Ruud Kleinpaste: Native Bees and Mistletoe

A week or so ago, a wonderful kids book couriered its way to my front door. It’s a book about our native bees in Aotearoa, written by Rachel Weston. It’s titled “Kiwi Bees have tiny knees”. 

How refreshing to finally read a book about our native bees, not the introduced pollinator from Tropical Africa which migrated through Europe and all the way to Asia. Our native bees are from Aotearoa and there are 28 species in our land, most of which have not been studied well at all! 

After Spring has started this year (that will be from tomorrow morning 12:43 am onwards) I shall come back to this magnificent book in detail, simply because it deserves a lot more entomological attention. 

For now, I will alert you to page 21: Clever little bees: Pollinating Mistletoe. 

That simple line grabbed my attention immediately, and on the day I received the book I started a complete week of Mistletoe frenzy; and it is all to do with Gardening! 

Our tiny bees pollinate mistletoe? For Real? 

Rachel’s book has a QR Code on page 21 which allows you to see them at work, check out the video here. 

A Leioproctus native bee (pretty small insect!) chews open the red mistletoe’s flower and harvests nectar and pollen. When it does the same trick with the next flower of the bunch, the pollen will fertilise that neighbouring flower. 

Bellbirds and tui are probably the main pollinators of these mistletoes, but those tiny bees also contribute to the reproductive system. That is just as well, seeing our native birds might be locally under pressure from predators etc – so if bees can take over some of that pollination job from the birds, the mistletoe might have better chances for survival. 

We have 8 species of Mistletoe in New Zealand (number 9 is presumed to be extinct), but browsing by possums and loss of habitat or host trees puts the species under pressure. Mistletoes are “parasitic” plants that live on their hosts and extract nutritious liquids from these host plants. This doesn’t seem to harm the host plants or trees in a major way. 

Once the mistletoe started flowering (some have very small flowers, other species have beautifully coloured flowers that stand out!) the pollinators will be attracted and do their job. That leads to the formation of fertile mistletoe fruit (seed inside the small, juicy berry) that will draw in the bird species that enjoy those fruits. 

As soon as they pick off their snacks, the birds may suddenly realise that the seed is surrounded by a seriously sticky glue. Some birds try to take the glue off their beaks by wiping the fruit and the seed over the branches of the host plant on which the mistletoe grew. 

Some birds will have a go at swallowing the fruit and seed regardless

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack team podcast
from News Talks at me.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Right now, it's nine minutes to live and our men
in the garden is rude line pass Yoda.

Speaker 3 (00:19):
Hey cre Jack. Are you all well?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
I'm very very well, thank you. How are you, sir?

Speaker 3 (00:24):
I'm good.

Speaker 4 (00:25):
I've just come back out of the Marlborough Sounds where
I was working on school and also stayed in the
middle of nowhere with our Wi Fi, which was just
wonderful nice.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
How was that excellent?

Speaker 3 (00:38):
And you know what I did with the kids?

Speaker 2 (00:40):
You went outside? This is the gifts.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
Yeah, that's one guess.

Speaker 4 (00:44):
And the second thing is I got some seeds of missletoe.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
We oh okay, And I taught them how to put
the mistletoe seeds on the trees.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Oh very good. You think when you put the seeds
on the trees.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
Yeah, well you know mistletoe, don't you?

Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah? Yeah, that's that is really important if you want
to be kissed at Christmas.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (01:05):
Do you know that too? Did you have it?

Speaker 2 (01:07):
I didn't know that, but you need my parents. My
parents have got a couple of mistletoe cuttings, and so
they got mistletoe cutting. So they can. They can pull
them out on the twenty fifth of December every year.

Speaker 3 (01:17):
Oh yeah, but they're not real missiletoe cuttings. They've probably
been dead, I suppose, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the point.
But no, But the point is we.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Sorry that they've got like a pot plant of mistletoe
that they grew from a cutting. So it's still gone work.
Well I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:34):
Nor do I because I thought then they're no, they
need to grow on other trees.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Oh dear, I've got that, I think. Okay, I'll kick
some mom now, find out what the dealers's all about it.
So yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Anyway, last week or a week or so ago, I
got a wonderful kid's book. I'll talk about that later
actually in springtime from Rachel Weston, which is a book
about native bees in just a little Native bees. We
you know, and I've really never really properly dealt with
it with you because they're so important. But that was
not the point.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
I'll do that later anyway.

Speaker 3 (02:09):
But yes, on page twenty one, page twenty of the book,
which was called Kiwi Bees have Tiny Knees. I like
that anyway, there was a pace only on there there
was this thing that grabbed my attention, and it was
about basically missiletoe. How bees, those little bees pollinate mistletoe.

(02:31):
Now I did not know that. I thought it was
birds like Belbert's and Dewey who did that, right, So
I started That became last week a complete missiletoe week
for me because I learned everything of us to know
about mistletoe. We've got eight species, the ninth one is
now extinct, and they're not doing too well, et cetera,

(02:51):
et cetera, et cetera. And because they're parasitic, we need
to get seeds onto their host plants. Now, first of
all the plants that I've got around here, I needed
to know what their host plants were. But he comes
to thing these things. I have seeds that have got
really sticky fruit, if you like, around the seed. And

(03:16):
so when a bird wants to eat the seed, like
a bell bird or a toy they eat, they try
to get that seed out of the fruit, but because
it's so sticky, the seed sticks to their beak and
what they then do is they wipe their beak on
the plant. Right, Some birds actually eat the seeds and
they get a really sticky poop and they have to

(03:38):
wipe their bum with the seed. You tell kids there
that they go.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
Like, no, yes, that's how.

Speaker 3 (03:47):
It works, So here you go. So the seeds then
get stuck by the bird on the plant, and in
the next year that seed slows. It's making little roots
that go into the host plant and that literally let
them grow on that plant. It's actually pair of without

(04:07):
really damaging the plants. Now, possums love missile toes, mistletoes
seriously in trouble. Some species are not very common at all,
So it would be really nice to actually get this
missiletoe back in our various habitats in New Zealand, of course,
which is our to put the school. And that was

(04:28):
exactly what the whole thing was about. These kids learned
to use that very slippery so that's very sticky sort
of stuff. They learned where to put it on the
tree in the little nooks where the branches come off
the main trunk, and then make sure that it's all
stuck there, and then a little tie around it with

(04:50):
a little piece of wool so that they can always
find which brands that they put the missilete on. Years later,
when they're still at school, they have their own missile
toes in their own trees, and I think that this
such a cool thing.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
To do with Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. It really is. Yeah,
it's incredible. Okay, well look I'm going to text mom.
I'm going to text Mom and say, just just send
us a photo of your missiletoe so I can see
what it's living off. At the moment, I hadn't hadn't realized.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
There you go.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
You learned something every Saturday Morning on the show. Have
not realized that it's so thank you very much, Ruthe.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks d B from nine am Saturday, or
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