Female Ptiloglossa bees are single moms with a lot to do and little time. Fortunately, they can use a feathery tongue to make infant-care plastics and then brew up batches of baby food.
“We jokingly call them polyester bees,” says pollination ecologist Stephen Buchmann of the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Chemically, the bee-made plastic is a cousin of human-made polyesters. A big gland on a female’s abdomen secretes Tinkertoy-like molecules of repeating lactone compounds, each with its “ester” structural bit that gives polyester its name.
The stuff makes the finishing touch for little urn-shaped nursery chambers that mother bees dig underground. They use their paintbrush tongues to lick up the gland secretion and slather it on nursery walls.
The plastic layer is transparent, tough and “can be kind of crunchy,” Buchmann says. It’s “thought to keep the brood chamber area nice and cozy, high-humidity and also to keep out the bad guys.”
These moms are doomsday preppers. In the P. arizonensis Buchmann studies in Arizona, females have only a few weeks to fill plastic retreats with all the food each youngster needs for much of a year underground before its own, brief reproductive frenzy in sunlight. Each generation of big, fast-flying bees grows up floating in, and feeding on, nothing but mom’s limited-edition brew of nectar and pollen — which smells like beer.
Many other bee species mix their baby food of pollen and nectar to “a kind of Play-Doh consistency,” Buchmann says. “Poke it and it dents.” Food stored in a cellophane bee nest, however, is different.
Open and tilt a nursery of baby Ptiloglossa bees “and all this stuff would run out it’s so watery,” Buchmann says. That’s probably because of the unusually watery nectar these polyester bees collect. Much of it comes from the candelabra-shaped bloom spikes of agave plants, runny enough for easy slurping by bats in southeastern Arizona…
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