Mason Bee Project
In the spring of 2015, twelve households in Idle Hour set up nesting houses for mason bees in their gardens. The houses were provided free of charge by the Idle Hour Neighbors Alliance. This is our neighborhood’s response to the pollinator crisis, so much discussed in the news these days. Most flowering plants, including most of our food crops, are pollinated by bees and their number is in serious decline.
Altogether over 4400 species of bees are native to North America. (The well-known honey bee is not among them, having been imported from Europe in the 1600s). Bees forage on flowers seeking pollen and nectar, above all to provision their nests. In the process they carry pollen from one blossom to another allowing plants to set fruit that provides food for other animals, including us humans. Pollination and seed production are also crucial to the continued renewal of plants. The importance of bees to nature’s ability of sustaining itself cannot be overestimated.
Bees have developed a variety of strategies for building their nests. Some build them in the ground, some tunnel into dead wood, some seek out the hollow stems of grasses or dead flower stalks to lay their eggs. The mason bees, for which Idle Hour neighbors are providing habitat, lay their eggs in different kinds of tubular cavities.
Within the tube, they construct cells which they partition from each other with a wall made of soil particles and saliva. Each cell contains one egg. Hence their name: mason bees.The young bees hatch in spring at the time when our redbuds bloom, and they forage for about 8 weeks. By the end of May, new nests have been built and the adult bees die.
Our neighborhood bee project has a small scientific component to it. Half of our bee keepers were given a set of cocoons to place in their bee houses, and the other half will wait and see how many bees come and nest in the houses on their own. By the end of spring we will see how the nesting activity is distributed among our 12 houses, that is whether having started out with cocoons makes any difference to the number of nests built in a given house. The cocoons we start with are those of blue orchard mason bees (Osmia lignaria), a very effective pollinator. Two or three females can pollinate an entire apple tree. They are especially valuable to orchardists because they work better than honey bees in bad weather.
We invite Idle Hour residents to join our environmental effort and install bee houses in their gardens. If you are interested in participating in this project, please contact Annette Castle at: IdleHourNHA@gmail.com
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