Ways to save the bees
Some people say HURAH the honey bees are dieing off. (because they are european and african invaders) but the reality is that it is all bees and it is worldwide. The native bees are dieing off too. I heard recently that 3 bumble bee species died out in England and at least one in Ontario. It is EVERYWHERE. And that is really scary.
In BC people drill holes in wood for orchard mason bees. But what about the other types? They are actually very specific in hole diameter and the time and temp that you put them out so that the other types do NOT get in.
This is playing favoirtes. There are lots of types of burrowing bees and many of them cannot make their own holes.
This year I started on something new. Making holes in cob or mud, with different types and diameters of metal bar. So bike spokes, knitting needles, up to half inch and more. All in the one block of mud or cob. (It sets up hard It needs a little roof) and the bees start using it. For shelter! I did not even think that the solitary bees need somewhere safe at night. Now a month or so later, they (seems to be a different type) are laying their eggs in it and blocking the holes. So it WORKS!
So that is mark 1 or version 1.
Another thing I noticed is that little bees burrow throught the soft pith of raspberry canes and of grape vines. So if you compost all your old raspberry canes, you are probably killing a bunch of bees!
Mark 2 will have the mud with raspberry canes, different weeds with pithy stems and grape vines layered through it.
And still holes in the mud.
Anyone want to try and report what happens? Its an "open source" project and I will put it on appropedia shortely.
The more info we get from different areas the better. I would like it to spread quickly so please do it and tell people your results and tell your gardner friends too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CdXa3dsbPk
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1CwnYY64NU
I have pics of some of the different types somewhere too.
Thanks Brian
Thank you for the tips, Brian. Very useful EVERYWHERE, to borrow your own word
. I (translated and) passed on the info to my brother (in North Africa). Unfortunately Youtube is totally blocked (censored) there.
Thank you Mahmud. Seems I am being shunned by the rest of babble.
I bet there is local knowelege of similar things in some cultures but it would seem that modern humans have become hostile to nature generally. Kill all bugs, kill all spiders, kill all snakes. etc. And keep the gardens sterile and weed free. I talked to a cob builder recently and one of the original cob guys in oregan had a problem with bees in one part of his building. But somethimes the problem is the solution.
Perhaps there are arabic versions of youtube type video? I have no problem with you taking the video, and putting a translation to it and then uploading it in whatever language you like. Probably the transport of honey bees over thousands of miles during the growing seasons is transporting bee sicknesses too and this is killing off local bees. Imagine a solitary bee in monoculture. "Dont worry kiddys, I know you are starving now but the canola is almost ripe and there is only me and nora left so I will get lots of lovely pollen for you!" Then suddenly, as the flowers open, a billion honey bees come and take all the nectar and pollen. Nora's grubs starve and Quinellas barely make it. But they have some weird new sickness that came from Texas.
Maybe one solution is local cob bricks, stuffed full of 10 or 15 different types of local bees, some polinating in cold weather, some in hot and providing a resiliant local solution to the polination problem. And monoculture needs to go very quickly.
I was talking to an aviarist just this afternoon.
I think the bee problem is hard to find a cause because there probably isn't a single cause, but an "all of the above" answer. Mites, pesticides, monoculture.
Some of it make me angry. I mean, how many examples do you have to have of introduced or shipped species going wrong before you say, "no, you can't import New Zealand bees, dipshit."
But that ship has sailed.
I think what we can do for the native honey bee is to take a new look at naturalizing areas. That's an uphill battle, but with cities looking for ways to save money, getting them to stop cutting meadow areas and "waste" areas might actually be easy. Naturalized areas are low maintenance.
And, they help give wild native honey bees a continual supply of food.
This year, I have noticed a return of wild native honey bees to my backyard. But then, there was a sudden die off of my usual robust population of bumble bees. There are still some bumble bees around. I don't attribute the absence to anything but local causes-- unusually cold weather just before the big heat hit two weeks ago, and who knows, maybe a mouse raided their meager two or three day supply of honey and they just didn't make it.
The amatuer geologist in me will tell you though, that when it comes to wild flowers and "weeds" honey bees have not had it so good since the end of the last ice age.
Brian,
I will take the offer and thank you. I agree, there must be something equivalent to youtube and I will enquire from my brother. Talking about bees, 2 years ago I read this story from the about a coup d'état in a bee hive. I found it kind of funny:
Nova Scotia abuzz as honeybees on lamOLIVER MOORE
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
July 25, 2007 at 3:57 AM EDT
Rodney Dillinger is looking for a swarm of 40,000 honeybees after a coup d'état that left one of his hives half empty. In a storyline that could have been written by Shakespeare, some of Mr. Dillinger's bees are suspected of having become dissatisfied with their queen, tricking her into giving birth to a replacement and then sending her into exile.
The deposed queen left in the past few days, followed by about half the bees in the southwestern Nova Scotia colony. Mr. Dillinger, a retiree who has only four hives, wants his bees back and has asked police for help.
"The gentleman reported that he had known the last location of his honeybees, and when he went there they were gone," said Constable Brian Bonnell, of the Shelburne RCMP detachment. Police issued a notice asking the public to keep an eye out. Mr. Dillinger said the swarm would look like a black cloud if in flight.
If perched, they might not look like bees at all.
Honeybees have flown from their hive in Nova Scotia.
"One person said he thought it was a bear, a small bear in a tree," he said. "Other people saw the swarm and they said it was pretty big."
Queen bees are typically overthrown by workers who feel they are not getting enough of what Tony Phillips, president of the Nova Scotia Beekeepers Association, calls "queen substance."
The rebels first trick her into laying eggs in a specially built "swarm cell."
These young are then fed the nutrients needed to create a queen bee, and not just a worker bee. Meanwhile, the old queen is progressively starved.
When she is slimmed down from her usual large physique and can fly again, she leaves the hive with her followers. She exits a colony now headed by one of the daughters she was tricked into birthing.
"Usually the first daughter-queen will go around and kill her sisters and become the colony head," Mr. Phillips explained.
He said the process leaves a younger and more vigorous queen in charge of the hive, but that may be small comfort to a beekeeper counting his lost revenue.
He said the bees may not go far, and can sometimes be retrieved, but these sorts of purges might also be considered simply part of the cost of doing business as a beekeeper.
Mr. Dillinger is worried that people who see his bees will be afraid of them, perhaps even attacking them with rocks, sticks or a garden hose.
But he said his bees are honeybees, not the Africanized killer bees that have caused so much alarm in the media.
He said his bees may "look ugly," but they are not dangerous and there is no chance of the kind of carnage portrayed in the campy 1978 movie The Swarm.
In preparation for leaving the hive, they would have bulked up and be carrying stocks of honey, Mr. Phillips explained, leaving them mellow and gentle. In fact, he added, the circus stunt in which people wear the so-called beard of bees is typically done with bees in this state.
Mr. Dillinger said that if the bees are found, he will come to retrieve them, trying to shake the queen bee into a box and then waiting for the others to join her.
And how can he be sure they are his bees?
"Here, where I am, I'm the only beekeeper in Shelburne," he said, chuckling at the question.
"So I'll know."
Al you have to do is download the video and put your own words to it. Or I can send a copy to you. (It is done with a camera so it is crappy anyway)
The "Coup d'etat" is a normal feature of honey bee life. If a hive is doing very well, the old queen lays eggs in a special chamber, they get fed royal jelly and become queens. Before they hatch, she takes the bulk of the workers to find somewhere new to live. (My da has bees and we used to have to chase the swarm with pots and pans to scare them down into a tree or bush. Not a fun job! I also had to make hives for him. That was safer) Then the new queens fight it out to be the new boss of the hive. I think there are lots of reasons for colony collapse. New nicotine like pesticides are one big reason. They are known to screw with the bee navigation system. Workers fly out in the morning to collect nectar and never come back. Just a note that most bees do not make honey and most types of bees are solitary or live in very small groups. These are the ones that I aim to help. So the main aim is not to produce lots and lots of honey (other people work on that), it is to have enough polinators right through the season so that the bulk of flowering plants are not in danger. I had no idea we had so many types of bees. There was a bee expert at a festival recently and I discribed the wasp mimic to him. He didn't believe me. I only saw a few at my place but lots in an area called royal oak. They are clearly bees (with pollen baskets) but they look very much like yellow jacket wasps.
Thanks for this thread, Brian. After reading this, I will repurpose my old raspberry canes this year.
In my corner of SW Ontario, I am seeing almost no wasps this summer. Is this somehow related to the absence of bees? On Saturday, I was in a conservation area in Hamilton region with a portable barbecue set up in close proximity to a park garbage can. About two hours into the picnic, one of the guests remarked that we should by now be swarmed with wasps hovering around the can and drowning in the barbecue sauce. Not a one. It has been like this all year.
Not shunning you, Brian - just getting kicked off the net by one wave of storm after another.
I, too, have noticed a decline in all insect populations this year. I attributed it to a very early warm spring, followed by a cold snap, but there are other factors: paranoia over West Nile, spraying everywhere; indiscriminate mowing of wild vegetation, etc. Milkweed, which had some kind of blight the last three years and mostly failed to bloom, is thriving again, so a few monarchs are back. But hardly any other butterflies. Very few crickets and i haven't seen a single mantis or ladybug.
The bumblebee hive in the eave of our house is eerily quiet. No wasps have tried to colonize the woodshed. (Someone told me they won't come if they think another swarm already owns the territory, so i glued an old nest inside the hood of the propane tank, and there has been no activity. Now, i don't know whether the ruse worked, or the wasps have died off.) It's most worrying. Not enough pollinators, not enough bird and frog food... the whole system is in peril.
So, anyway, i loved your idea. Don't have clay, but will look for some. Did find a couple of nice old soft logs and started drilling holes. Topped with tin trays against water. Have not yet decided where best to set them up. Will report here when there is news.
There's a behavioral difference between our native wasps and european "yellow jackets". We don't notice the yellow jackets until later in the summer, usually in September after a good crisp cold front moves through. That's the yellow jacket's cue to swtich from being insectivorous/carion feeders to searching frantically and agressively for sweet things-- which brings them into contact with humans.
I have a love for all the creatures around me, save yellow jackets.
I have noticed no drop off of native wasps in my backyard, but I've seen fewer yellow jackets skimming the lawn looking for bugs to pick up and take back to the nest. That could be a very local thing-- I destroy all yellow jacket nests I find early in the season before they become a problem, and my neighbours do too.
If you want to check for yellow jacket nests, look on the south side of your outbuildings and house. You can tell the difference between native wasps and yellow jackets on the fly-- you can see the legs of the native wasps trailing during flight, while the yellow jackets retract their landing gear.
Unless native wasps are nesting close to where human traffic will bring them into incidental contact, I'd leave the native wasps alone. I've never been bothered by them unless I was bothering them, and they are good pest control for insects. What's more, they compete against the yellow jackets in the same niche.
The best, very very best, garanteed to work and works so well you won't believe it treatment for wasp sting is to take a leaf from a broad leaf plantain weed-- which I insist you will have growing close to you on your property or at any SW Ontario park--- take a leaf from the broad leaf plantain.... are ya listening? You take this leaf and crush it between your fingers, get the juices of the plant flowing a bit-- you'll notice the leaf take on a darker shade of green when you do this, and then hold it on the bite area until the pain goes away. Which it will in under a minute.
Okay, fine, don't believe me.
thanks brian, i'm going to try this out at my place and a buddy's place!
Another word on wasps.
I wuz wonderin, given just how good wasps are at insect hunting, whether farmers would benifit if they made habitat for wasps in their fields. It struck me, looking at acres and acres of farm land that is well away from any suitable nesting habitat for wasps, that this gives unwanted insects too much free space.
I don't think it would take much. Just the odd pole with a sandwich board of wood on top facing to the sun.
Tommy, i endorse your remedy for wasp bite, except that when you've just been stung (and especially if you happen to be sensitive to wasp venom, swell up within minutes like an apple on fire) is exactly when you feel least like poring along the roadside for broad-leaf plantain (and when you will find a thousand lance-leaf in full bloom). The good news is, you can crush a handful of leaves when you do find them, slip them into a zipper-baggie and freeze. Handy and quick to defrost any time. It even works as a tea, though not as well. Dry leaves, steep in boiling water; soak a rag. Dandelion tea, leaves and flowers, works okay on insect bites and nettle sting, quite well on sunburn.
A new phrase that I've been hearing more and more amoungst the agricultural chemical suppliers is "not harmful to beneficials."
There are some insecticides that should really be banned. And the suppliers realize they may have been lazy, using sledgehammers in place of knives, so they're now rolling out better products and encouraging better practices.
The removal of fencerows and natural barriers, plus the tendancy for little land neither field nor forest, the kinda inbetween spaces or places in growth like in burns or heavily cut timber, is also hurting the native beneficials.
I believe that the mean yellow jackets also burrow into the ground. I step on at least one buried nest of the vicious little monsters every year.
Yes, absentia, the times I will be in places where I will have difficulty finding the plantain, I keep my eye open for it on the way and keep a few leaves with me. The sooner you get it on a mosquito bite (that's what I use it for mostly) the better, as it stops the welt dead in it's tracks.
A friend from Missouri told me about plantain years ago, and being a sceptic I was like, "yeah, sure" because all sorts of claims are made about medicinal plants. But one day after doing some bushwacking along Catfish creek, I ended up with one of those maddeningly itchy bites on my little finger, so with nothing to lose I found a leaf and tried it.
Been an advocate ever since. And there's lots of info on line about it. Apparently, they used some preparation of the roots as a treatment for snake bite, too. But of course we have better treatments today for that. Mine is especially potent: don't fucking get bit by a snake. Works every time so far.
I believe that the mean yellow jackets also burrow into the ground. I step on at least one buried nest of the vicious little monsters every year.
Yes, I saw a ground nest for the first time last year, at the east terminus of Windemere Street, at the Thames. There was no accidentaly stepping on this one-- it was later in the season, and the activity in the air around it was such that even an oblivious person would have been aware of it at once.
Gad, I hate the things.
I mentioned above that as far as wildflowers and weeds go in SW Ontario, bees haven't had it this good since the last ice age.
How so, Tommy?
Well, I'm glad you asked.
Scientists have gotten down and dirty in the muck of our lakes. Because lakes freeze over in the winter, and the water is stilled, more stuff floats to the bottom. You can, with some accuracy, read these bands of sedimentation sort of like tree rings. They'll tell you a number of things, but once you determine a date, you can look in the mud and count the pollen, and that gives you a pretty good idea what was growing in Ontario when.
And what has been seen is this: 12,000 years ago, we see pollen percentages heavily dominated by spruce, but fading away sharply by 10,000 years ago. Pine follows this trend in the opposite, suggesting pine taking over from spruce. But in that, we have percentages of Birch towards the 10,000 mark, Oak, a little Elm closer to 10,000 years ago and "Herbs and Weeds" enjoying a percentage (about 10%) that peaks right at 12,000 years ago, and then dissapears as the oak, birch and elm hit the scene about 11,000 years ago.
We don't see "Herbs and Weeds" enjoying such a percentage again until about 2000 years ago. That could be climate, but I suspect it may have more to do with First Nations people becoming agrarian. The "Herbs and Weeds" percentage hits the roof, oh about 200 years ago, at nearly 90%.
Nectar for thought.
Here it seems to be a good year for bees and other polinators. We had and still have many flowers blooming. I was looking at a patch of buckwheat that I planted and there were lots of wild honey bees collecting nectar, more then from my own hives that I have here, they seem to prefer the clover and other pasture flowers. Two of my hives swarmed, due largely to my own failure to destroy queen cells. One of my hives has a queen that lays about fifty percent drone cells, am not sure as to the reason for that.
This spring I rented a small excavator and dugg a test pit about nine feet deep into a clay bed, to see if it would be suitable for a future larger pond. I was surprised to see how quickly insects, birds and amphibians find use for a new watering hole. Bees would come there to drink, wasps and birds like to collect the soft clay for their nests, about eight frogs have made it their home, and I heard tree frogs in the trees close by. And the odd robbin likes to take a bath in it.
A diversity of plants and lots of watering places seem to encourage pollinators.
Wasps, bees ants and termites are closely related so I expect that pesticides that affect one will hurt the others too. There are bt pesticides that kill cattapillars on cabbage etc. BT is a bacteria. So if the bees, wasps, etc take it back to their hive, it will kill their grubs too. The nicotine like pesticides will probably affect the navigation of wasps, bees, ants and butterflys. Thats an especially big deal for honey bees and most butterflys and moths because they travel fair distances. With bees navigation is critical because they lay eggs and then bring food for the babies.
GM plants with the bt toxin built into their tissues are naturally going to kill bees and butterflys that sip the nectar and eat the pollen. If you hear easy answers to the problems, they are probably being provided by the pesticides industry. They are probably behind much of the confusion and the "we need lots of research before we ban stuff" mumbo jumbo. It would be lots better if oversite bodys did lots of research before they introduced stuff.
Anyways, hope that helps. I would urge people to stop navel gazing. We do not need to know the exact nature of the problem before we act.
We know there is a problem and we know it is really really big.
Make the little clay or cob bee blocks or do your own original method and lets start providing habitat for these creatures before they all disappear.
Brian
Brian, do you have links to info on the BT bacteria and GM plants containing it? I could do my own homework, but I'm guessing you probably could zero me in to the best sources more quickly than my search skills could.
Sorry, Tommy, I cannot. The best i saw was from a group inspired by Percy Smizer. (It looks like i spelt the name wrong). Basically, a soil bacteria (so most bees never encountered it) produces a really strong toxin against insect larvae and companies have taken this gene and put it in plants so they produce that same poison too. I think the garden bt products contain the live bacteria or spores. So a random killer of a few very unlucky bees every year becomes much more common and right in their faces and kills way more now.
We have been digging around and fixing up the wandering perimeter [155'] of our old farmhouse. The kitchen is a very old former community store that was stuck on the back of the house over 100 years ago: no foundation and only a foot above ground level.
So when we dug along there the shallow trench had air access to the floor framing. We fixed up that length over the course of a couple weeks. And that includes an outer rolled aluminum shield that covers about 10" below ground level to keep out rats that move in otherwise. Keeps them from coming in THERE anyway. So were filling in just a few feet at a time as we nicely landscape our dooryard along that perimeter.
When I fill in this one section, I see all these disturbed bees buzzing around, legs loaded with pollen from the jungle of blossoms around the house. Ah... they've gone and built a hive in what looks to them like a really safep lace thats also very close to those thousands of flowers.
So we took the fill out and built this barrier around their access hole so they can still get in and out.
But we're wondering about the longer term solution, and how long it is.
What I'm hoping is that I can fill in the hole with sand before winter, and the dig it out again in the spring. Are they totally dormant for the winter? So that I can do that? And how long will they want to use this hive?
[Its not easy to get under there by the way. But I can do it. And I've got a good guess where the hive would be- since I've fixed it so that all but one large beam is covered by styrofoam sealed all around. The hive would be about 18" at most above the ground level under there. Its damp most of the year, with substantial puddles a lot of the time. Nova Scotia weather.]
Another presumably pertinent fact is that chances are if they are there for the winter, there will also be a rat or two. Who I presume would eat the hive. ?
I'm a little uncertain what you are describing Ken. Are they burrowing in the ground or have they actually built a nest out of wax? Lot's of bees that burrow do not really live as a group like honey bees do. Some bees are even solitary, but I've noticed they will sometimes nest very close to each other. Some are active for different times of the season than others and they don't necessarily go dormant to survive the winter some may just leave behind the eggs to hatch the following year.
Some shots of a green bee that set up a home in the ground under some woodchips in our backyard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfZZG_9lz9Q
You must have a sweet camera! That is very similar to a small green bee that burrowed in the old raspberry canes. Yours sure had loaded pollen baskets, didn't it!
Thanks for the video.
It's a fairly low end meant for photo snap shots camera but they make them at fairly high resolutions now. The thing about photographing bees is that the macro mode is often appropriate if you can get close enough and compact pocket cameras tend to have very good marco abilities.
Thanks for starting this thread. I'm glad to see the cob bee shelters worked out I'm definetly going to share this with other bee enthusiasts.
A fellow beekeeper who runs the bumblebee watch blog offered some suggestions for the identity of the green bees.
"The bee is probably an Augochlora. Because of the wood chips on the ground, that identification is more likely than Agapostemon. Hard to tell what is on the back of her abodomen; looks more like an insect than a mite. Could be a parasitic oil beetle or bee fly larva. Or it might be a male strepsipteran of the family Stylopidae, mating with a female stylopid that is parasitizing the bee. The insect waiting, stage left, to dash into the burrow could be a cuckoo bee, but could also be any of a number of parasitic wasps."
Given you're bee was living in the raseberry canes that would probably lend itself more to the Augochlora possibility as i understand they like to live in wood.
Thanks for the wild flower pollen geology Tommy_Paine. Very interesting and I'm glad you pointed out 'wildflowers and weeds go' because trees are certainly important pollen sources too. Where did you learn about this? But it should be pointed out that using the word 'native' in conjunction with honey bees in north america isn't really appropriate. You might have had feral european honey bees. Too bad they didn't make it :( . There haven't been native honey bees here for ages hence Brians opening remark. The thing about Australia(not NZ) and why people would want bees from there is that it's the only place I know of where the verroa mite doesn't/didn't exist, but you'd still be getting honey bees honey bees of european genetic origin that were raised in Australia but I'd still agree on using localy raised bees as they have probably been better climatized to our conditions.
Bubbles I'm glad to hear you're bees are doing well this year. An idea that has been floating around the beekeepers co-op here is that once they start making the queen cells is too hard to supress the desire to swarm. We had a bunch of swarms ourselves this year and I personally suspect the early start to spring and the bees running out of space to store nectare much sooner than we expected helped create the swarming mood.
"It would be lots better if oversite bodys did lots of research before they introduced stuff."
While it certainly helps to be better informed I'm really coming to a point where I'm unsure how possible it is to get a high enough level of certainty about what kind of effects these kinds of human interventions will have. As the green bee video shows there is a complicated relationship going on between bees and other bees as well as other organisims in the environment and I don't know how you can take that all into account in vitro.
I found a large number of bees using a pile of gravel along the rail tracks as a nesting ground a few weeks ago. Was nice to see them making use of the urban waste...as toxic as railway land probably is they also do happen to be one of the few places around the city where the plants get to grow totally wild for long periods at a time.
Good post. I have decided to let things just happen with the cob bee shelters. Some holes now have jumping spiders in residence. One lot of bee babies got paracitized because you can see the little hole where they came out. There are a couple of dead bees deep in holes where presumably they got ambushed by something. But thats nature. It is not eat or bee eaten. It is eat AND bee eaten. I have a whole daft theory about leaf cutter ants and how they arose. Ants get attacked by tiny paracitic wasps. (I am really shortsighted and I can see them quite easily) They hover over the ants, and if it stays still too long, zap, swoops down and lays an egg in the poor ants body. I think that is why ant movement is so jerky. They are tiny, smaller than a no see um. So maybe ants that shielded themselves with bits of leaf survived. You bring the bit of leaf back to the nest and the others say " what good it THAT? we don't eat it, throw it in the mold pile" "Well hey, the flys were just awful, I had to do something!" "Wheres julie, lia, and joan?" "Flys got them". So anyway, the mold grows and before you know it, the ants are eating it. A whole new type of ant because of parasites! (In theory). Nobody has ever taken this seriously but I bet it is right.
That's interesting conjecture, Brian. It may be wrong, but thinking like that is the whole point of living.
Thanks for the wild flower pollen geology Tommy_Paine. Very interesting and I'm glad you pointed out 'wildflowers and weeds go' because trees are certainly important pollen sources too. Where did you learn about this?
Tommy Paine is an auto didact and knows a litttle about a lot of things, and more rarely, a lot about little things.
That analysis came from the book "Ontario Rocks" by Nick Eyles 2002 Fitzhenry and Whiteside Ltd. ISBN 1-55041-619-7. This edition has the information I related in graph form on page 237.
Having said that, I may have been a little off by suggesting that bees haven't had it so good since the end of the ice age. Upon further reflection, it could be that the type of weeds and herbs we see taking over around 1840 may not have flowers that native bees could take advantage of. For example, I've never seen a bee on ragweed, nor english and broadleaf plantain. But, I have seen them on dandelions. So, I don't know if it's fair to say that invasive species have been a boon or bust for insects like bees.
And if the bees had evolved to live in hardwood forests, that too is changing because of another invasive speices: The earthworm.
Many native understory plants, such as the Trilium, evolved in a forests where the leaf litter broke down slowly. The earthworm (which I was surprised to find out is not native to North America, but introduced both accidentally and on purpose) breaks down leaf litter quickly, and triliums are not equiped to take up such nutrients.
I have witnessed the impact of earthworms on leaf litter myself. The woods I grew up around, collectively known as the Westminister Ponds, had very deep leaf litter. We used to play in it, and kick up drifts of it. You couldn't walk, even in summer, through the undergrowth without making that "shoosh shoosh shoosh" sound many probably associate with fall.
Now, in the same places, I see one layer of leaves, and bare patches of grey soil.
And no where near as many triliums.
I wish we had bees here instead of the ~!@#$%^!!!! blackflies!!!
Back to my question about what the bees are doing [post#19 a few days ago], and the follow-up question.
They arent burrowing. They got established when the floor framing [the bottom of which is several inches below ground level] was exposed for a few weeks from us digging out the side of the house. But its only a couple inch gap to get underneath. I havent seen their hive or whatever because I only go under there when I absolutely have to.
But the traffic is a couple bees an hour. Now that we've filled in evrywhere except where they get in, to get in they fly to the skirt, then they do a helicopter thing to drop themselves down into the hole that gets them to their entrance.
There are two kinds of bees. Big ones we call bumble bees. And some that are probably less then half as big, and slender [not as slender as wasps tho].
The questions about what we do are in the post19.
I suggest fill with sand and leave a small pipe 1 inch to 3 inches diameter for bees to get in or out. wire over the end with 1/2 inch wire to stop the rats. They might be solitary bees with just a small hive or cluster of bee babies. Or maybe there are clusters all over the place. 3 inches if possible so that spiders do not stop the bees and have a feast. I guess the bees are dormant over winter but you never know. A couple of warm days and maybe they fly. Better to give them the option of moving.
Whats a small cluster of bee babies?
Like the queen just dropped a few here, and isnt around? And they get a little food for when they hatch?
The traffic has dropped a lot. Maybe just several bees a day in and out now. Maybe more, but way less than before at any rate.
Returning from a short vacation I was suprised to see loads and loads of bees tending to my cucumbers, et al. I`ve already enough cukes for a couple jars of pickles. Thanks, bees!