Making the Bees Come to Me: Part Three- Roots and Shoots

For a while after I planted my seeds I failed too see anything growing at all. I was worried that somehow I had done it wrong or it would take much longer than I had initially hoped to get these plants growing. However about five days after I had plated the seeds I began to see a few very, very tiny shoots appear in the planters.

Over the next two days they began to spring up, little green leaves appearing everywhere.

I began to use a liquid plant feed along with the regular watering I gave the shoots, to make sure they got all the nutrients that they needed as well as to promote faster larger plant growth. And around 11 days after planting the shoots were gaining tiny leaves and heading towards the sunlight. 

How to Make a Bee Home

Bee homes, houses or hotels are places used by solitary bees to provide cover/shelter and a place to raise young bees. 

Solitary bees are different from Bumble bees as they do not for colonies or produce honey. Species of solitary bees include Mason Bees.

The usually nest reeds or hollow wood, however a bee hotel can also be a perfect nest site for a solitary bee, and this is how to make one.

With drill bits of various sizes (5/16th of an inch works best for Mason bees) simply take some scrap lumber and drill holes 3 to 5 inches deep but not all the way through the wood block. For example, get a 4 inch by 4 inch piece of wood and drill holes that are 3 and 1/2 inches deep.

You can cover the holes with chicken wire to help keep birds away from the bee house.

Securely place the bee house on the south side of buildings, fence posts, or trees.

Scatter some of the houses throughout your community. You may find an excellent location to trap some bees and then move them to your location.

DO NOT move bee houses after they are in place until at least November.

DO NOT spray insecticides around or near the bee home.

And DO NOT use treated wood.

The Bumble Bee Life Cycle

One

During the autumn, after mating with a male, a newly hatched queen must feed on nectar in order to build up fat reserves before she goes into hibernation underground for the winter. She can even produce her own antifreeze if the temperature dips too low to prevent her whole body from freezing.

Two

In the spring she emerges from the ground and heads off into the world to feed and find a suitable place for a nest site.

Three

2 weeks after coming out of hibernation, the new queen prepares to lay her eggs. She builds up a store of protein rich pollen and begins to feed off of it, her ovaries react to digesting this protein rich pollen and she begins laying. She moulds a small honeypot using her own wax and creates a ball of pollen, which she lays her eggs onto. 

Four

After about 4 days the eggs hatch into larvae, the queen produces a protective cell to encase her newly hatched brood. She feeds the larvae on pollen collected from near her nest site and as they grow she then prepares tokay a second batch of eggs.

Five

4-5 weeks after the first eggs were hatched the first workers emerge as adults. They collect pollen and nectar, feed and attend to the larvae, and protect their queen. 

Six

16 weeks later and the nest is filled to capacity with queen and workers. The queen then moves onto producing fertilised eggs which contain new queens and unfertilised eggs which become males. These larvae are feed greater amounts more frequently through their development.

Seven

When the males hatch, at about 18 weeks, they leave the nest site in order to find a mate. Approximately a week after this the queens emerge and mate with the males. 

Eight

24 weeks later and the colony has now come to an end, the males, workers and the queen all die. Only newly hatched and mated queens survive. They begin to feed on nectar and build up their fat reserves and find a suitable site to hibernate in and survive through the the winter, ready to emerge next spring.

Making the Bees Come to Me: Part 2- The Planting

When it came time to plant the flowers I'd been told, on good advice, to start off the seedlings in smaller containers and then transfer them to a bigger planter once they had grown large enough. So I acquired some small plastic planters suitable for the job.

I filled each small container with a good amount of compost, and enjoyed the feeling of getting dirty, mud covered hands.

I had read somewhere that the compost needed to be completely damp/moist before planting the seeds. The way to get this done thoroughly was to place the planters on a plate and slowly add water onto the plate, this allowed the compost to absorb the water and draw it into the soil. I kept repeating this process (pouring water onto the plate) until the water simply remained and the soil was damp to the touch.

It was then time to add the seeds. I placed a small amount spread across each planter and then pressed them into the soil until they were covered.

All that remained now was to wait for some results. 

How Can we Save the Bees?

After researching why bees are so important, I wanted to also learn what conservation projects were in place to protect the bees and what could be done to stop their decline.

There are many different bee charities and most of them offer/sell wildflower and bee friendly seeds, the largest part of bee conservation comes from individuals planting flowers and providing the bees with a stable food source to replace the lost wildflower meadows. what is so specific about many wildflower seeds given out by charities is that they flower over a long season, where as most garden plants flower for only a few weeks at a time. A longer flowering period means there is food from early spring, throughout summer and late autumn. This is especially important for bumble bees, whose newly hatched queens must build up fat reserves in order to hibernate throughout winter and emerge again in spring. 

Wildlife World also sells a lot of bee houses, and many bee conservation charities give instructions on how to create a bee house, this is somewhere to give the bees shelter and where they can create their nests. With new queens emerging in the spring time, where the weather is cold and unpredictable, these bee homes are a vital lifeline.

Bumblebee Conservation works with farmers from an agricultural angle, encouraging bee friendly farming as well as leaving wilder field margins and using less pesticides in order to allow wild flowers to grow in greater numbers. As well as this they encourage and offer advice on how to create a bee friendly garden, the Partners for Sustainable Pollination offer plaques and certificates for gardens and farms certified to have a bee friendly environment. 

All in all, although there are projects set in place it seems the oat important part of bee conservation is the individual, one person can really make a difference. Bees and bee charities rely on people creating bee friendly environments and growing the flowers necessary for bumble bee survival.

Save the Bees!

Whilst attempting to identify my bees and get my hands on some seeds I was exposed to many facts about bees and bee numbers, so I thought I would briefly talk about some of the information about bees and why the seeds I received were so important.

According to both pamphlets over the past 60 years the UK has lost 97% of it's wildflower meadows from intensive farming and the use of pesticides, meaning that the bees have lost 97% of their original food sources. Because of this 20 bee species have become extinct, and one quarter of the remaining species are on the red list of threatened species, species such as the great yellow bumble bee, which is currently only found in Scotland. 

So why should we care?

Well bees are incredible pollinators, both bumble bees and honey bees (which too have numbers in a rapid decline). 

In north America it is estimated that 30% of food for human consumption is a product of bee pollination. In Europe it is estimated that 84% of crops require insect pollination and in the UK 1/3 of  crops that require animal pollination are pollinated by honey bees, the other 2/3 rely on bumble bees, solitary bees and hover flies. 

An experiment performed by Whole Foods and University Heights Rhode Island attempted to depict what our supermarket produce section could look like without bees. They removed all the foods that relied upon bees for pollination and the results were surprising and shocking.

The impact was so greta that Whole Foods lost 237 of their 453 products, equivalent to 52% of what they sell.

What would the world be like without bees?

Without bees acting as pollinators we could loose many foods and produce that we rely on. 

A short list of the some of the foods we'd likely loose include:

Kiwi fruit	Oil seed rape	Runner beans
Cranberry	Turnip rape	Lima beans
Blueberry	Sunflowers	Broad beans
Gooseberry	Cotton	Soya bean
Currants	Vetches	Aubergine
Cherry	Lucerne (alfalfa)	Tomato
Pear	Clovers	Peppers
Plum	Lupin	Cucumber
Apple	Buckwheat	Squash
Blackberry		Pumpkin
Orange		Gourds
Lemon		Celery
Melon		coriander
Watermelon		Fennel
Raspberry		Gherkin
Peach		Marrow
Strawberry		Mustard

Making the Bees Come to Me

After going out into the wild to look for bees I thought about possible ways of attracting bees to my home. I've lived in Leeds city centre for over a year and in all that time have failed to see a single bee. So I decided to attempt to grow flowers on my balcony in order to make the bees come to me.

I started by going to a site called wildlife world and ordered myself a bee attractor pack for the modest price of £4.99. The pack contained a booklet containing basic bee information, as well as an identification guide.

I also viewed an advert for a charity called Friends of the Earth, which were offering free bee friendly seeds in exchange for texting to a number and listening to a sales pitch for monthly charity donations. 

The packs contained a variety of species of wildflower all known for being particular nectar favourites of bees. These species include:

Bird's Foot Trefoil

Red and White Clovers

Common/Field Poppy

Viper's Bugloss

Yarrow

As well as many more, but you get what I'm saying.

Identifying Species: Part Two

Better quality photos should equal easier identification, some species were the same as from my first set of pictures, however there were a few new species I hadn't stumbled upon the first time round.

Red-shanked carder bee  (Bombus ruderarius)

This bee is listed under the scarce category, so it was a delight to find out I had encountered one. Being all black with a distinct red tail makes it stand apart from other species. However it does look similar to a female Red Tailed Cuckoo bee (however they tend to only live in the south of the country, so it's highly unlikely it was one of them) or a queen Red Tailed bee. It was a close toss up between a rare version of a common species or a common version of a rare species so I may still be wrong. 

Common carder bee  (Bombus pascuorum)

The ginger hairs are very visible in this image and although the head is darker, it is most definitely a Common Carder.

Honey Bee

Whilst wandering along I saw this guy on a flower right next to the path. She may not be the exact type of bee I was looking for, however still worth taking a picture of I believe. Honey bees are the species kept and reared by bee keepers with colonies and hives of an enormous size. Bumble bees however have only very small nests and colonies, certain bumble bees remain solitary and possess no colony at all.

Buff-tailed bumblebee  (Bombus terrestris)

Buff Tailed bees have a dirty golden/yellow band on their thorax and their abdomen and a white buff tail (hence the name). Queens tail's can vary in colour from white to a dull orange. This is a common bee found in gardens and woodlands around the country.

Finding the Bees: Part Two

I went back to East Keswick a few weeks later armed with a better quality camera and a macro lens in order to take some better pictures. Instead of sticking to the bushes and flowers of peoples gardens I headed out to the marshland, a known spot for observing nature. There's a lot of wild, untamed grass  perfect for the growth of wild flowers and perfect for bumble bees.

Although the quality of the photos was vastly improved from the first time round, finding and snapping pictures of the subjects proved a lot, lot harder. In order to get close enough to a single bee I had to wade through long grass surrounded by other insects, and, 9 times out of 10, by the time I got close enough they'd usually fly away.

I picked a handful of the best photos from the day and edited them using ACDSee, a simple photo editing software.