them a fantastic food source for bees. Even better, dandelion pollen contains a higher amount of protein compared to other flowers. But there’s more–the shape of the flower plays a crucial role in its interaction with insects. With food sources for bees becoming more and more scarce, a powerhouse like the dandelion is a big win.

Dr. Philip Donkersley is a senior teaching assistant at the University of Lancaster. In his work he studies the interactions between insects and their environment from nutritional, microbial and fitness perspectives. He’s on the editorial boards of Ecology and Evolution and Frontiers in Bee Science.

Good to know

Dandelions grow in very little soil, flower from early spring to just before winter, and offer sustenance for bees all year round. But dandelions are classified as herbs which means every part of the plant is edible for us as well. The leafy greens are rich in vitamins like A and B12, but you can munch on the roots and flowers too.

This video from the Forest Preserve District of Will County talks about why dandelions are good for bees, but also for your lawn.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Bee’s Knees. I’m your host, Jacy Meyer. The Bee’s Knees is a podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity.

Thanks for being here.

If someone said to you, this is the best plant imaginable, what plant do you think they’d be talking about? Beautifully scented roses, an exotic herb, the magnificent elm? Dr. Philip Donkersley, today’s guest, may surprise you with his choice. Thanks again for being here Philip. You have a different perspective on dandelions than most people.

Tell us how you feel about them. Thank you very much Jacy. [00:01:00] So, my perspective on dandelions is that they are basically the best plant imaginable. Most people look at them and think weeds, they think we’ll spray them with pesticides, we’ll get, digging them out of the garden. But the fact remains that they are there is no genuinely anything quite a thing as a weed, and at the best of times, weeds are just plants that do very well in a lot of environments.

One of the nicest things about dandelions is that they are just such an amazing food source for all kinds of bees, and they are extremely prolific. So it means when you have just a couple of dandelions in your lawn, if they get pollinated, they go to seed, you then have thousands of dandelions in your lawn, which for those of you who don’t suffer from hay fever, it’s a wonderful thing because it means you have lots of food lying around with bumblebees all year round.

One of the other great things I love about dandelions is that, [00:02:00] well, at least in the UK, they have a cultural and sort of botanical history. There’s a, uh, lovely drink, especially found in the north country where I live, uh, called dandelion and burdock, where it’s very similar, I think, in taste to root beer.

In fact, it might be very similar production to root beer because you dig up the large chunky roots of dandelion plants and burdock plants and you brew a sweet sort of soda drink with it. It’s quite lovely. We all know in urban areas, a lot of native flowers are no longer available for bees. But what exactly do dandelions offer them in terms of nutrition?

And can bees live solely on dandelions? So no animal can live solely on one plant, but the sheer abundance of dandelions means you do have a lot of food available to them. So obviously bees go to flowers for nectar and pollen and the nectar, it’s [00:03:00] basically looking for carbohydrates, looking for sugar.

Dandelions produces an abundance of nectar, so a bee visiting a dandelion flower will always get the amount of sugar it needs to keep living and flying around looking for more flowers. It’s the pollen side of dandelions where things get really interesting. So, pollen is basically like the protein, it’s the meat of a bee’s diet.

And, you could, there are some really lovely studies by Hendriksema and Shaw back in 1997, it was a really fascinating little study they did where they looked at the sort of crude protein content of dandelion pollen. And it’s a lot higher than most other flowers. It’s somewhere in the region of 37 to 42 percent protein, which is pretty beefy when it comes to just a little pollen grain.

And for the longest time, that stayed as like, okay, cool. So dandelions are great protein content. It’s when you look just a little bit deeper in the amino acids that those proteins comprise. So Just like with humans, we’ve got essential amino [00:04:00] acids that we can’t produce ourselves. And bees are the same.

We basically have more or less a one to one on the essential amino acids in humans and bees. Because essential amino acids are chemicals that can only be produced by flowers, or by plants in general. And what’s really interesting is that different plants have different levels of essential amino acids, particularly in their pollens, and there are a couple of amino acids that are in dandelion pollen, lysine, leucine, and valine, which are way higher.

in dandelion pollen than they are in most other pollens. So yes, dandelions produce a lot of nectar, produce a lot of sugar, they produce a lot of protein. It’s the quality of the protein that you get from dandelion pollen that really has these huge health benefits for basically, anyone who wants to come along and eat it.

That is so interesting. There’s something else about dandelions, though, that is also fascinating to [00:05:00] me. And it’s the shape of the flower. It’s also a win for bees. Why is that? So, I love this idea that evolutionarily, flowers came from, we need someone to come along and shift the pollen around, we need someone to help us reproduce as plants.

So, we developed a system where we have pollen stuck right out on the edge of the flowers, anyone can come along and feed it. And then, this evolutionary process called the Red Queen Hypothesis occurs where, over time, insects learn that they can cheat that system, and they can just steal the pollen, eat it, and steal the nectar and eat it without contributing to the plants reproduction.

So correspondingly, Red Queen Hypothesis acts on that, and the plants gradually over time produce more and more complex shaped flowers that kind of trick insects into having to pollinate them before they get the nectar and the food reports. Great example of this. Things like tulips, honeysuckles, a really lovely [00:06:00] example, these like really long, complicated flowers, like really long tubes to them, or lots of petals all curved together, make things very difficult for a bee just to kind of come in and take food and run away.

Now, it’s not to say that all plants evolve that. Dandelions are a great example of like a primitive style, big, open flower. So they’ve maintained that old system, because as you notice from how they grow in your garden, they don’t really care about waste. They go whole hog on reproduction and growing vegetation as quickly as possible, which is an alternative sort of survival strategy that a lot of plants do.

A lot of trees do it actually, it’s quite interesting. So you have these big open flowers, and that means that really any bee that wants to have some dandelion pollen, it doesn’t need to be bees don’t need to put any effort into getting the pollen, so it’s an easy meal. Obviously, you’ve got bees like honeybees that [00:07:00] have, uh, medium length, kind of short tongues, so they can only really forage on fairly simple flowers.

Dandelion is great for them. Then you’ve got some really complicated, really long tongued, really interesting behavioured bumblebee species like the Bilberry bumblebee. It’s a great example of this. It’s got a really long tongue, and it has got some really interesting behaviours around flowers.

Specifically using its arms to part petals away. It doesn’t need to bother with that either. If it needs food, it can go straight to a dandelion and get an easy meal. That is strangely high quality. You were on with, on The Bee’s Knees last year and you introduced us to your bee box project. Can you briefly remind us what it is and can we get an update?

Absolutely. So the bee box project is an artificial nest box for bumblebees. Just like you have something for birds in your garden or bats in your garden or even a hedgehog’s box [00:08:00] that we have over here. That project is going really well, actually, and next week, which is really fantastic timing, what I’m doing is I’m starting a really interesting new collaboration with some researchers in Berlin who have an AI algorithm that can decode bee behavior using video.

What I’m going to be doing next Tuesday, actually, that’s going to be a very fun, busy day, is I am going to be gluing QR codes to the backs of hundreds of bumblebees. Putting them in the bee box, reuniting them with their nest inside the bee box and recording a couple of weeks worth of live video footage to feed into their algorithm.

The idea being that normally, if you want to do behavioral studies on bumblebees, you physically have to sit there and watch that video and then note down what the bees are doing at all times. Now with an algorithm, what we can do is we can plug all that information into a computer and it will say bee number 14 has spent 3 [00:09:00] hours cleaning itself and 4 hours looking after the queen and like 5 hours gone off foraging.

It’s um very early days yet, but it’s a really exciting new piece of research technology that will really revolutionize how we deal with or how we see the behavior. And do you have any expectations or what are you hoping to get from this insight? Biggest plan, really exciting thing I’m looking forward to is the study of the interaction between The plan is to study how neonicotinoid pesticides impact bee behavior.

And we’ve done a lot of this out in the field with bees flying and losing the ability to memorize where their home is. So they go off and they get lost if they get too much pesticide. What we don’t know is what happens to the bee behavior inside the nest. So there was a really interesting study just at the end of last year.

That showed that when you give bumblebees certain levels of pesticides, they spend more time walking around the outside of the nest than they do sat on the actual nest itself, [00:10:00] which is a really, it’s good indication there’s an effect there, but we have no idea what the bees are specifically doing because we don’t have a way of decoding what their behavior is, and the idea that I’ve got is to study whether it’s changing that they’re going to spend more time Cleaning the nest, more time eating food from the nest, or more time building the nest out. Because we just don’t know what their sort of change of behavioural patterns is going to be like. It’s going to be really interesting to find out. Yeah, that sounds fascinating and I will follow up with you on that,

real quick, will you have pre exposed the bees to the pesticides? For the purposes of next week’s experiment, no, we are doing it just on a healthy, non manipulated colony, because we’re trying to do it, that’s our baseline training data. So the same thing as when you’re training a automatically driving car, you have to give it thousands of hours of nothing complicated, and eventually it will learn to recognize the weird stuff.

Anything else you’d like to [00:11:00] add about dandelions, Philip? They’re just the most tenacious, wonderful plants. They truly are. They do such a lot of great work. The leaves, you can always have fun watching things like rabbits nibbling on the leaves, the seeds, they feed small rodents, you have mice and voles and shrews feeding on the seeds.

They support an entire global ecosystem and they just do such a great job. So when you see dandelions in the garden, look after them, grab some seeds from them and spread them around, go around guerrilla gardening your neighbors and throwing, throwing dandelion seeds into their garden. All going to be good for the bees and for the planet.

Why do you do what you do? Why bees? Why bees? I would typically say I’ve always loved bees, but that’s just not actually that true. I went to university years and years ago to study microbes and then in the summer spent working on farms in Eastern Europe. [00:12:00] I got my first taste of keeping bees and I just really enjoyed the physical activity of it and sort of the emotional connectedness with nature that you get from working with bees.

And then just over the years, honeybees was an easy in because they’re very easy to work with. And there has always been this sort of desire to work on something that’s a bit more sensitive. And bumblebees are, honeybees are not really that much in trouble globally. They’re, they’re pretty fine. It’s the bumblebees and solitary bees that are really in trouble and getting finally to do something that’s meaningful conservation wise to work with, uh, working with bumblebees.

And then doing something that’s got, like, I can answer genuine, important scientific questions about bumble bees. It’s just hugely rewarding. It’s like, it’s just a really nice way of living. It’s great. Kind of makes you want to plant dandelions, doesn’t it? Luckily, as Philip said, they are hardy enough to thrive on their own.

But even better, they’re a quick and healthy meal for loads of wild bees. So [00:13:00] embrace those friendly yellow sparks of pollen, and let at least a few of them feed the bees in your garden. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit the BeesKnees. website for more information about Philip, his projects, and the sensational dandelion.