Exotic Ants in Florida. Archbold Biological Station, famous for studies of rare native species, seems an odd launching place for a study of non-native insects. The Station, however, has many exotic species, just like every other site in Florida. In 1982 an African ant was found in the fenceline bayhead (Tract 7), the first record of the species in the US. The fenceline bayhead was probably not the Ellis Island for this species, as we later found specimens in a bottle of unsorted arthropods collected by Walter Suter in Palm Beach Co. in 1965. This exotic discovery started a project culminating 18 years later in a long publication on exotic ants throughout Florida. The project began with the collaboration of James Trager, and after he moved to Missouri, the survey was joined by Lloyd Davis and Stefan Cover.

As a group, Florida’s exotic ants are notable in several ways. There are 52 species, the largest number for any state, or for any area of the world. Almost all come from the tropics and subtropics, with a surprising number (22 spp.) from the distant Old World tropics. It appears there was an early influx of Old World species: 16 were already present by 1940, including some much earlier arrivals. New World exotics, rather mysteriously, did not arrive in numbers until later: 24 species were not known from Florida until after 1940.

Ants have contributed unusually high numbers of exotics to Florida. The superior colonizing ability of ants may be to blame; social systems of ants can be seen as an ingenious strategy that combines advantages of intensive care for offspring with high reproductive potential. It is a bit like a large human family in which older children take care of their younger siblings and do all other work, except that the queen ant achieves her leisure status at a time of life when she can still produce hundreds, or thousands, of additional offspring. A single queen may mother an empire.

Florida’s Fabulous Insects. Despite the best efforts of educators, functional biological illiteracy is common. This is not really anybody’s fault. The basic topics of biology, such as genetics, cell biology, and physiology have become so swollen with information that they fill all available space in curricula. Supplied with this basic knowledge, young adults are sent out into the living world, which is just like sending them into a library with an education well grounded in the alphabet and grammatical rules, but with a vocabulary of about a dozen words. The general level of entomological knowledge is a splendid example of this functional illiteracy. Even in most universities, courses in entomology have been cut back or eliminated. Publication of a general book on Florida insects in 2000 (Florida’s Fabulous Insects, World Publications; see photo, this page) is an attempt to fight entomological illiteracy with a concentrated dose of insect natural history. The text was written at Archbold; the many color photographs are mostly by Brian Kenney, supplemented with photos by more than 20 other naturalists, including Pete Carmichael, Thomas Eisner, and James Lloyd.

"Oh, happy the lily, When kissed by the bee;
And, sipping tranquilly, Quite happy is he."
                    (Duet from Ruddigore, Gilbert and Sullivan 1887)

Setting aside encrypted Victorian sexual allusions and illusions, there are still plenty of prevalent misconceptions about relationships between bees and flowers. Most revolve around overestimations of the strength and closeness of the mutualism. Deliberate pollination by bees, for example, is not known to occur at the Station, or anywhere else. Presumably, this is because there is almost no chance that an individual bee or its offspring would significantly benefit from increased seed production by its host plant. Likewise, specific mutualism, in which a species of bee and a species of plant are exclusively dependent on each other, seems very rare, in spite of the theoretical appeal of insured reciprocity. Most ecological communities probably lack the stability needed for evolution and maintenance of simplistic mutual relationships between bees and plants. While bees and bee-pollinated plants are co-evolved in a deep phyletic sense, individual species usually show varied and complex relationships.

At the Archbold Biological Station we have been documenting for many years these patterns and others in studies of the 115 species of bees on the Station and the 136 species of flowering plants they are known to visit (see photo, this page). Many species of bees visit numerous unrelated flowers, although individuals of these species usually show "flower constancy," going from flower to flower of the same species. Dialictus placidensis, for example, visits at least 43 species of flowers on the Station, from Agalinis to Ximenia. Similarly, many flowers host a batch of bees; gallberry (Ilex glabra), for example, is visited by at least 28 species. Some bee/flower relationships are apparently not mutualistic. Although Lake Placid scrub mint (Dicerandra frutescens) is visited by seven species of bees, none are likely to contribute significantly to pollination; this appears to be a fly-pollinated plant. There are a few bees that seem to be dependent on pollen of only one or two plants at the Station. Andrena fulvipennis, for example, appears to depend on silk grass (Pityopsis graminifolia), a species visited by many other insects. Elsewhere, however, A. fulvipennis is found on seven additional genera of plants. This instance is a model for how host-specific populations, and eventually species, may evolve in areas where host choices are limited, as in the depauperate upland flora of the southern Lake Wales Ridge. There are many other insights beginning to emerge from this community-level study of bees.

Community-level studies need a community of scientists. This is one reason why such studies are rare. The bee project requires accurate inventory and identification of plants, which has been going on ever since Richard Archbold brought Leonard Brass to the nascent biological station. Native bees have also been studied on the Station for many years, as demonstrated by a gradual increase in the bee inventory. Karl Krombein’s project (late 50's, early 60's) on bees that can be induced to nest in hollow dowels brought the number of species up to about 30. Howard Weems doubled this number with a flight trap (1978-79) in the area that is now the butterfly garden. Documenting bee and flower associations was begun in 1982, and preoccupied some early interns in the invertebrate lab, especially Andrew Schreffler and James Cronin. By 1995, 105 species of bees were known from the Station. In 2000, Jayanthi Edirisinghe (see photo, this page), a Fullbright scholar from Sri Lanka, did an intensive project on bees and their floral hosts. The number of species seems to have leveled off at 113, but more floral associations are still being added. Beginning in 1982, we have also been collecting records and specimens of flies, wasps, and other insects on flowers. Little by little, we are putting together a picture of the interlocking complexities of insect/flower relationships at the Station.