Bees Need Flowers

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by TheBeesWaggle

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Clover depends on bee visits to reproduce seeds.

Why Bees Need Flowers

75% of all flowering plants rely on pollinators to produce seed and or fruit. Without insect-assisted pollination, many of the colors we enjoy in the natural landscape would disappear.

1/3 of the food humankind consumes has been produced by bee pollination specifically.  That is upwards of 70% of the produce , including, but not limited to apples, pears, berries, tomatoes, carrots, onions, and many more!

The Earth’s landscape is becoming less and less capable of sustaining the life of bees, which means there are less and less bees raised to adulthood.  Bee populations survive by raising young bees to adulthood.  The number of bees in the next generation depends on how many flowers bees can visit, and how much pollen they can bring back to the nest for their young. Simply put, bees need flowers.

Due to the green landscape, lacking flowers for bees, bees are forced to travel miles to find food.  These long distance trips sometimes leave bees exhausted and shorten their lifespan, which also lessens the nest’s potential for producing a healthy new generation of bees.  Honeybee populations are known to be struggling, but are not the only bees in need of more resources to survive; there are over 4000 native bee species in North America and Canada, and 20,000 native bee species worldwide. Some native bee populations are rapidly declining and nearing extinction. They are some of the best pollinators on the planet!  Farm fields and orchards located near wild areas (containing healthy forage and habitats for native bees) produce more fruit than their monoculture surrounded counterparts.

Monocultures are acres and acres of one crop with no other plant mixed in. These monocultures are like a desert to bees flying in search of pollen and nectar from flowers. Given the fact that wild areas help improve crop yields, there should be more floral landscapes mixed into farmland.  If not for bees, for aesthetics. Who wouldn’t want to see more flowers in a green landscape?

What is good for the native bee is also good for honeybees, butterflies, birds, and even bats! The point is to bring balance back to the landscape so we can coexist with the wild species we have pushed into smaller condensed areas by destroying habitats. It isn’t sustainable for them, and in the long run it will also destroy us.

Imagine 70% of the grocery store’s produce section empty!  Imagine creating meals short of things like tomatoes, garlic, onions, and so many more.  This is the reality that will become us if we don’t take action and begin bringing back pollinator habitats to all landscapes.

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This meal would only contain steak without bees.  That’s a sobering illustration! It could be “dressed up” with a glass of wine, right? Nope, wine doesn’t exist without bees either!

The simplest way to help pollinators is to add flowers to your own yard. Whether you swap out your entire front lawn for flowering plants or place a few pots out containing a variety of flowers, you are making an impact. The less distance a bee must travel to forage, the better.

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The flowers behind the rhubarb plant were grown from seed that same season, and produced beautiful blooms far into the bitter cold of Fall.

The flowering plants you plant shouldn’t contain pesticides, so look for organic seeds and plants.  When in doubt about whether a plant is organic or not, air on the side of caution, and don’t plant it. Pesticides weaken and kill bees and other pollinators.

Organic flower seeds are inexpensive and very successful at producing a bounty of beautiful flowers, which will likely return if you have a healthy bee population pollinating them all season. Planting a variety of flowering plants will attract all kinds of characters to your yard. You will enjoy seeing a variety of beautiful pollinators paying their respects to your floral buffet!

 

If you are really feeling zealous and want to invite bees to stay in your yard, you can provide a variety of nesting options.  Ground nesting bees like open soil, or piles of dirt to dig into and form nesting holes.  Wood nesting bees love tree stumps, and tree stumps are aesthetically pleasing amidst the garden.  Twig nesting bees like pithy plant material, containing hollowed out centers. They also like blocks with pre-drilled holes of different sizes (0.25-0.5″; 6″ deep) to choose from.  Bumblebees might like a nesting box built just for them containing wooly material, or even old bird’s nesting material.

 

We at The Bees Waggle value all of our followers, and look to you to reach more people and motivate them to simply plant more flowers! Together we can make a real impact on this problem.  We plan to remove all of our front lawn and replace it with flowering plants and places for our bees to nest. I am so looking forward to the photos and experiences this transformation will afford!

Cheers to joining the movement to save our bees!

the-bees-waggle-99-design

Leafcutter Bees are Great Craftswomen!

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All About Leafcutter Bees

by TheBeesWaggle

 

Any name with cutter in it seems frightening, but I am here to redeem these Leafcutter Bees of such a stigma by bringing understanding through education.

Leaf-cutter bees are another native species of bees found in most parts of North America. They are smaller than a honeybee, and have darker stripes paired with pastel yellow colored stripes across the abdomen.

The scientific name for this species is Megachilidae, and their name says it all, they do cut leaves for a purpose. They get their name from the way they use pieces of leaves to form egg cells which they then store in long, hollow cavities.  They use a glue-like substance from glands near their mouths to sew pieces of leaves together, which they have carved from leaves of lilacs and other broad-leafed plants. The shape is that of a half-moon, and the size of the piece they take is very consistent. They only take as much as they need, never destroying the plants from which they take the leaf fragments.

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Half-moon cuts on my lilac bush.

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A row of beautifully crafted nesting cells from my leafcutter bee house.

Leafcutter bees are a solitary breed, like the mason bee. This translates into a more docile creature with nothing to defend but her life. So the only time she would sting would be to defend her life, and this is a rare occurrence, making her a very welcoming guest in your own yard!  I have spent many minutes peering into the nesting blocks while these busy bees fly in and out going about their nesting business.  I never once felt threatened by them, and in fact, felt ignored, entirely!  This is also true of the nature of mason bees.

However, unlike mason bees, leaf-cutter bees will do their own excavating of soft rotting wood, or holes in thick stemmed plants, and in any conveniently located crevice.  They also like having conveniently located nesting blocks with inviting holes as well, and we had success with them nesting in ours this summer! Nesting blocks need protection, so they must be paired with a nice house, and we have many options!

Like mason bees, leafcutter bees are very good pollinators compared to the honey bee.  One leaf-cutter bee can pollinate at least what 20, and even up to 40, honey bees can pollinate. Leaf-cutter bees do not have pollen carrying baskets on their hind legs, but they do carry lots of pollen via static cling created by the hairs on their abdomen. The way they visit flowers is much like the mason bees, diving into the pollen as they fly from flower to flower. This techniques sets them apart from honeybees and makes them very effective pollinators.

Finally, leaf-cutter bees do not make honey, but they cultivate quite the production of food sources through their fierce pollinating efforts, and it would be foolish not to recognize this talent useful to us as humans. Like the honeybee, leafcutter bees, along with all other species of bees, need our help!  Become a great host to these fascinating creatures, along with other species of pollinators, by setting up a complete habitat for them next Spring!

Leafcutter Bees

Leafcutter Bees

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Excellent Pollinators

by Sandy Swegel

There’s a native bee (especially in the Western US) that you’ll rarely recognize flying around, but almost everyone can tell when the bee has been in their garden. Leaves, especially of roses, have perfect little half-moons cut on the edges. The cuts are better circles than most of us can draw. In most years there aren’t overwhelming numbers of cutter bees so they don’t really threaten the plants.

 

Leafcutter bees don’t eat the leaves. They take them to make nests for their babies. Unlike honey bees which live in hives, leaf cutters are solitary bees, and the leaves are used to make long tubular cigar-looking nests. Each bee egg gets its own little room, complete with a gob of saliva, some pollen and some nectar for when the larvae grow in the Spring.

Some people think leafcutter bees are pests and want to exterminate them. Others want to attract them to their gardens because they are excellent pollinators. I’m on the side of letting them happily live in my rose garden and cut their perfect little half moons. They are gentle bees and rarely sting. Cute and good for pollination.

 

Photo Credit and Info:
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05576.html
http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens-gardening/your-garden/help-for-the-home-gardener/advice-tips-resources/pests-and-problems/insects/bees/leaf-cutter-bees.aspx
http://swampthings.blogspot.com/2012/05/leaf-cutter-bee-nest.html
http://rachel-the-gardener.blogspot.com/2011/08/leaf-cutter-bees.html

Straw in the Garden: Be Careful!

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Straw May Be Killing Your Crops

by Sandy Swegel

Straw bales are one of my favorite garden tools.  They are useful to the gardener in so many ways.  All nicely tied up, straw bales are like giant Lego blocks that can be stacked to make so many things. I’m using the term “straw” bale, but old “hay” bales have the same great features.  Three bales make a great compost bin.  A row of bales makes excellent walls that double as sitting places.  Open the bales up and you have the perfect mulch to keep strawberries or squash off the ground or to make a path protected from mud.  Give the chickens one bale and an hour later they have spread it evenly over the coop floor in their pursuit of worms or food in the bale.  A square of bales with some plastic thrown over is an excellent cold frame.  And I haven’t even begun to touch on the usefulness of bales as a fort.

So it was distressing this week to be reminded that we can no longer just trust the wonderful bales that we scavenged in the past because modern agriculture has rendered hay, straw, and even the gardener’s best friend, manure, unsafe for growing food.

This conversation came up because tomatoes are very sensitive to herbicide damage.  The most common cause of herbicide damage extension agents used to see was from “herbicide drift” where chemicals sprayed nearby go airborne and are spread by the wind onto your garden.  But my experience this week was with tomato plants, a very susceptible plant – sort of the canary in the mine.  After considering dozens of diseases from virus and fungus and bacteria that might be stunting a friend’s tomatoes and keeping them from setting fruit, we had to face the likelihood that the culprit was last year’s straw that was liberally mulched throughout the garden.

Hay and straw become hidden poison bombs in the garden when farmers use the new generation of weed killers (that are very effective on weeds) like Milestone or Forefront or Curtail.  Milestone is aminopyralid it is a very persistent killer of broad-leaf plants.  Farmers like it because it kills weeds and because unlike other weedkillers, they can feed treated pasture to their animals without any waiting time.  The label says clearly that while animals can still feed on the pasture, the herbicide survives being eaten by the animals, and it survives composting.  So even year old hay that you’ve composted or nice old manure from free-range animals on pasture still has enough herbicide in it to kill your tomato crop.

The bottom line is you can’t just get straw at the feed store or old hay or manure from a neighbor’s barn to use in your garden unless you know how the original pasture was treated this year and last year.  It’s another sad but true example of the destructive environmental impact even small actions such as applying some weedkiller can have. And it’s not even just the farmer who has to take care.  Grass clippings are a gardener’s favorite mulch…and some of the new weed killers or weed and feed products contain these long-lasting poison time bombs.  It’s easy to want to kill some thistle…but you have to read the very tiny small print to see if you are destroying your own garden by using the organic practices of mulching with grass or hay or straw that generations of gardeners have sworn by.  It’s not your father’s straw bale anymore.

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/fletcher/programs/ncorganic/special-pubs/herbicide_carryover.pdf
http://www.motherearthnews.com/Grow-It/Milestone-Herbicide-Contamination-Creates-Dangerous-Toxic-Compost.aspx

Carrot Love

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Heirloom Vegetable Seeds

By Sandy Swegel

 

I was noticing very happy pollinators this week: honey bees and native bees, tiny flies, lacewings.

And the air was abuzz with hummingbirds and their look-a-likes sphinx moth. Noticing that pollinators were all around is the first step. Then I looked for where they were gathered….because that meant I had somehow (accidentally) created a habitat that they loved.

The best habitat of the day was a patch of carrots abandoned last year in the back of the garden which had entirely gone to seed. There were dozens of different kinds of happy flying beneficials on it. It was at a slightly wet end of the row so that helped. I’ll never pull the last carrot again. What I didn’t know until this week is that carrot flowers are pale pink. Very sweet in a big patch.

 

I like to leave carrots in the ground in winter. I eat them until the ground freezes because they get sweeter and sweeter each day. Then I’m happy for them to get frozen solid because many of them turn to mush and by the time I dig them in early spring, there are writhing masses of earthworms feast. But the carrots that don’t turn to mush, make beautiful flowers their second year.

There was another surprise areas abuzz yesterday. I headed out to a patch of fallen lambs ear that looked spent. From a distance, the flowers were all brown. Lambs ear are beautiful and drought tolerant, but they will seed everywhere. I was about to pull out fifty or so plants that barely had any flowers left…but the bees had a strong opinion that they wanted the last of those flowers. So one more week for the lamb’s ears. I know they’ll drop seeds. But the bees had the final say. Everything for our bee overlords.

 

Photo Credits:

blog.growingwithscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/carrot-flower-pollinators.jpg
www.craftsy.com/blog/2015/07/texture-plants/

It’s Caterpillar Time!

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Beneficial Insects

by Sandy Swegel

Protect our friends. So many butterflies in our area have laid their eggs and their baby caterpillars are getting big and fat and chewing up plants. Be sure you know who your friends are before you squash any of them! You’ll love having the butterflies.

Swallowtail caterpillars
I found these this week, not on the dozens of dill plants I planted for them but on a leftover parsley from last year. Next year, more parsley.

Monarch caterpillars
Also yellow stripey…they look a little more serious. I’m watching for these now. Quite a few eggs on the milkweed plants I let take over part of the back garden…so I’m hoping

Painted lady caterpillar
I almost never see these although I see lots of the butterflies. Skinny little black prickly caterpillars. Their host is the Malva family like thistles or hollyhocks.

Cabbage looper
Well, this is one you’re probably seeing a lot of right now. Cute little white moths fluttering everywhere. Bright green little loopers inching along devouring your cabbages. If you want cabbages, you have to treat these as pests.

 

 

Photocredit:
lagbchbutterflies.weebly.com
www.monarch-butterfly.com
wildones.org

The Honey Bee Colony

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How to Handle These Valuable Pollinators

It’s the stuff of Hollywood movies and spine-chilling stories — a swarm of bees attacking everything in their path. Mad, ruthless, and vicious buzzing creatures covering whatever strikes their fancy (usually a person) until they succumb to the deadly stings! This is how a swarm of bees behaves, right?
Well, not exactly.

First of all, let’s discuss what a honey bee swarm is and exactly why they’re swarming. A swarm is an entire colony of bees looking for a place to start up housekeeping. It includes a queen and up to 30,000 of her pals, the worker bees and drones. They do this without any anger, aggression, nor any plans to sting people.

Usually, a young queen is born into a honey bee colony and she takes the place of the old queen (no one said life as a queen was easy). The old queen sees the writing on the wall and starts packing for greener pastures. Don’t worry, she has some loyal subjects — she ends up taking about half of that colony with her to hang around a new castle.

The entourage is led by the queen bee and her pheromones — which has them following her beyond all reason. When the queen finds a comfy bush or tree branch, the swarm will settle there, as well. Ultimately what they’re looking for is an unoccupied cavity in which to call home. This is the time when a savvy beekeeper will place a beehive below the swarm to attract them. If the colony approves (and by “the colony”, I mean the Queen) then someone just got themselves a brand new hive, pollination team, and honey processing plant!

Let’s back up a bit. There’s a thick, black, buzzing cloud going through your yard and you’re supposed to believe that these guys don’t have your name at the top of their tiny, bee hit-list, right? That’s exactly right. And the reason that they don’t have stinging on their mind is that honey bees typically defend two things: their young (in the hive) and their honey (also in the hive).

They tend to get irked when you mess with these things — as well they should. In the honeybee’s defense, if you’re going to go into a hive and take either of those things, well…that actually makes you the aggressor.

That said, personally, I wouldn’t gr

ab a broom and start flailing it around trying to swat at the swarm. I mean that probably falls under the definition of provocation, am I right?

If you find that a swarm of honeybees has landed at your home, garage, or porch and you not only don’t believe a word I’ve written here, but are getting ready to sue me because these bees are certainly going to kill you in your sleep…all I ask is that instead of taking matters into your own hands, please contact a local beekeeper to have them gently removed. Honey bees are one of our most valuable pollinators and they’re having a terrible time staying in existence.

Trivial Note: I’m not a honey beekeeper. Although, I am a Western Blue Mason Beekeeper, which isn’t of any importance to this article at all. I only mention it for the record.

Our Native Bees

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How to Help the Bees Feel At Home

by Sandy Swegel

 

Ever feel like you’re doing all the work and everybody else is getting all the credit?  That was the great scenario I watched unfold yesterday.  It was a warm sunny day and there were hundreds of honey bees buzzing loudly in a hot pink crab apple tree.  Such a sight and sound is a crowning point of Spring and gives us hope for honeybees.  But I was working in the rock garden nearby pulling weeds out of a mini-hedge of yellow Basket of Gold. (Aurinia saxatilis)  While everybody else was watching the crab apple full of honey bees, there was one solitary native bee happily feeding and pollinating an entire row of bright yellow alyssum growing over the rocks.  This native bee wasn’t getting all the glory but he was a Rock Star.

Native bees are often much smaller than honey bees. They don’t make honey for us.  They have evolved alongside native plants so they prefer to feed on native plants rather than human-made hybrids.  The native bee I watched wasn’t a hive builder but makes a solitary nest just for itself in the dirt or somewhere in a little hole in an old dead tree.

 

You can encourage native bees to live in your garden by planting native plants and by building little nests the native bee likes.  You can make a small practical native bee nest out of a box and hollow tubes, or you can go all out and make some garden art as we see in these pictures.

Or just honor the native bee by noticing it.  Next time you’re in the garden, look for the little bee that’s at least half the size of all the other bees you see.  That’s one of our unsung pollinator heroes.

How to Build your Own Native Bee Nest:
http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/nests_for_native_bees_fact_sheet_xerces_society.pdf

Photo Credits
http://landscaping.about.com/od/Deer-Proof-Plants/tp/deer-resistant-perennials.htm
nativebeeconservancy.org

 

 

The Native Bumble

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All About the Bumblebee

by Summer Sugg

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s—it’s…a bumblebee? This seems to be more than fitting, seeing as this pollinator’s genus name, Bombus, literally means “booming”, or “buzzing” in Latin. Anyone who’s had a garden in Colorado, or hiked in its wildflower filled landscapes can testify to the astounding amount of noise a bumblebee can make while zooming past your head. It definitely caught me off guard when I got the amazing opportunity to work with the bumblebees in the field with two biology professors at CU (Diana Oliveras and Carol Kearns) during the summer months as research.

I’m sure many of you know what a bumblebee looks like, but what I never knew before my research experience was that there are more colors than just black and yellow to a particular species of bumblebee. The abdominal segments (6 on a female, 7 on male) are where the color is located and can contain orange, white, rufous red, and even brown pile (fur) with the yellow and black depending on the species.

Female bumblebees are very interesting, especially the long life of the queen (one year or longer) who first mates, then overwinter to emerge in the spring with a mission to gather and find a good place for a hive to lay her eggs. The workers are also female, have stingers that can sting something as many times as it wants without dying, and are much smaller than the queen (except for when the new queen is chosen and leaves the hive with the males). Male bumblebees are also interesting, and some people who are good at identifying the males can scoop them up with their bare hands to examine them. The males have no stingers or corbiculae (female’s shiny area of the back legs’ femur surrounded by stiff hairs to carry pollen) and sometimes loiter on flowers or branches with their large humorous bug eyes.

Female (left) vs. Male (right)—different species, but you can see the characteristics. (http://bugguide.net)

Another interesting fact is how bumblebees are native to North America with 23 species found in Colorado alone, while honeybees are of European origin and are only a single species. The experience of working with them and this new knowledge also gave me more appreciation towards our native pollinators, especially bumblebees who are the primary players in helping to pollinate some of Colorado’s (and other state’s) native wildflowers, such as the shooting star anthers (as pictured below). This is due to their large size, enabling them to literally buzz out the pollen, which other non-native pollinators cannot do.

(http://beetlesinthebush.wordpress.com/2010/07/)

Sources:

Book: “The Natural History of Bumblebees—A sourcebook for Investigations” by Carol A. Kearns and James D. Thompson

Websites: http://www.colostate.edu/Dept/bspm/extension%20and%20outreach/Bumble%20Bees.pdf http://beetlesinthebush.wordpress.com/2010/07/

Honeybee Facts

Flowers to set the mood

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Flower Arrangement Tips

by Sandy Swegel

One of my favorite jobs each year is designing twenty-two flower pots for an urban condo. The homeowners are real garden lovers but they live in the middle of the city on a high floor. Rather than be content to just look at the amazing mountain vistas their elevation provides, they decided to bring flowers to them in profusely planted pots.

The fun for me is not just designing the interesting combinations of flowers and foliage, but also using the flowers to set the mood for each tiny “room” on the deck.

Here are some of the moods I’ve asked the flowers to set this year.

Sweet, soft gentle awakening.
I love vivid designs, but sometimes one needs to move slowly into the day. So the flowers outside the bedroom window are pretty and not too stirring. Salmon geraniums with spilling blue lobelia. A small white pot with water plants like papyrus. A gentle mood set for early morning.

Late Afternoon Jolt of Wow
The east side of the deck has afternoon shade and really comfy chairs, so it’s a grand spot for guests and afternoon cocktails. Planters here are full of what I call the diva plants: giant purples and oranges. Weird grasses or showy reds. This year a feathery purple Japanese Maple surrounded by orange tropical kangaroo paw and goldfish plant and any other odd orange flowery thing I could find provide the centerpiece. Last year a hot red castor bean plant and lime green foliage and fuchsia colored flowers did the trick. Pots on the perimeter are full of giant petunias and cascading sweet potato vines. Diva flowers always look even more amazing after a few margaritas.

Dinner time
After cocktails, people shift to the grill area. Plants are sturdy here on a west deck. A couple of potted evergreens to balance the big grill and table. Orange hibiscus that is bright and colorful but doesn’t mind being jostled or heated by the grill. Multi-colored coleus to create the illusion of color and texture in the setting shade. An herb pot in case the grills needs some extra rosemary sprigs.
Fading light
After the sun sets, people move indoors and even though there are soft solar lights coming on near a fountain, the flowers fade in the coming night. Exceptions are the white alyssum and silver foliage spread throughout pots that glow under moonlight or the orange osteospermum with the purple fluorescent centers that hold the light a little longer.

Flowers are such powerful influences in our lives. We choose what we grow for many reasons.