July 2016

Recently, I was doing a bee survey on the Rye Harbour Nature Reserve with the project leader of the short-haired bumblebee project.  Whilst there were plenty of bumblebees around, we were quite surprised to stumble across several bee orchids.  If you have never seen a bee orchid, you may wonder what it looks like, but it you have heard the name and then come across the plant, you would be in no doubt what you had found, because it looks exactly like a bumblebee drinking nectar from a pink flower.

Bee Orchid - Ophrys apifera

Bee Orchid - Ophrys apifera

The idea behind this, if you can call an evolutionary advantage an idea, is that the flower looks like a female bumblebee.  Not only does it look like a female bumblebee, but to a male bumblebee, it smells like one as well.  So the male lands on the flower and attempts to mate with the ‘female’ and in the process gets covered in pollen.  When he makes a second attempt at another flower, the pollen is rubbed onto the stigma of that flower and at least the plant is fertilized.  Hopefully, the male bumblebee will not keep making the same mistake and will eventually find a proper female to mate with.

We didn’t see any bumblebees on the bee orchids and I started wondering which species of bee actually pollinates the orchid.  When I got home I reached for my trusty copy of the internet and looked it up.  Sadly, the answer was a little disappointing – In the UK, the bee orchid is self-pollinating and it relies on the wind to brush the pollen onto the stigma.  Apparently, around the Mediterranean, there are species of bee that pollinate the plant, but my trusty copy of the internet was strangely reticent on exactly which species do so.

The bee orchid is a striking plant and well worth keeping an eye out for.  It is not a particularly rare plant and is quite widespread throughout England, though the books describe it as ‘locally common’ which means that you won’t find it everywhere, but when you do find one, you’ll probably find several.  It seems to like chalk soils and often appears on disturbed ground, though it doesn’t flower every year.  Perhaps that’s why it has suddenly appeared on the bund wall at Rye Harbour.