Proof that Wasps are Good for Your Garden

People always ask me "What are wasps good for?" Wasps keep cabbage loopers from eating your kale. Here's photographic proof. This yellow jacket will chow down on this looper so that she can regurgitate it as baby wasp pablum. As you can see, wasps do have some hairs, but they don't have the velvety branched setae that bees evolved as they changed from meat eaters to vegetarians. Wikipedia says wasps are sometimes misidentified at "meat bees". Bees are actually more like "vegan wasps".

Fall Floral Competition: The Beenado

Three honeybees with strikingly different abdomens

  It's a quiet warm Sunday afternoon in September. A golden light reveals a black shadow on my neighbour's buddleia--a large Mourning Cloak butterfly opens its wings as it silently sips nectar. All is quiet on the southwestern front. And then all hell lets loose as two hummingbirds declare war on each other. They take turns flying straight up to gain the visual advantage, their high pitched squeaks warning each other until their beaks clash in a mid-air sword battle. Suddenly there's a third hummingbird involved, claiming a good vantage point watch the action from our lilac bush. The sparrows and chickadees hide in the shadows. And then just as quickly as it started, the fight has ended, or perhaps moved on to another yard where the sun is still warming the desired nectar.

 

While we are celebrating an early harvest moon, floral resources are also dwindling about 2 weeks ahead of schedule. What does this mean to the bees? Competition for nectar and pollen is heating up. At a time of the year when country gardeners are entering competitions for best peach pie, longest zucchini, and the top annual floral display, bees are competing for the best flowers to feed them and save their lives. The French baker at the UBC Farm market apologizes for covering up his goods. "It's because of the bees" he says. "Pas les abeilles," I say emphatically. "Ce sont les autres, les guepes." I ask him how to pronounce it. It's gep, rhymes-with-skep. "Masculin ou feminin?" I ask. "C'est une guepe," he says. Oh la la, the women always get the blame. Wasps are furiously searching for food to feed themselves and their young before winter comes and kills them all. . . except for the queen of course. There are some distinct advantages to being female.

A bee in every dahlia, this one with a plump pollen load

 

In the rows of flowers grown for bouquets their is a fierce competition going on in the dahlias. The bee-friendly dahlias that have yellow flat centres containing pollen and nectar are sites of frenzied activity with honeybees and bumble bees, each a miniature boxing ring with the biggest and strongest bees pushing the smaller ones outside the ropes. Bumble bees can wake up earlier and forage later, but honeybees have the advantage of sheer numbers. Besides, honeybees have a beekeeper who can feed them pollen patties and sugar water if they run out of foraged food, but these native bumble bees don't have that advantage, which is probably just as well. With so many honeybees sucking up resources I wonder how much is left for the bumble bees in this situation? How often can the dahlias replenish their supply?

 

It's important to mention that any double dahlias bred so that they cannot offer nectar or pollen are silent. occasionally I find a bee butt sticking out of the petticoats of double dahlias, but they are wasting precious time and energy. You are not doing bees any favours by planting these flowers. The flowers offering pollen come in just as many eye-popping colours as the double duds.

There is also a lot of hymenoptera helicopters hovering over the Ammi (I think it's bishop's lace). These umbels are crawling with patrolling wasps and syrphid flies of various sizes. I could stand and take photos here that would create an amazing stop-animation scenes in a battle. The real B-movie. Another kind of beenado is happening over the garlic chives at 16 Oaks organic Community Garden. A vosnesenskii queen and one of her brood work side by side on the umbels of one plant. While other flowers in the garden lay empty and still, these garlic chives are bristling with dramatic tension. Similar battles are going on in the oregano and those good old brassicas. A flowering broccoli plant provides an important source of fall nectar in the city.

On looking at these photographs I note that in spite of the intense competition going on there also seems to be a higher tolerance for the close proximity of other insects feeding at the same plant.

No pollen? I'm outta here!

 

In his book Bumblebees; their behaviour, ecology and conservation (2010, Oxford University Press) David Goulson asks the question: how did the introduction of honeybees half a century ago affect the native bee population in North America? Were there native bees who could not compete with the honeybees and ended up becoming extinct? I could see that happening to an oligolectic* bee, especially one that needed crucial late summer forage. We won't know if bees were lost, but we can study the bees we have now. Native bees need our support.

Fall is certainly a time when one needs to be conscious of the political nature of which plants you choose for which bees: native goldenrods and and asters need to be there in a critical mass for native bees. Abundant fall forage for honeybees means that they won't have to compete so much with native bees: garlic chives, oregano, perovskia, asters, helenium, nepeta, bee-friendly dahlias, false dandelion, sunflowers, sedum and any umbels that bloom late are essential. Also, we need to think about putting a cap on how many hives we allow per city block so that we do not stress our native urban bees to the point of extinction. I know some folks might find this hard to hear, but it's just common sense. There's only so much food at the pollinator buffet, especially as the days get shorter, floral choices narrow, and the volume of forage goes down. And soon, the rains will come.

A spider in the perovskia has a multi-course meal

 

*Oligolectic bees evolved to have a narrow choice of forage plants, ie from one genus or species.

Strategies for Keeping Children Calm around Bees

Sweat bee in a native plant called Pearly Everlasting. This is one of those flowers that has dry petals you can use in flower arrangements

It's a muggy hot afternoon in August. I have come to the Cedar Cottage Neighborhood House to do a bee safari with a group of 6-8 year olds. I arrive early to assess the situation and see if there are any bee plants in the immediate vicinity. The older kids are rounded up for a game involving a ball and chalk squares drawn on the ground. One of the boys is declared out and he seems upset. He goes and sits down on a log and quietly starts to sob. I go over to him and quietly tell him to take a deep breath and murmur encouragement. Then I leave him alone. The game is going on, with rules that puzzle me. I'm not the only one as other kids get frustrated and tempers flare. Another boy stops and lies down on the chalk square. He begins to cry. To my amazement I realize he is the identical twin of the first boy who succumbed to the heat. I try to calm him and hand him some lemon balm, but he pushes it away.

Okay, I've got a bunch of kids I don't know, who are overheated and volatile and we're going to be around stinging insects. This sounds like fun. To my delight there are all sorts of vegetables in raised beds growing all around the neighborhood house. Two girls want to water the corn and squash so I show them how to hold the hose to water the soil, not the leaves. "We don't need help," they tell me and water the leaves. I'm on a winning streak.

 After two minutes they get board, so I finish up the watering. On a hot day like this I can't help "accidently" spraying a few kids. The boys who were playing the game on the pavement dare me to soak them and I do. This is summer camp after all, and we all need watering. The councellors  round up the kids and sing my favorite song I love to hate: "I'm scooping up a baby bumble bee. Won't my momma bee so pleased with me?" It starts with scooping and ends with puking. It's not a pretty song and it advocates cruelty to bees. Just great.

Before we head off on our walk, I take the group of 12 youngsters to a garden bed. I take a male blossom off the plant and close the top. "Do you know how to act around bees?" I ask. Don't do this, one girl demonstrates and she runs around flapping her hands and screeches." "Yes, that's exactly what you don't do," I say. You need to take a deep breath and move very slowly, like in Tai Chi. I take a male blossom off a squash plant. "Do you know what's in here?" I ask. "Is it a bee?" "Yes, and I'm going to see if she'll crawl on my hand." I can see a frisson of revulsion shiver through a girl's shoulders. "I'm scared", she says. "It's going to be okay," I say. I open the top of the blossom and she flies up and back into the squash plant. "You see, she doesn't want to bother me," I say. She just wants to pollinate this squash. And I explain how bees take pollen from the male blossom and put in on a female blossom so it can produce a squash like the ones we see developing on the plant. "Without pollination those squash would have died," I explain.

 I am relieved to be working with the youngest of the kids. They are wee 6-8 year-olds dwarfed by their huge backpacks. We head to the school garden. "It's a bee nest!" They shout and point at a tree. Perched above the cars on a boulvard tree, a classic paper wasp nest hangs from a tree. Aha! This is a teachable moment. I explain that the wasps chew up wood from the fences and create a paper pup which they form into a nest. Winnie the Pooh is all wrong, I say. The illustrator didn't know anything about the difference between wasps and bees. If this was made of wax it would melt and fall off the tree. "Oh, now I see," one bright little girl says, the light dawning in her eyes. Success!

"What would happen if you threw a soccer ball at that nest?" a boy asks. There's one in every crowd. "You would get stung because the wasps would try to defend their babies," I say. But if you don't bother them, they won't bother you. Then I explain to them my ritual of giving a sacrificial piece of salmon to a hungry wasp at a picnic. I tell them to take their picnic plates inside as soon as they finish eating and keep all garbage under a tight lid. Then I tell them to pour any sweet drinks from a can   into a glass or a bottle with a lid because wasps can crawl into cans and you can get stung by accident when you drink from a can. That's wasp safety 101. "What if you kick a wasp and step on it?" the same boy asks, and the questions continue.

 

When we get to the garden, I see it's going to be tricky to get everyone in a spot where they can feel comfortable. We are pretty squished for space and there are bees everywhere. "Please stay further away from the flowers if you are afraid," I say, giving them a way to feel safe in the garden.

"I'm not really interested in this garden, one girl says, full of summer ennui. "This is my school garden."

"Well, maybe we can see something new," I say.

I give them my spiel, talking about bees using the examples of what we see in the lavender, wooly lamb's ear, perovskia, rudbeckia and echinacea. I explain that the blonde bumble bees are the males and they don't sting. "You can even catch them in your hands. Do you think I should do it?" They dare me and I catch a little blondie and show how he flies away from inside my hands back onto the flowers. "Do it again! Do it again!"

 Then I see a wasp chomping down on a bee caught in a spider's web. When the wasp leaves I take out the dead honeybee and show them. It takes a while to convince them she's really dead, but then they take turns touching her and I leave her on the fence for them to observe. "Can you break that spider web so it doesn't catch any more bees?" the girl says. This is the girl that was repelled by bees about an hour ago.

We form a circle and do the bee dance before the kids settle down for their snack. One boy tells me a tall tale: "My friend got scratched by a bee and my brother punched the queen and stepped on it!" he claims. "That's an interesting piece of fiction," I say and move on.

We walk back to the neighborhood house past the wasp nest, having had a good safari in the heat of the midday sun. I walk down to the Cedar Cottage Community garden where beekeeper Peter has opened up the hives and is looking for a queen. "I hope he doesn't punch her and step on her," I think to myself and head down the hill for a long, tall glass of iced tea.

A Strange Little Critter: New Wasp on the Block

 My, what big eyes you have! This little creature was pollinating the Angelica Sylvestris. It has something strange going on on its thorax. This is one time I wish I had netted it so I could check it closer. It has a damaged wing, so it looks like it has been through the wars.

 This blurry photo shows the pattern on its back. It's tiny--about a cm long.

ETA: Phil from the blog Cabinet of Curiosities has helped me identify this as a digger wasp, maybe the square-headed digger wasp like this one taken by Terry Thormin: http://www.pbase.com/terrythormin/image/128851647

 I love the way this wasp was balancing its back legs on a sunflower leaf to feed on the fennel nectar.

Here's another small wasp with a distinct pattern, a kind of window pane on its thorax.

 This is dangerous-looking milk thistle.

 I am really enjoying the shades of the hummingbird sage I planted from seed. It blooms in shell pink, white and scarlet.

A honey bee landed on my glasses and then crawled onto my hand and tried to stick its tongue in between my fingers. I think this is because I had a gig as the Queen Bee in the morning. I use a witch hazel with lavender to remove my makeup and the bee must have been attracted to the scent of the lavender. This has happened to me before when I rub lavender blossoms with my fingers. So you need to be aware that your cosmetics may attract bees!

Weaving Wasps and Horned Hornets

Some people have asked Madame Beespeaker, "What is the difference between a wasp an a hornet?" I usually mumble something, like, "I'm the wrong person to ask. I haven't got a clue," and then change the subject to bees or breakfast. I finally found the guy who answered the question for me in the comments section of his recent post on his blog The Home Bug Garden. He lives in Edmonton and he gardens for bugs, and his wife takes photos of them! Cool. I am very excited to be going to Edmo in September to a performance art festival because I'm going to visit the Bug Room at the Royal Alberta Museum. As well as eat perogies. Yum. Anyway, here is the link: Biodiversity Gone Bad: Hornets in the Home Bug Garden.

The Wasp Nest Demystified

As part of our ephemeral art lesson I brought a wasp nest into class for the students to take apart and study. I wanted to put an end to the confusion between a feral beehive and a wasp's nest.

The nest was attached to a branch in a rhododendron bush is our back yard. We watched it grow over the summer as bald-faced hornets came and went and never bothered us at all.

The students pulled open some of the cells that were closed on top and found wasps in various stages of decay. Some had been hollowed out from inside by parasites. There was a mass of spider eggs and a few tiny hatched spiders living in the defunct nest.


The students cut and tore the paper and added it to the ephemeral material piles.

The teacher and I talked about one of the quintessential sounds of summer--wasps scraping wood off of fence posts to use to make paper .

Each student had a turn at having a close encounter with a wasp's nest. Hopefully this will help turn fear of wasps into respectful curiosity.