The Need for Bees

                Say goodbye to bees, and menu planning becomes much easier.  Without bees, you would lose apples, almonds, blueberries, cherries, avocados, onions, cucumbers, pumpkins, citrus fruit, melons, beets, broccoli, cauliflower and much more from your diet.  Bees are the primary pollinators of many of the foods we eat. 

                Honey bees play an important role in crop pollination.  However, Colony Collapse Disorder has wiped out 40 percent of honey bee colonies in recent years.  At the same time, growers are beginning to recognize the important role of mason bees in pollination.  Mason bees differ from honey bees in several ways. 

                                                                         Honey Bees

 

                Honey bees were introduced to America by early Europeans.  They are social bees, with thousands living in a single hive, which also makes them more susceptible to disease and predation.

                Honey bees are fascinating insects.  A hive consists of a queen, drones and workers.  The workers are female bees.  They clean the hive, forage for food and provide guard duty. They feed the larvae pollen and royal jelly, a substance they produce from a gland in their heads.  Bees make honey from nectar and store it for use when food supplies are scarce.  Drones are male bees.  Their only job is to mate with the queen.  Worker bees even feed the drone bees. Workers can sting but drones cannot.

                There is a single queen bee for each hive.  As the hive’s only fertile female, the queen’s primary job is to lay eggs.  A queen is created by worker bees that feed a chosen larva a steady diet consisting exclusively of royal jelly and no pollen. This larva grows into a queen.  As an adult, the queen bee mates with drone bees.  The queen reserves sperm in a special sac and as she lays eggs, up to 2,000 in a day, she determines which eggs she will fertilize.  Unfertilized eggs produce male drones and fertilized eggs produce female worker bees. 

                                                                           Mason Bees

 

                Mason bees, also called orchard bees, are smaller than honey bees. Native to America, these bees are solitary rather than social.  Unlike honey bees, all female mason bees are fertile and can lay eggs.  Mason bees cannot excavate wood so they are not a threat to homeowners.  They look for tube-like holes made by other insects or woodpeckers, or use hollow twigs for nesting.  The female gathers pollen and nectar to create a food supply to fill a cell before she inserts an egg and then seals the cell shut with mud.  Next she makes another cell next to the previous one until the tube is filled.  Eggs in the back of the tube become female mason bees while eggs near the front become males.    

                When an egg hatches, the larva feeds on the supply of food in the cell, then spins a cocoon and pupates. When the adult is finally formed, it will stay dormant and wait for warm spring weather before emerging from the cell.

                There are many kinds of mason bees and all of them benefit the garden.  Very effective as pollinators, two or three females can pollinate an entire apple tree! Females remain near the nest, and only forage within a 100 yard range.  Only the female has a stinger but mason bees are considered very gentle and only sting if physically provoked.