It’s easy to forget about the nursery since, after the first few weeks of high activity in the spring, things have been pretty quiet. In fact, I wasn’t sure anything was happening there at all, until I noticed the dried mud.
The nursery, you see, is actually a ready-made nest for Osmia lignaria, or mason bees. Unlike honeybees, mason bees are native to the United States. They are “solitary bees,” meaning they do not build and live in hives together. They lay their eggs in any narrow passages they can find, such as hollow stems, the spaces between cedar shingles, or holes in wood bored by other insects or birds. They live brief, busy lives, laying and provisioning their eggs, and walling off each chamber with mud. Also known as blue orchard bees, masons are docile and prodigious pollinators, making them especially attractive to orchardists.
Mason bees are one of the more than 400 wild bee species native to New York, and they provide important, but mostly unaccounted for pollination services across the state. We’ve become more aware of our dependence on pollinators over the past year through media attention to the mysterious honeybee die-off known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Few people, however, know about the plight — or even the existence — of native bees.
I became interested in mason bees last year, while researching CCD. I began to suspect that, as with the coverage of so many ecosystem disorders, we were looking at only one part of an extremely complex bigger picture. Maybe honeybees are the canaries in the coal mine, catching our notice first, because of their commercial importance. But just what kind of coal mine are we in, exactly?
Forgive me if I’m guilty of my own oversimplifications, but the primary features of the coal mine I’m looking at appear to be monoculture and sprawl culture. Industrial agriculture means ever larger plantations of single crops, a situation that supports pests rather than beneficial insects. In the countryside, pesticides and the plow have depleted or fragmented both honeybee pasture and native bee habitats. In cities and suburbs, pavement, pesticides and “preening” — our bias toward expanses of turf grass and the removal of brush, snags and stands of uncultivated trees — have made life difficult for bees (and other wildlife).
To put it bluntly, we’ve made major alterations in the landscape, which in turn, affect virtually every part of the food chain. And we haven’t done so with impunity.
How can the typical town dweller help out? Find out more about pollinator issues by checking out sites such as North American Pollinator Protection Campaign www.nappc.org and www.beyondpesticides.org. You’ll also discover inspiring projects such as greening golf courses and find ways to get involved with bird sanctuary programs at www.auduboninternational.org.
Then, if you feel motivated, you can act directly in a couple of ways: 1) by planting flowering trees, shrubs or plants with an eye for continuous bloom all season, and 2) by making or buying nesting blocks for native bees. See www.nappc.org for instructions; www.knoxcellars.com and www.beediverse.com sell a variety of models.
Last year, I found out about masons too late to order any live bees. I got a “starter cottage” — a handful of cardboard tubes inside a small, elongated wooden “birdhouse” — and put it up in hopes that it would be found by house-hunting masons. Something used one of the tubes, but it wasn’t a mason bee!
This year, I ordered my “canned bees” from Knox Cellars in February. They arrived in deep hibernation, traveling in a canister with extra tubes for new nests when they emerge. They took up lodgings in the fridge until early April’s warmer weather, when I put the canister on my front porch. The next time I remembered to check, the three “loaded” tubes were empty. Over the next several days, I spotted the occasional small, dark bee, bumping around from porch to flower. Then they disappeared. I began to think they had all flown the coop looking for greener pastures, when I checked again. Two of the unused tubes are now sealed off with mud!
If we’re lucky, next year’s masons are growing in their little chambers right now. If we’re lucky, enough human efforts on enough levels will eventually improve conditions for the “canaries” and for all the rest of us. And, just maybe, it’s not too much to hope that someday we’ll even get out of the coal mine.
About the author: Ruth Ann Smalley, Ph.D., is an educator and a certified Eden Energy medicine practitioner with a practice in Albany. She’s also an Honest Weight member worker, and writes a monthly column for the coop’s newsletter.
