The Tucson Bee Collaborative and Slow Food Arizona partnered together for the Arizona Insect Festival to produce four short skits highlighting the pollination of native crop plants by insects.

Each plant — a fig, onion, chile and squash—was built in large scale, and occupied by a human dressed as an insect pollinator. An entomologist standing alongside explained the insect’s lifecycle and interaction with that plant.

Scientists and un-costumed insects prepare for the event. Photo: Carlos Martinez, UA Entomology

The University of Arizona Insect Collection is world class, home to thousands of Sonoran Desert insects, but these specimens are very small and the public does not often get to see them!

The Insect Festival gave us the opportunity to reanimate a selection of insects crucial to native food crops.

Charles Bradley dressed as a Squash bee in the University of Arizona Insect Collection. Photo: Alex Lombard UA Entomology

Each of the four flowers and the costumes for the insect pollinators were designed and built by volunteers from the Moore Lab of Arthropod Systematics.

Barry Copeland and Ainsley O’Connell construct giant onion flowers that will be pollinated by a Bee-fly. The anthers are made of felt balls that attach to the Bee-fly costume as the actor interacts with the flower.

Photo: Alex Lombard, UA Entomology

The Sonoran Bumble Bee is uniquely able to buzz-pollinate flowers in the family Solonanceae, such as the chili.

Photo: Bruce Taubert, Tucson Bee Collaborative

To do this, the Sonoran Bumble bee bites down at the base of the flowers anther with its mandibles. Then, using the same muscles that help it flap its wings, the bee vibrates its torso.

This rapid vibration causes pollen to spill out of the anthers. The bee then uses its specialized pollen-collecting hairs, called ‘scopae,’ to collect the pollen.

Photo: Carlos Martinez, UA Entomology

Figs are not technically fruit but actually an inward-blooming bundle of flowers.  There are male fig trees and female fig trees that each require a specific co-evolved species of wasp to be pollinated.

Photo: Carlos Martinez, UA Entomology

To pollinate the fig, a female fig wasp first enters an unripe male fig and lays her eggs inside the flowers which become seeds. 

The wasps reach adulthood inside the fig; male wasps hatch first, and wait to mate with the females. Then, in a final act, chew a tunnel out of the fig and die. The pregnant females crawl out and take flight, in search of other fig trees in which to lay their eggs.

When she finally finds one, she crawls inside the flower, dropping pollen from her birth-fig along the way, thereby pollinating the minute flowers in the fig.

Photo: Bruce Taubert, Tucson Bee Collaborative

To show this, the fig wasp actor first awakens holding a male fig wasp puppet whose mouth parts are made of scissors. The actor then uses the puppet to ‘chew’ through the bottom of the fig flower.

On their way out of the flower, the insect-actor is covered in pollen, then flies through the audience in search of a new fig.

Once found, the insect-actor burrows back up through the hanging fruit and deposits the pollen from the costume back onto the fruit’s velcro-lined ovaries.

Photo: Carlos Martinez, UA Entomology

Squash plants have male and female flowers that require insects to transfer pollen between them.

Photo: Alex Lombard, UA Entomology

Squash bees only pollinate (and also sleep inside) flowers of the family Cucurbitaceae such as pumpkins and gourds.

Unlike honeybees, squash bees are better suited to carry big loads of pollen because of their much fuzzier bodies and hind legs.

Photo: Salvador Vitanza

The root of the onion is the part of the plant we are most familiar with… But the flowers of this plant are just as characteristic, and require the help of an insect to reproduce.

Photo: Alex Lombard, UA Entomology

Unlike bees, a Bee-fly (or Bombyliid), are especially attracted to onion flowers because of their sweet nectar which they can readily suck up with their long tongues.

As the bee-fly moves from flower to flower, pollen gets stuck in its long hairs and is moved amongst individual plants.

Photo: Joan Fox