Make a Bee House Class Follow-Up

  

I had a lot of fun talking about native plants, native insects that use them, and our native pollinators at the Make a Bee House Class I taught last week through the Missoula County Public Schools Lifelong Learning Center.   

Twelve people participated in the class, some had never used a drill, others had never really thought there was a difference between a bald faced hornet, western yellow jacket, European paper wasp, etc… but all were eager to learn and excited about native bees!

Everyone had great questions and I think were pretty excited to install their houses and see who shows up.  I hope people keep me posted about their boxes.  I also know most were eager to build more.  Like I mentioned in the class, if nothing else building the bee houses and watching them is a great way to learn about out native bees and other insects.  

Ultimately the class made 14 boxes, and only a little blood was shed.   

I got all the materials at my favorite building material reuse center, Home ReSource, including Douglas fir 4x4" and 4x6" for the boxes, cedar shakes and tin ridge cap for the roofs, cedar fence boards for the backs and a variety of nails and screws to fasten it all together.  Home ReSource has it all.

This just in....I just got an email from Cate from the class showing where she installed her bee house- right next to her vegetable garden!  Beautiful!

Marilyn, my wife, made a box too (she was a test subject for the class; she survived), and this one will be installed at the Native Plant Garden at 8^th and Grant this Thursday when we do a spring cleaning, and weeding of this neighborhood native plant garden.   Everyone is welcome to attend, and we will even be giving out free native plants!  See I was able to turn this post into a plea for help!  Here is a link to the event page with more information, but you can just show up at 8th and Grant, at 6pm on Thursday (April 30), ready for an hour or so of light work in this little garden.  Bring gloves and your favorite weeding tool if you have one.

This box is heading to the Native Plant Garden at 8th and Grant!

The idea of ground nesting bees interested a lot of people and prompted some discussion of what we can do for them (since they comprise the majority of our native bees), and I thought I would pass a long some timely information.  One was a recent blog post on how to provide habitat for native ground nesting bees from my favorite native plant and insect personality, Heather Holm of Restoring the Landscape with Native Plants, and author of Pollinators of Native Plants.  Be sure to follow her on Facebook, and any other social media you can.  And buy her book.  She is a wealth of information on native plants and insects, and a fantastic artist, graphic designer, educator and landscape designer! 

The other experience with ground nesting bees came to me yesterday (unexpectedly) when I was hunting in a snow storm in the mountains east of Missoula.  As I was sitting under a ponderosa pine escaping the cold and wet snow, a bumblebee came buzzing by me visiting some flowering lupines and other snow covered plants.  I immediately thought of how I explained to the class that our native bees will tolerate a much wider range of temperatures and conditions than Eurasian honeybees.  So I took out my phone to get a picture of a bumblebee pollinating flowers in the snow.  Then the bee landed on a patch of bare ground and started furiously digging, probably a excavating nesting burrow.  I captured this action on camera:

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

Spring is nearly here and people are thinking about their gardens.  This spring and summer I have a few speaking engagements across the state.

The first one (pictured above), is sponsored by the Calypso Chapter of the Montana Native Plant Society and University of Montana Western's School of Outreach.  I have had the pleasure of speaking to this group in past years and I had a wonderful time with the very interested and engaged crowd.  RSVP soon- space is limited and it typically fills up.  Contact outreach@umwestern.edu to register or for more information.

Date:  April 6
Location: Beautiful Divide, MT at the Grange Hall
Topic:  Insects in the Native Garden

Next on the list is a little more vague- I'll be doing a presentation with the Montana BOW (Becoming and Outdoor Woman) program (a program I am a huge fan of), and we are thinking of central or north-central Montana- tentatively in Lewistown or Malta, sometime between May 1 and May 15.  As you can see, there are still some details to work out.  Contact Liz Lodman for more information (or to lobby for a location!).

The next presentation is a combination presentation and field trip to our garden.  This one is also part of the BOW program, and is part of summer BOW.  Summer BOW is a wonderful experience, if you have ever thought about learning to fish, shoot, hunt, identify birds, navigate in the woods, or learn about native plan gardening (!), and you are a woman, consider taking this workshop.  Montana BOW is such a fantastic program and I really enjoy participating any time I an invited.
Sign up soon- summer BOW fills up quickly!  Contact Liz Lodman for more information.
Date:  Aug 2-4 (my presentation and field trip is Aug 3)
Location:  Lubrecht Forest, Greenough, MT

Hope to see you at one of these presentations!
Think gardening.

Insect collection update: the year of the Bombus

Indiscriminate cuckoo bumble bee (Bombus insularis)

Last year I started an insect collection in order to document (and learn) all the insects visiting our garden. This project has been so much fun and such a rewarding endeavor.  I am constantly amazed by the abundance and diversity of insects using our garden, and I am always fascinated by the ecological interactions going on in our little yard.

Last year I was obsessed with bee mimics- a variety of species, genera, and families that mimic bees and wasps.  The ecology of these animals, and deception they employ, are really fascinating.  This year, I am fascinated by bumble bees (Bombus species)- the gentle giants of Hymenoptera. 

There has been a lot written about many pollinators, and even bumble bees in particular.  Many species of bumble bees have declined for a variety of reasons- and many of them are the usual suspects- habitat loss, climate change, pesticides, etc… but another thing that intrigues me about bumblebees and their conservation is their nesting requirements.  This relates directly to conventional landscaping.  Bumblebees nest in the ground in underground burrows, so, more than anything, they need access to the ground: bare dirt they can burrow in to. This behavior puts them at odds with lawns, which cover most landscapes.

Bumble bees are not alone in being affected by lawns, indeed most of our native bees (over 75%) nest in the ground. However some species nest above ground in hollow cavities- holes formed by woodpecker drilling, from other insects boring into trees and even in hollow stems of plants like milkweed (Asclepias speciosa). These are the cavity nesting bees, like mason bees (Osmia species), that nest in bee boxes. For our other native bees (like bumble bees), bare ground is what they need. But unlike most of our native bees, which are solitary nesters, bumble bees are social and live in colonies.

The original mason bee box

Everyone likes bumble bees, and along with ladybird beetles and butterflies they are probably the best known insects in the garden (and most liked). But I realized I knew very little about them, despite that they are large, colorful, and easy to observe. Surprisingly, bumble bees can be hard to identify, and this speaks to their social nature and community structure. Within a species, males, workers and queens are often very differently colored, and are even present at different times of the year. Combined with the fact that there are local variations and over 20 species in west-central Montana, even though they are large and easily observed (and captured) they can be tough to identify.

So far I have collected and identified 12 species in our garden. Most of these are pretty common species, perhaps with the exception of the western bumble bee (B. occidentalis). Though locally common, the western bumble bee is in decline throughout its range and has even been locally extirpated, making it a species of concern throughout its range now. Historically they ranged from the Pacific coast east into Rockies and south to New Mexico.

Although several guides and resources are available, there is no one guide that is perfect for species found here in Montana.  As a result, in order to identify bumble bee species  I have been using a combination of guides including this key from Discover Life,  a guide to Bumble Bees of the Western United States by the US Forest Service, a guide to bumble bees in North America by bumblebee.org  and other online resources, like bugguide.net.  Even with all these resources I still have some questions, and I still have a couple of specimens I have yet to satisfactorily identify.  This is not to scare people off- it is a lot of fun learning about them and identifying them and many are actually quite easy to identify.  One of my best references has become my own insect collection.

The interesting thing is all the diversity that is out there, and all the interesting behaviors and ecology.  And all this can be found in your own backyard, provided you remove some lawn, plant some native plants, and take a look at what happens. So, last year, for me it was all about the mimics, and this year, bumble bees have my interest. Fortunately, there are hundreds of more species in my garden to keep my attention for years to come.