Solitary bees in my flower garden

As you may know from reading my very first blog post, or from the "About Us" page on the blog, I don't keep my honey bees at my home, but at my father's. One of the reasons we decided to do this was because of the restrictive regulations on keeping beehives in the city. I may cross that bridge eventually, but not right now.

Well, bees will be bees, and they'll go wherever there are flowers to collect nectar and pollen from, regardless of whether or not city officials and neighbors want them. Yesterday while I was weeding our front flower garden and putting down wood chips, I ran into 4-5 of these little buggers flying around...

 

Some quick online research revealed that these are Andrenid Bees. They are small, native, solitary bees that build nests in a small, pencil sized hole they dig in the ground. Here's some info:
UMN - Solitary Bees with a Twist
UMN - Andrenid Bees

I've known about solitary bees before. In fact, I remember some bees digging tunnels in the sandbox at my parents' house when I was a kid. I've also known that you can build houses for various types of solitary bees, but never did much research. So I did a little last night. It seems that many of these native bees are even more prolific pollinators than honey bees! Plus their homes are super easy to build, inconspicuous, and probably wouldn't bother the neighbors in the city too much. Maybe I'll take up a project soon and build a house for some bees here. Then I can be a city beekeeper as well!

Bumble Bee Homes
How to make a bumble bee nest
Providing bumble bee nest sites
Plans for building bumble bee nest boxes


Orchard Mason Bee Homes
How to build a bee house
How to construct a sturdy, all wood mason bee house
Bring on the bees

More on making a bait hive from our extra Warre box

I've got some pictures of the construction of our bait hive a few posts back. Here's a video talking about preparing the hive to put out and using our beeswax "polish" to seal/waterproof the outside of the hive.

Busy as a bee - One week after installing our bee package into our Warre hive 05-18-13

Whoever coined the phrase "busy as a bee" was NOT joking. Check out everything they've accomplished in just one week. Keep in mind this is in Minnesota, spring arrived late (there was snow on the ground less than one week before we installed the bees), there has been rain for about 2-3 of the 7 days they've been in the hive so I don't know how much foraging they've been able to do, and this is a 2lb package of bees instead of the 3lb package I was expecting. Crazy...

Lighting our smoker for the first time and our first beehive inspection 05-15-13

After soccer on last Wednesday, we stopped by Grandpa's to check on our bees for the first time. We passed our first test (lighting the smoker and getting it to stay lit) and were surprised by how active the bees have been. Whoever came up with the phrase "busy as a bee" wasn't joking! Look at how much they've accomplished in just four days!

In addition to what you can see in the video, check out the picture below. I wasn't sure how much foraging they'd be doing with Minnesota's late spring, but the bees have already found flowers and are bringing in pollen. We saw bees with yellow, orange, and white pollen.

Again, sorry about the picture quality, but in this picture you can see a little more of the comb coming down from the top bars. You can also see from the lines where the bees are, in other words, where there's more comb coming down that you can't see.

Pretty amazing work for only four days in a late spring!

Bee Day Videos 05-11-13

Well, I finally figured out how to use Windows Live Movie Maker to edit these clips together. Here's the video of our first ever experience with live honey bees. I'll pretty much let it speak for itself. Just be warned, however, the videographer was a eight year old boy. It is, at times, shaky. And, at others, not even pointing in the right direction. Still, I think it captured the day quite well, and I can watch it over and over again just as enthralled as when I was actually there with the bees.

More videos coming soon. Here's the first...