The bee’s knees

Colin Smale takes a look at one of the county’s popular wildflowers, the bee orchid.

Have you heard of the strange-looking bee orchid, Latin: Ophrys apifera?

Ophrys is from a Greek word meaning eyebrows because in the Mediterranean region and Rome in particular, the women used to darken their eyebrows with this orchid. Apifera leads us to apiary, a place where bees are kept!

But why is it called a bee orchid? One glance and it takes but a moment to see that this orchid does look very much like a bee, which is what it is designed to look like because it wants to attract bees to take its pollen.

The flower emits pheromones, which to an amorous male bee smell like a female. When the pheromone scent trail leads to this flower, the male bee sees only a glamorous bee!

A fresh, newly-blossomed bee orchid will have two bags of pollen hanging under that green hood, as seen in the main image here.

These are called pollinias and it is easy to see that when the male bee lands on the ‘body’ of this bee (the body is called the labellum) the bag or bags of pollen will stick to the bee to be carried off to the next bee orchid, which the bee will pollinate.

It is not long after daybreak, when the sun warms the land and the bees are on the wing, that the insects do their work. Probably by midday the pollinias have gone. Clever stuff, eh?

An image of a bee orchid without these two pollinias is only half an image and not showing the full beauty of the flower.

Self-pollinating
In the Mediterranean this plant is common but less so in the UK, preferring the south east of England, but it is slowly moving towards the south west too. In the UK, it is more or less self-pollinating because the bee that it is designed to attract, the long-horned bee (Eucera longicornis), is largely a European bee.

I remember finding my first bee orchid; I was staring at the ground but just looking to see what plants were growing there. I was actually looking at a spot very close to a bee orchid but it didn’t jump vividly into view. However, once seen, I then realised there were others all around it and a new site was found, for me at least.

In Lincolnshire, it can be found on some roadside verges and the chalky grasslands of the Wolds. I know of a couple of sites very near to the Belmont transmitter; one site has a super-abundance of plants while the other has half a dozen plants one year and none the next.

There is a particular part of a grass meadow near me where the ground looks very poor, but for some odd reason this is where more bee orchids are found.

It likes roadside verges and railway embankments. I remember a surprising account of at least 138 plants being discovered on an urban roadside verge, reported to the council by a local botanist and then mown down a couple of days after the council had been informed of their whereabouts! Hopefully, nowadays, councils are better informed and considerate.

Lincolnshire has 22 different species of orchid, this has been the story of just one of them.

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