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Syndicate
Mason bees and lots of the other solitary types make little chambers. then they put lots of pollen in the chamber, lay an egg and seal it up. So a six inch hole bored in wood might have 10 or 15 bee babies in it. If they have a space between flat planks or pieces of slate about 3/8 of an inch high, they will put the little chambers between the planks.
Creating shelter for the non-honey producing bees is an excellent idea Brian. You have done a good thing here, I am going to think about what I can do where I live [BC].
You should feel good about this thread - in just 10 days it got pretty long. More people might take a look I suppose, but it is allready doing some good.
I have a lot to learn about bees... Thanks for doing this.
Thanks, noah_Scape
I found someone doing something simpler (and probably better for most people) that the cob thing with neat pictures at the link below. The guy bundles up teasel stems and the bees use the hollow stems. And as I noted, raspberry canes are used by at least 2 types of bee. Basically anything with a hollow (or pithy in the middle), stem seems to work for some of these bees. You just bundle them up, and tie it together with string. If you are worried about creatures getting the bees, perhaps you can put some bundles in pipes, etc. Or you might put the raspberry canes outside and softer ones inside in the bundle.
Even if they are not nesting in it, the big waspy looking bees are in the larger holes in the cob bee shelters every night.
They also use large holes drilled in wood. The main thing for me is to be an individual. Make up your own method for helping the bees. and don't standardize.
There is a whole commercial industry devoted to making little bee houses for orchard mason bees. And it is focused pretty much on orchard mason monoculture. I think that is a fundimentally wrong headed approach. We need the diversity. If people keep making 8,3 mm holes for orchard masons (or whatever the correct size is deemed to be) eventually all masons will breed to be that size. And smaller and larger orchard masons and other competing bees, will suffer.
But if we put out a variety of different hollow stems, prepared in different ways, diversity continues.
http://www.permies.com/permaculture-forums/520_0/critter-care/orachard-m...
I think it is a very good point. Just now, there are masses of aphids on my plum trees, the honey dew from them makes the plants and leaves sticky underneath the trees. Wasps and little birds are very busy eating the greenfly. Wasps all the time and the birds come across in flocks pecking off the greenfly.
I just found a small waspnest in my cob greenhouse so unfortunately for them, it has to go. (I am allergic and they are just too close to my workspace).
Ants eat aphids too but they have this bad habit of aphid farming where they tend the aphids and harvest the honeydew as ant food, they even keep some underground through the winter, bring them up onto the trees when the growth happens and kill other creatures on the plants and trees so they do not eat their stock. I do not use insecticides apart from the soap sprays and it is just too much to spray the whole plum tree with the plums practically ripe.
The city of victoria uses ladybugs to keep the downtown trees clear of aphids. But you got to wondor where they get them from. If they are imported from somewhere else, then they are seriously damaging the genetic diversity of the ladybugs in Victoria.
I think it is a very good point. Just now, there are masses of aphids on my plum trees, the honey dew from them makes the plants and leaves sticky underneath the trees. Wasps and little birds are very busy eating the greenfly. Wasps all the time and the birds come across in flocks pecking off the greenfly.
I just found a small waspnest in my cob greenhouse so unfortunately for them, it has to go. (I am allergic and they are just too close to my workspace).
Ants eat aphids too but they have this bad habit of aphid farming where they tend the aphids and harvest the honeydew as ant food, they even keep some underground through the winter, bring them up onto the trees when the growth happens and kill other creatures on the plants and trees so they do not eat their stock. I do not use insecticides apart from the soap sprays and it is just too much to spray the whole plum tree with the plums practically ripe.
The city of victoria uses ladybugs to keep the downtown trees clear of aphids. But you got to wondor where they get them from. If they are imported from somewhere else, then they are seriously damaging the genetic diversity of the ladybugs in Victoria.
Aphids exploded here because of monocultures of soyabeans being grown. And asiatic ladybugs were brought in to control them by farmers. Instead of the deep red colour, these are orangey, and perhaps more oblong than the round ones we are accustomed too.
And, they bite. Not a bad or painfull bite, but where we had cute little ladybugs before, now we have little bitey ones.
Way to go.
At this time of year, people who park under Norway Maples find their cars all sticky with sap. It's not sap-- it's aphid shit. I had a Norway Maple half on my property and half on my neighbours. It was making a mess of her pool, so she had it cut down. Have to admit, I hate the removal of any tree-- but now that it's gone, I do not miss the Norway Maple. Now that I think of it, my rose bushes aren't as aphidy as they used to be when the tree was here.
Messy, messy tree.
Just a thought I had watching honey bees on the russian sage in my back yard. The Russian sage is beautiful, and produces about a billion little flowers that last for half the summer at least. The bees, both bumble and honey (bumble bees still down in numbers here, while honey bees are much more noticeable) seem to love it.
However, this Russian sage doesn't produce any seeds, and I gather it's sterile. (good thing-- it would easily take over) Does this mean it still produces pollen or are the bees having their precious time wasted?
I mean, I suppose the bees know their business better than I do, and wouldn't be wasting their time on empty blossoms. But one never knows.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Save-the-bees-from-extinction-You-CAN-do... I am lousy at writing the instructions but the pictures should help.
edited to add It got 1500 views in 24 hours, which is pretty good. ( wedns 4th august). Hopefully, people will join in.
I am making it a collaboration so that others can add to it too.
It is about how to make the cob bee shelters. The shelters are working and it seems to improve over time too. Saw my first leafcutter yesterday. And today at work, I thought I had half killed one of the wasp imitators. It was down in the dust and dirt and looking as grubby as me. But it wasn't me that did it.
It was another male bee! They fight like monsters for those areas near the blue flowers! Every 10 minutes or so they would scrap in the dirt again! I don't know if they sting each other or bite each other but it is fierce! They fight face to face, tail to tail and grapple with those 6 legs like some sort of angry crab. One bee sure looked like he was losing all the fights but he kept coming back for more.
Anyway, i am off to a different job tomorrow and no bees there.
I think the sage produces nectar even if sterile.
Brian
I did an update about the cob bee shelters for anyone who is interested. You can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86l26f6pEtI
The project is going really well and other people have started their own cob bee shelters too. Hot day today, and very few bees around. Just the wool carders, I don't know where they get their energy from. In terms of hovering ability, they are on a par with the leafcutters. They have taken up station around flowering lemon balm now (they used to be round a blue flowered weed) and the males fight each other all day to be there when the females pass through. I have got quite a few comments on the line "honey bees are best" and good riddance if the others disappear. This is the good species bad species attitude that is destroying our world.
Brian
Study links bee decline to cell phones
Bees worth $12 billion dollars a year to the US economy. Will they act to save the bees? Or will kick-back and graft by politicos acquiescing to a multi-billion dollar cell phony lobby spell doom for mother nature? It's everyone for themselves in a world where profit and market ideology triumph over the common good and human interests.
I think cell phones are a red herring. City bees are doing better than country bees according to several of the people who have written on my instructables page and some other people have found that too.
Also, in the USA, new york bees are doing far better than bees in the rest of the states. I think it is a combination of habitat loss, ag chemicals and gm plants. You can add the transport of commercial bees ( with whatever diseases they pick up along the way) back and forth across the USA to this. By the way, the BC libs lifted the bee quarantine on Vancouver island over the very noisy objections of the van isle bee keeper association. (There are a few really serious bee diseases on the mainland that have not gotten here yet). So expect the commercial and native bee populations on vancouver island to take a nosedive real soon too.
So you're saying bees need more cell phones, leveling of forests and wetlands to make way for concrete jungle? Maybe cell phone transmissions actually work to aid bee navigation?
I don't think he's saying any of those things. I think he's saying we need a food system that depends less on large scale mono-crops, food with a genetic make-up that has not been inbeded with insect killers, to incorporate onsite pollinators into farms and since he's focused on native pollinators in this thread I might assume he's interested in emphasizing crops that don't depend on the honey bee for pollination and just maybe even working towards re-establishing more native plants that could be used as food sources.
It is thought City bee's do better because they don't have to deal with many of the stresses of the agricultural industry...My bees were noticeably disturbed for a couple of weeks when we moved them across the city to a new location(bees are shown to have a very long memory having to learn the ins and outs of a new location is an obvious stress factor), industry bees in the US get moved long distances all the time(the US doesn't have enough bees to pollinate the amount of food it produces), city bees generally feed on a wide variety of wild weeds and the wide diversity of what people have planted in their yards, urban farmers and ornamental flower growers also don't tend to feel the need to grow GM organisms. There are also a lot of trees in cities. To add to that most industry bees are fed sugar water solutions(of questionable nutritional value) rather than honey, queens are indiscriminately replaced yearly(we might want to ask ourselves what that means to genetic selection) and medicated as a preventative measure against the prevalent diseases.
This is toronto
and this
and this
The bees are using the cob and stem bee vase. Some are shunning the open holes and instead digging in the pith in the raspberry canes, grape vines and dill stems. (I did not expect that).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCAPJbBrJaw is some video of them. If you get seasick easy, better not to watch.
Anyway, they have gone in pretty quick and it seems they like it.
I am happy that it works and I hope gardeners adjust their habits to allow more space for these little creatures.
Brian
I think I can set something like that up, Brian, I have just the spot too. I also have a lot of goldenrod that I cut down in late fall, and it's pithy, so I'll try them.
Scientists look to the Kufra for answers. Apparently they are free of pathogens and microwaves.
Fidel, your comments are unhelpful. There is a NRA thread somethere that you could attend.
Honey Bees who lost their parasites through isolation and whose parasites have mutated over thousands of years to be LESS virulent so that THEY can survive with a small population of hosts are going to be wiped out very quickly when they come in contact with wider world bee sicknesses. And the thread is not about honey bees, it is about the thousands of other species of bees that need our attention. Honey bees are all over the world and they WILL survive. Some of the native bees have only a few thousand left and can be wiped out without anybody even knowing about it. This thread is about real physical steps to help them make it.
It is not about theorys.
Brian
I posted an article on bees describing bee research.
Brian, please stick to Brian's topic of discussion, which is how to save the bees. Or at least, I think it is?
A guy in Toronto has found 19 new species of bees. (Which means 19 more species to save!)
I think the picture in the link is a hoverfly not a bee. Bees have long tongues and 4 wings.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/09/new-bee-species-discovered-durin...
My wife is letting a three foot by 10 foot patch of a Korean vegetable plant (don't know the name of it) we grow in the backyard garden flower to get seeds... the plant makes a big cluster of small white flowers on the top of it's stem and the local bees seem to love them. Every morning since they flowered I go out there to water the garden before work the bees are there by the hundreds tearing into those flowers; it makes me smile. I also grow patches of wild flowers around my two peach trees and along my backyard fence line which draws bees and even an occasional humming bird or two (I do not spray anything while the flowers are bloomed).
Anyways the real reason I posted here is I have a question: We've had triple digit heat everyday for over five weeks here now (Central Texas)... is there a way to set up a watering point for bees?
Hi, Bec
Don't know about bees (perhaps Brian White will be along shortly to help out) but I have seen wasps drinking greedily from shallow spills of overflow around potted plants. They seem glad of tiny drops of water, so I would say just sprinkle your unknown Korean plant carelessly enough that there's a few drops left over for the insects.
I wonder if the plant might be comfrey? Bees can't get enough of ours and it looks roughly like the plant you describe.
There's something moving about watching these tiny creatures drinking and realizing that we share the same needs and are for a split second anyway united in the pleasure of that first sip of cold water. Puts me in mind of the lovely lyric that begins "Busy, curious, thirsty fly, drink with me and drink as I."
http://kitchengardeners.org/groups/solitary-bees-native-pollinators has some info about water for bees ,sticks and stones in the bird bath so the bees do not drown (lower on the page) and there is more on the search engines. A piece of cloth to soak the water on the edge of a bird bath might help too. I am not a bee oracle and if people do not find answers on the web, the real important thing is to try stuff yourself. If one or 2 bees drown while your perfect your bee watering system, it is not the end of the world. (Why not a chicken watering station with cloth in it and all round the side? The plastic bottles you get at pet and horsey and ag food stores. They cost about 5 bucks.)
Thanks, I got with the wife last night, looked around on the internet, and we brain stormed a bee water support system for our back yard (and found a ton of other interesting stuff about our native bees). I've never seen them but the wife said she's seen bees at the bird bath in the front yard so we're going to set up a "bee bath" in the back yard. When I do a project I like to go for the high end in the astetics department and any exuse to get another stone or rock lawn ornament is OK by me
... the plan is to modify a small stone bird bath from a local garden shop we've been looking at by putting a "island" in the middle that will have nesting clay and mud material on it and serve as a rescue platform. One thing we are consered with is some of the larger local birds sometimes dominate the bath out front for long periods of time so I'm thinking of putting some kind of low roof on this one... we'll see.
I'm also going to build one of these in the corner of the back yard...
and maybe try my hand at a bumblebee box or two...
Here's a link to a nice set of plans for those of you who want to try this as well...
http://tomclothier.hort.net/page38.html
Great. Just one thing though. Humans obsess about saving the "best". In nature there is no best, anything and everything that is here right now is best or equals. It is a community where as the season progresses, several species work for a few weeks, and then other species takes over. Or maybe you will have a cold or hot or rainy or dry period and different bees will proliferate.
So you need to provide different size holes. It is not one size fits all in nature.
This cold spring in Victoria, there were very few mason bees in my area but in front of my fence there are a huge community of burrowing bees and these did most of the pollinating job instead. (at least in my area)
Humans in Victoria go apeshit about the mason bees but have no idea the others even exist! There is a trade in mason bees (that is probably unhealthy for the species) while the burrowing bees are ignored and just get on with it and get the job done. I think they are the same or similar ones that are in the video on the "wild bee sex" thread on babble.
Yeah, I caught the whole size thing from your posts... I'm figuring about a 16 or so of each of these hole sizes: 1/8th, 1/4 and 3/8th inch, all about 6 inches deep, maybe throw in a few 1/2 incher condos...
That should be a good size spread, I'm also setting up a dirt patch at the base of the bee condo for ground diggers... seems Texas has allot of native ground burrowing bees... probably an ad adaptation for the heat.
http://environment.about.com/b/2010/09/06/scientists-abuzz-over-link-between-climate-change-and-declining-bee-pollination.htm?nl=1
This is a 17 year study near a glacier in Colarado that implicates climate change in the decline of bee polination. Its warmer so the bees come out too early and miss their favorite flowers or something like that. Of course the scientist screws it all up at the end with the "more research needed" funding request thing.
I wonder when he will figure out that "more research needed" just casts extra doubt on his 17 years of work to EVERY person who reads his report? All the excuse that Harper needs to can research! "17 effing years and you don't have concrete results!" "What use are you?" etc.
(It was a Canadian scientist)
Get scientists to make funding requests outside of their "news" soundbites please. The funding request cuts the wow! factor in half.
brian we had so many bumble bees here this summer I could hardly believe it. And I am leaving a huge big slash pile just in case they are wintering in it.
Also like your recommendation about sticks and stuff so they do not drown. I left a clthes basket out in the rain and it had just a inch or so of water in it and a bee drowned. I was devastated and will never again leave something with water in it that they cannot climb out on.
This recent movie pretty much sums up the current state of affairs with the bees: http://vimeo.com/16570483
I'm planting flowers and other things that are bee-friendly this summer. I already have quite a large wildflower garden that attracts bees and hummingbirds.