Solitary bees 2009!
Monday, March 16th, 2009It’s official my solitary bees are emerging!
I have just spent the weekend at the old house watching the first few males scanning all the available holes between the bricks for emerging females. Very soon it will probably be like this all over the place:
Solitary bee reproduction
Or worse still (for the ‘what just hit me’ females) like this video that I took in 2007:
I also got a great video of a male carpenter bee voraciously feeding on the nectar of primroses, but as I have left it on the other computer I will have to update and add that video below later.
As far as my boxed bees are concerned, I have left them in the cooler cellar until I am sure that the temperatures are more steady. I don’t want to risk the bees being caught by a late frost/snowfall in weather conditions that could be similar to those of 2008. I did however put three different nesting habitats in place:
- the home-made paper bee straws (with ten starting cocoons) on the window sill above the place where the box normally hangs.
- the hollow stem bundles that I made, and
- the honeycombed commercial solitary bee habitat that I bought last year