Solitary Bee Blog

The unusal and perhaps most noteworthy thing about this project is the access I have to my population of Osmia Rufus / solitary bees / Orchard Mason bees (call them what you like).

The construction of their artificial habitat in clear plastic tubes, in a box whose lid I can temporarily remove, and the box position below a first floor window, and the fact that they are not bothered by my presence centimetres away, gives me unfettered access to observe their life cycle. Hence producing many of the great photos I have got with a fairly limited little digital camera.  It also offers me a surprise or three when I study the images I have captured afterwards…

Competitiveness Creates Carelessness (& Fruit)

The word is that Mason Orchard bees are 10-100 more efficient pollinators than the more commonly known (less seen) honey bee. With my privileged window into the intimate life of my solitary bees, I am gathering strong indicators as why this may be so.  The competition at the entrance and inside the cells is very fierce, hairs are literally being pulled out, female baldness becomes an issue as the tough adult life progresses… (More to come).

Monster in the box

Nothing has surprised me more than a suspected incident of cannabalism this year seen in tube #4.  It manner of existing suggests it is not from the main Orchard Mason species populating the majority of the box, nor a mutation (several genes would have had to have seriously flipped).

So something REALLY disturbing has taken residence inside the box…

Sizeable Revelations

Finally (for now), it is impressive that within one single agglomoration there is a real diversity of size within the actual male and female populations.  Is it that there are advantages in being large and some in being small as variations appear every year?  However it could also be purely a function of how much pollen is stocked before the cell is sealed, or the internal diametre of my tubes… the revelations, hypotheses and experiments are a plenty.