Solitary Bees

Whilst I was making lots of straws for my bees at the start of the year, I started sharing my recycled beer cans packed with c.30 paper straws with various people around me. In fact I persuaded four local French acquaintances to place a can each in appropriate places where the bees might find them. The profiles of my new allies were as follows:

1. Sylvain the neighbour behind our plot of land and orchard, is converting some large farm buildings about 400 metres away from where my bees boxes are. Like our own, his house’s 150 year-old brick joints (composed of a mix of local clay, soil and sand) have also suffered from the slow erosion that enables insect tunnels to form – ideal for solitary bees. He also has an old collapsing wooden-frame wattle and daub barn catching the midday sun, so I thought it was an ideal place to situate a paper-straw can. He and his lovely family have often heard me enthuse about my bees, so I thought I would get them involved.
2. The primary school teacher who also doubles up as the local town hall administrator (in the village of 480 inhabitants) was also someone who I had positive contact with. So I invited him over to see my bee activities in April. He seemed suitably impressed and confirmed that he’d seen the bees taking up residence in the town hall brickwork. I suggested that he could make paper straws and habitats with his school children as an ecology project, and he willingly accepted a can of straws agreeing that we’d talk further later in the year.
3. The cousin/handyman – curious about my fervour for the bees, I gave him a can of straws, some hogweed reeds and about 10 cocoons in March to see if we could establish the bees near his three fruit trees in his garden about 15km away. The challenge was in the placement of the tunnels.
4. The colleague Rémi from Creil – although I work and live in Paris, I have a great and talented Web colleague who lives in Picardie who at the time was living on the first floor of a block of flats with its communal garden. So having taken an interested I gave him a can of straws to see if he could attract some local bees.

Last weekend I visited Sylvain the neighbour. I had seen that of the thirty or so straws 4 were sealed and I was determined to follow up on his success; to cut the selotape to open up the paper straws, to look at what had been achieved inside and count the success before winter set in. We also needed to shelter the relatively delicate tubes out of the humidity. So here’s a picture of what we found:

In total out of the four tubes sealed, there were 20 cocoons probably of Osmia cornuta. Opening up the tubes in front of the watching neighbours, was a great occasion – in fact one tube accounted for 9 of the cocoons (out of 13 constructed cells). In the picture above you can see 4 cocoons. The fourth, near the wet clay bung (of course now dried) that I used to seal the back ends of the paper straw tubes, I believe was that of a female bee.

After having talked about my bees for over a year – and them often making reference to honey bees – they finally got to see what all my fuss had been about. We then relocated the cocoons in clean tubes to allow them to freely emerge in the spring. I think I have got some new allies in the project. Very satisfying!

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Postscript: As for the other three allies – I will soon talk to the school teacher about the ecology project for next year, Remi the colleague is moving to a house with a garden so I am going to give him a drilled bee block as a house-warming present (he didn’t get any bees this year), and ditto for the cousin. 2010′s going to be a good one.