Rest in Peace in Grindelia: Late July Bees in Oak Meadows Park

At this time of the year you'll find leafcutter bees chillin' in the fireweed at Oak Meadows Park.

I had fun watching this male leafcutter hover behind a female, fixing on the target before he mated with her. You can see that the male has ashy grey hairs, while the female is more blonde. She also has quite the facial hair, which is sometimes the case with certain species of female bees.

How can a person resist playing with fireweed seeds? Be free and feed the bees!

Meanwhile, on the east side of the park, the perennials are becoming well established and I was happy to see these gumweed flowers (Grindelia sp.) because they were so attractive to bees in the Okanagan.

They are shallow, easy-access flowers that capture the warmth and energy of the sun.

Look for these green plugs at the ends of leafcutter nests in the pollinator hotel.

This is also the time of the year when the males are dying. I found this little melissodes male in a grindelia flower.

He still has a glint in his eyes.

This bumblebee had died on a flower and was stuck in the sap that oozes from the buds.

This little guy was alive, but he had lost part of one antenna.

The honeybees were foraging in the chickweed growing underneath the taller perennials.

The lovely asters are blooming too.

I popped in quickly to VanDusen Gardens to admire these alliums. They'd be good to plant with nodding onions as they bloom slightly later.

Here's a cheeky wool carder bee heading into a beautful penstemon flower which was also hosting honeybees and bumblebees. I've read that some penstemons have hairs that keep some bees out of their corollas and I'm curious to study those species.

Taking the Vancouver NatureKids Club on a Bee Safari

I was asked to be a nature mentor and take some Vancouver NatureKids and their caregivers on a bee safari. We met in beautiful Oak Meadows Park at the bee hotel. I started by showing them the small leafcutter bees that were using the tunnels in the hotel as nesting sites and we saw a little bee carrying a piece of leaf into one of the entrances.

It was the perfect day for a bee safari and the flowers were active with bees of all stripes. Before setting out we covered some bee safety tips and I gave everyone a sheet with prompts: twenty things to try to find on our safari.

A flower with pollen that is a color other than yellow or orange: fireweed. Check! Fireweed has green or blue pollen. Look for honeybees, bumblebees and leafcutter bees in fireweed.

And here's a reminder to enter any good bee safari photos you've taken in the EYA's photo contact. There's gonna be prizes!

Another flower with unusual pollen is lacy phacelia or The Bee's Friend.  This little bee is rubbing herself along the long stamens to gather the purple pollen. West Coast Seeds sells packages of this flower, calling it purple tansy. There's a really nice photo of a bumblebee right on the package. Whatever it's called, I highly recommend putting it in your garden.

Doesn't she look fierce in flight? Even so, she's a "tickle bee" and cannot sting you! Look at the mandibles she has for digging her nest. She must be some kind of sweat or mining bee, carrying pollen on her legs.

When you're on a bee safari always look in the weeds for bees, especially dandelions and false dandelions. You are likely to see the really wee bees swimming around in the shallow flowers, covering themselves in pollen.

And here's a wool carder bee, resting before nesting in one of these holes where she stuffs wool carded from the nearby wooly lamb's ear plant. I think she's the bee that's sealing the holes with the tiny pebbles you see here. We also saw a hole stuffed with resin--made by another kind of bee or wasp. I even saw a parasitic wasp or ant stuck in the resin--what a cool evolutionary tool!

You often see these little bees on yarrow literally up to their armpits in pollen. Some have yellow leg hairs, making them seem even more neon yellow when they are coated in yarrow pollen.

At the end of the safari we headed over to the entrance of VanDusen Gardens. This planting is an example of one of my favorite native combinations of plants: sedum, blanket flower, nodding onion and Ocean Spray. There were Melissodes digger bees and leafcutter bees here.

This patch of flowers near the entrance of the new building is worth a visit in itself.

And I did see a turquoise sweat bee, even though she proved elusive during our safari.

The sloped soil and stone wall likely provide great sites for ground nesting bees here.

I really enjoyed my afternoon jaunt with the Vancouver NatureKids Club. The adults and kids asked really great questions and they were so appreciative of the work done in Oak Meadows Park to support pollinators thanks to biologist Nick Page and the Environmental Youth Alliance.

As I walked north of VanDusen Gardens to have tea with my inlaws I was rewarded with the sighting of a bee that's rare in Vancouver. In fact, I'd never seen it here before. This was taken in a front yard garden. Too bad my photography skills went on vacay!

I'm pretty sure this in Bombus nevadensis, or the Nevada Bumblebee, a really golden velvety bumblebee queen with a black head and black tip on her tail. How exciting!!!!!

My Mom's Hands

 
" My mom's hands are busy, and restless. During my childhood they were often covered in all purpose flour or garden soil. (How many of us have internalized an image of that classic gesture: our mother wiping her hands on a kitchen towel?) Mom also sewed, played the piano, made crafts and squeezed music out of the accordion. Year after year, her green thumbs coaxed sweet peas, gladiolas and mammoth sunflowers to burst forth from the dry, cracked prairie soil. Her hands are strong, feminine, nurturing, and gentle."
--from These Hands are Our Hands, a chapbook by Lori Weidenhammer

I was so pleased that yesterday mom and I could stroll through the Laburnum Walk at VanDusen Gardens while it is blooming. I was also very grateful that mom and dad and I got to look at bees under the microscope as we dropped in on the Environmental Youth Alliance's citizen science program.
 

One day I heard a visitor to the gardens complaining that he had not seen an arbutus tree in VanDusen botanical gardens. Dude, they are here before you even get into the gardens and this little one is blooming its heart out.

And here's one of my favorite native mid spring bee plants, the blue camas. The last of the mason bees are feeding on these and the native lupins. I'm so happy to see them here. Hope you all had a great Mother's Day.

Happy Pollinator Week!

The Pollinator Project celebrated Sunday at VanDusen Gardens.

Yours truly crashed the party with a fractured wing! (I fell off a chair trying to catch and release a large parasitic wasp.)

Jasna Guy and I went on a pollen-collecting safari.

I'm Voting for the Pollinator Party!

Just joking! Save the date for this fabulous event. I'll be giving bee safari tours.

Queen and Comfrey: Visit VanDusen Gardens this Victoria Day Weekend

 If you want to visit VanDusen gardens, this is the long weekend to do it because there are so many cool plants in bloom and the bees are very busy. The laburnum walk is humming with bumblebees. This comfrey is also a popular spot for the queens and workers. It's a good place to observe different species of bumblebees working alongside each other.

We don't have many redbud trees in Vancouver, but this is a beautiful example of a Judas tree with pea-shaped blossoms that is a bumblebee favorite.

Here's a close-up of the stamens and the nectar guides. The blossoms are a striking hue of hot pink.

Playing Rude on Tansy

"Ummm, some of us are trying to eat here!"

There's a little cut flower garden tucked away on the north side of VanDusen Gardens run by volunteers. It's a little secret bee garden alive with all sorts of activities and I urge you to seek it out. Tansy is so unusual because they are clusters of composite flowers without expending the extra energy to grow petals. They make nice landing pads for a variety of insects.

Tansy  (Tanacetum vulgare) is a noxious weed in Vancouver with a history as a dye plant (yellow), powerful medicinal plant (considered too toxic to be used today) and insect repellant. It was put in with corpses in coffins in New England and in linen closets to repel moths. It is commonly planted in gardens in Australia to keep away ants, so maybe scientists should take a closer look at the potential for putting all that tansy along BC highways to good use. The essential oils are high in thujone, also found in the herb garden in oregano, common sage, and wormwood.

(Tanacetum vulgare)is a noxious weed in Vancouver

Will Fire Ants Affect Native Ground Nesting Bees?

Peter did some sounds recording of bees today at VanDusen Gardens while I took photos. An area that is rich with ground-nesting bees has been invaded by fire ants. They can quickly take over an area of ground with their large nests. I hope the fire ants will not be a threat to the beautiful ground nesting bees near Alma VanDusen meadow. Ditto for the treatment to get rid of the fire ants.

Cleaning Mason Bee Condos with Brian Campbell

 It's that time of the year to prepare your mason bees for winter by cleaning the cocoons and condos. Brian Campbell gave a thoroughly fascinating workshop on mason bees as part of the VanDusen Garden workshop series. Brian started the class with a talk on the diversity of bees in British Columbia. He says our province is a great place to practice native bee conservation. This talk is worth the price of admission alone and Brian can come to your garden club or school and tell you all about our local bees. He can give you the confidence to clean your mason bees and help them live to produce another generation next spring.

My father-in-law says he brings his houses in to dry a few days before he cleans them out. Brian takes his in much earlier to protect them from birds and predatory mites. If you had two condos you could try both methods and compare the results. (Note that it's important not to disturb the egg while it is developing into a larva.)

If you have houses made of drilled holes with paper tubes you need to pull out the tubes and unroll them to remove the cocoons. I recently read that parchment paper for cooking is the best paper for rolling your own tubes if you are using the system with the drilled holes.When cleaning cocoons it's important to watch for hibernating wasp queens. We had found one that appeared totally dormant until she woke up and began flying around the room. There are several other mason bee pests you may find in your tunnels including parasitic wasps, cuckoo bees, cuckoo wasps, carpet beetles, flour beetles, spider beetles and pollen mites.

Also look for any cocoons that are damaged and empty and put them in the garbage pile. If your tunnels are filled with crumbly brown matter and chalky white hard  dead larva you may have a condo infected with chalk brood. In this case you've got to quarantine your condo and clean it with water and bleach. Clean your hands as well to prevent the disease from spreading.

If you've got some healthy cocoons, separate them out and wash them in a tub. Some people use bleach, and some don't. There are other people experimenting with natural oils to eliminate the mites and also the cleansing action of gentle abrasion with sand. There are natural eco-sensitive bleaches on the market that would work for this. Brian assures us the healthy cocoons are water proof and the bleach will not get into the bees.

 This condo was interesting because it contained the cells and larva of resin bees. If these are put back together once the mason bees are cleaned out they should pupate and hatch next summer. The exact species of this bee remains a mystery to us. I really wish we had a digital microscope to look more closely at all the insects and debris in the tunnels. (If anyone knows of a good digital microscope for classroom and home use with a MAC OS, please let me know. Price is an object, BTW!)

 It's as simple as this: just putting the cocoons in water and letting them float to the top. You can remove them and let them dry on an old towel. Some people repeat this three times or also use sand to help abrade debris from the cocoons. The most common debris is black pellets of bee poop and pollen mites. These hairy footed mites hitchhike on the backs of bees to eat pollen. Like Varroa mites they reproduce at an alarming rate which can all end in tears. If hairy mites in the tunnels run out of pollen they eat the mason bee cocoons and then they eat the mason bees.

Next you can "candle" the bees by laying them on a powerful flashlight or light tray. Brian encouraged us to keep track of how many large (female) cocoons and smaller (male) cocoons were intact. By mid December (or earlier) puts the cocoons in a plastic bag in a jar in the refrigerator until spring. He adds a wet piece of paper towel on the bottom to keep some humidity in the jar, but not too much. Check your bees periodically to see if they are too dry or too wet.

We also found a tiny dead cuckoo wasp: Pseudomalus auratus. It was just a few mm long and it had a shiny turquoise thorax and a red shiny abdomen. It is one of the wasps that parasitizes mason bees. This wasp does not sting, but curls into a ball when it feels threatened. Awwww.

Should you clean your cocoons? Yes. Most folks had not cleaned their condos for a couple of years and they were overrun with pollen mites and disease. From my research I also learned it is best to buy cocoons from a trusted local mason beekeeper like Brian who checks to make sure he sells disease-free Western mason bees.