This unexpected moment from July of this year will always remain one of my favorite memories from my Phd. I was in one of my watermelon fields with my assistant and two volunteers, trying to figure out a protocol for observing bee foraging behavior. I came across this HUGE bumblebee--looked like a Southern Plains bumblebee by the coloring--foraging in the wildflowers we'd planted on the edge of the field and had to point it out to Julianna, Hannah and Michael so I called them over. What started out as just an observation of an astonishingly large bee turned into a probably 30 minute moment with this bee, just watching her and offering her different flowers to see how she would respond, and joking and enjoying watching her huge body weigh down the flower heads as she drank from the nectar. We weren't pressed for time, we just enjoyed her presence and followed her and lived a moment of her life through our human eyes. I decided to name her Queen Victoria.
As you can see in the video below, she did walk over to the Cosmos and Gaillardia flowers and forage on them when offered to her even though she was originally foraging on Zinnia, the large yellow flowers. This is interesting because some bumblebees will clearly move between floral species as they forage, whereas others will only stay on one floral species as they forage--a concept known as floral fidelity. Pollinators that exhibit more floral fidelity, or basically just stick to one floral species as they forage, are probably more efficient pollinators of their host plants, since the plant will only be receiving its own pollen species versus other foreign pollen.
