Homes
LangleyAdvance | Friday, August 20, 2010 A19
In the Garden by Anne Marrison
Anne Marrison is happy to answer garden questions. Send them to her via amarrison@shaw.ca
since they have senior moments and forget where they used to live. All they need for a nest is a hole in the ground. This could be an old mousehole or a hole under a board, or under a flat stone – somewhere rain can’t penetrate. Nothing bothers to rob a bumblebee hive: the total amount of honey in a nest is about two teaspoons.
A colony starts small when the queen comes out of hibernation but later the larger hives can reach 200 bumblebees. Invaluable for pollinating fruit, vegetable and ornamental crops in spring, mason bees have never been known to sting. They usually begin pollinating during the first warm spell in Febru-
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sealed with green chewed up leaves. Mason bee tubes are sealed with grey mud. Wasps also pollinate, though not very successfully because they’re too smooth to carry pollen well. But tiny wasps and large yellow-jackets visit flowers to eat the nectar and so some pollination happens anyway. Yellow-jackets are also useful predators of caterpillars. All pollinating insects are attracted to gardens where a shallow body of water has perching places or moist soil around the edge.
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Prices in effect Aug. 1-31, 2010
fix...
EVE RY TUE SDAY & F R I DAY
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Time
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Aug 21 & 22 Aug 22
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D
ue to mites and pesticides, honeybees are vanishing in many countries – and as suppliers of honey they are absolutely irreplaceable. But pollination in home gardens isn’t a lost cause because it can be done very effectively by other members of the bee family. The crucial thing gardeners can do is make gardens welcoming for these lesserknown but hardworking bees. Bumblebees, for instance are resistant to the dreaded varroa mite which has decimated many honeybee hives. Other mites also attack bumblebees, but most weaken rather than kill outright. These bees are willing to work in temperatures below 50F (10C) – unlike honeybees that don’t stir until temperatures are above 60 F (16C). Bumblebees are good-tempered and their stings are extremely rare, though very painful when they do occur. They work commercially in greenhouses, pollinating tomatoes and sometimes peppers and cucumbers. Bumblebees are said to adapt well to greenhouses
ary but die off by mid-June leaving eggs behind. In nature, each egg is sealed off in a plant stem or hole in a tree. By spring, the eggs have gone through a larval stage and transformed into large blue-black hairy mason bees resembling bluebottles. For gardeners, the tube houses sold in early spring in garden centres can be placed on a house or shed wall for use by mason bees. Many commercial tube houses are wooden “sandwich” type blocks which have been scooped out with a router so that they form tubes when the layers are together. Others are moulded plastic. Those first cocoons are clean and viable. Yearly maintenance involves taking the tube houses apart and discarding the dirty looking cocoons because they will contain mites. The others can be placed outside in a birthing box (like a small birdhouse) to await warm weather. People in rural areas may find they can simply put mason bee tube houses on a house or shed wall and mason bees from the wild will lay eggs in the tubes. So will leaf-cutter bees. These are great pollinators working late into the summer when mason bees have vanished. You can identify their tubes because they are
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Survival of other bees rests with gardeners