| Christine | Farmer |

I wrote earlier in the year about miner bees mating in the bamboo, and wondered whether they would move in to the garden to dig their nests. At the end of that previous post you may have seen that yes, they began to colonise some of the ground where I had seen a ‘mysterious hole’! There were I think four types of miner bees around the bamboo in March, however just one type nested, below the Woodruff, in soil that is quite sandy.

Miner bees are solitary bees, meaning that they do not live in hives or communities, and each female builds and provisions her own individual nest. However, these like many other solitary bees, do like to build their nests in close proximity, as can be seen under the woodruff in the pictures below (click on thumbnails for a closer look):

The miner bee nest site:

Above left: Three nest entrances, near to the plants so that other than in heavy rain, they are sheltered from droplets. Above centre left: A closer view of some of the nest entrances. These tunnels, which are about the width of a pencil, are dug down into the soil several inches, and many side-chambers are excavated, into which the female lays her eggs, sealing them with food she has provided for the development of the young bee. Above centre right: During particuarly wet weather the bees seem to seal off the nests near the surface with a little chewed material. On drier days they will pull over a leaf or a small piece of wood or clump of earth to cover the entrance. Above right: this nest is alone at the side of the path, but has the same kind of bee nesting in it. You can quite clearly see the little mound of excavated material, which has a characteristic texture.

Leaving the nest and foraging:

Above left: It took several days for the bees to get used to me poking my lens near their nests. At first they would stay in the entrance to the nest if they spotted me. A combination of their getting used to the camera, and my learning to keep down nearer the earth so that they didn’t see me until they were half out of the nest allowed me to finally get some shots of the bees in the entrance ways. To the right of this bee is a large clump of earth which she rolls over the entrance at night or in poorer weather, and sometimes when she leaves the nest. Above centre left: A bee leaves the nest. They do move quite quickly, and in order to get a shot of them leaving one has about a second. They spend another fifteen minutes or so away from the nest gathering pollen, and then return and enter the nest even more quickly (see below). Then you have about five minutes to wait while the bee unloads her pollen before she will again come to the surface and you have another opportunity to take a photograph. If you are able to spend enough time by the nests you will be able to time one and another bee’s coming and going so that you can get several opportunities for photographs in half an hour. However, it does require an awful lot of patience! Above right: Two shots of a bee gathering pollen. I don’t know which flowers the bees were using at first, as they were not gathering anything from my garden; even though the woodruff was close by, they did not show an interest in it. I did catch this one bee on a yellow poppy, but this is the only time for weeks when I saw them feeding in my garden.

Returning to the nest:

Above left: Some of the nest entrances are down in the earth right inside the plants themselves, and this means that the bee has to make several passes over the woodruff in order to locate the nest. As you can see in these shots the bee has collected pollen all over her legs, and this is how they appear on their return. In the first shot she is flying back and forth trying to locate the nest, and in the second picture she has found the way, and is climbing down the plants towards the nest entrance. Bees leaving nests underneath the plants also make a few zig-zagging passes over the plants just before they leave, which would seem to allow them to remember where the nests are in the tangle of foliage. Above right: a bee lands in open ground and luckily for me she had left a lump of earth over her nest, allowing me less than a second to take a shot before she disappears inside! More usually they are quicker than this, and I have plenty of blurred photographs as I try to follow the bee and focus quickly.

Most of these shots were taken with my old compact camera, some with my new Canon compact camera. In later posts I’ll show you some of the images I’m getting with my DSLR and new macro lens.

More photographs of bees as well as illustrations and drawings can be found on the
| Bee Pages |

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A little update following on from Monday’s post about the bee activity in the garden.

As the weather has continued mostly dry and warm, and getting drier and warmer, there has been more bee activity in the bamboo, with a number of solitary bees flying and mating. I have also been able to identify the types of bee, with some careful study, and a little helpful confirmation from Damian at Help Save Bees.

Some of the solitary bees currenty active in the garden:

Above: The two pictures on the left are of a female Tawny mining bee, and I think this is the same female who was here at the weekend. Haven’t seen a male so far. The more common of the solitary bees at the moment here is shown in the two pictures on the right, which I captured this morning, resting on one of the roses. It is the Early mining bee.

This bee below is probably another mining bee, Andrena carantonica, which likes to nest under paths and stones, according to this useful website: Garden Safari.

Update: I think it is more likely to be Andrena cineraria, or Ashy mining bee, see this: Information sheet. Some sites mention its bluish tinge, which certainly fits with what I saw. Unfortunately I haven’t seen this bee again.

I think all the solitary bees at the moment are types of mining bee, which make their nests underground. This is a bee I have not seen before in my garden, however this could simply be because I haven’t paid attention! However, I did quite a bit of clearing of some areas a few weekends ago, ready to plant some bee-friendly plants, and the resulting bare patches of earth may have attracted these bees. I can’t imagine I would have missed the tawny mining bee before, as she’s so very brightly coloured. I’m hoping that at least some of them nest in my garden this year. The soil is quite sandy, which I have read that they prefer.

And here below are the Early mining bees mating, captured yesterday in quite windy conditions, so I was very lucky I happened not only to spot this pair, but that the leaves stopped thrashing around long enough to get them more or less in focus:

Above:
1. Female resting on leaf, seems to be depositing pollen from her feet to the leaf.
2. Pollen can be seen on the leaf, meanwhile the male is visible, hovering above.
3. The male, smaller and more slender than the female, lands on the leaf.
4. Male and female together.

Below:
5-7. Mating takes place (in 6, the male is balancing on his wing tips).
8. The scene from slightly further out.

And just a last couple of photos for today, below. I decided to see if I could see any nesting activity for the mining bees, and came across this hole in the soil (possibly one of my least exciting photos!), which is approximately the right size for a mining bee (the diameter of a pencil). However, I didn’t see any bee activity around it, and it could just be, well, a hole of no particular importance! While I was waiting for a bee to turn up, I spotted this wasp collecting nesting material from an old piece of wood.

Since there is such a lot of bee activity this year in the garden I’ve decided to invest in a proper macro lens for my SLR. All these pictures so far have been taken with my compact camera with it’s ‘macro’ setting on. So, hopefully I’ll be getting some better quality shots on here soon.

Update 8th April: This Hairy footed flower bee, below, another solitary bee, on the white dead nettle this afternoon. This bee looks like a black bumblebee, but it darts around very quickly rather than ‘bumbling’. It could see me with the camera and was hiding quite a bit, but managed to get some rather blurred pics. I’ll try to capture it again with the new lens.

Update 12th April: Below: This male Hairy footed flower bee was in the garden today. They move very quickly, and of all the bees I have seen they are the most interested in me, often ‘buzzing’ the camera or my head while I’m trying to take a photo! This one below, was enjoying a quiet moment on an old plastic pot. Below right: you can see his cheeky-looking face, and enormous eyes.

Update 20th April: Below: I’m still not certain whether the hole in the ground had any significance, but since then I have discovered what are definitely the nests of mining bees. A couple are alongside the path (below left), while the majority are in the soil at the edge of some woodruff. I noticed one entrance two days ago, then another couple appeared the next day, and today there are about seven. I think there are at least three bees at work, but there could be more. Unfortunately they seem very sensitive to my crashing around, however quiet I try to be, and so far all I have are photographs of the bees in the entrance to the nests: below centre and right.

I will keep photographing the bees, since I want plenty of material for the bee drawings I’m working on.

All updates to the bee activity will now go in a future blog post, and extra photographs will be on my Bee Photography page.

Also – see the Bee Pages on the right hand menu!

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I thought I’d update with some news about the bees – both those in the garden, and on my drawing table. However, as this post became quite long in the writing, I have decided to put the new drawings into a separate blog post (coming soon).

Improving the solitary bee houses:

Late last month I decided to improve the site of the solitary bee nests, both enlarging the number and type of nest available, and moving them from the decking, as I think that the vibrations caused by people walking about discouraged the bees last year. Above left I’m drilling holes in the untreated wood, then tidying up with sandpaper. Finally above right is the new site of the nests, sheltered under the roof of an old hedgehog house, and resting on some bricks for stability. Read more about making solitary bee houses in these new sections on the Solitary Bee Houses and Leafcutter Bees.

A tired bumblebee:

Temperatures have been increasing over the past weeks, and bee activity in general increasing with bumblebees and honeybees flying in and out of the garden. I have never been able to get a bumblebee to nest in my garden, so I have to make do with their passing visits. Last week I rescued a buff tailed bumblebee which I found in the house, upside down and appearing quite dead. However, her legs waved weakly when I touched her, and so I righted the bee in a dish and supplied her with sugar water. Above left you see the bee, and the tongue clearly against the glass and white paper of the dish. Centre: the bee rests on some fencing material before finally flying off about twenty minutes after I found her in the house. The bee above right in the fritillary was photographed a few days later – not the same bee, but quite engrossed in what she’s doing!

Some solitary bee activity:

This past Saturday there was a very warm sunny morning and many types of bees could be seen flying above the solitary bee houses, resting occasionally on the bamboo plants, where I managed to photograph a few! It was not an easy task, given that it was quite breezy and the bees were darting around very quickly in between brief rests on the leaves. But even when the bees settled it was difficult to focus on the small bees on the waving bamboo, as you can imagine. A photograph below shows the clump of bamboo which is above the nests – the bees were darting in and out of it most of the day. Click on the thumbnails for more detail.

These are not the Leafcutter bees, who will not make an appearance until early June.

The bee above left was a beautiful red colour, and the centre left shot shows the mouth of this bee, which seems built for rolling mud balls, and so I think this is a red mason bee (update – this is a tawny mining bee, identified from photographs here). Centre right a bluish bee – do you have any idea what it is? I saw both these bees (or perhaps more than one?) a few times during the afternoon. Most common was the bee above right, which was present most of the afternoon, and there seemed to be several of them. I am still finding it quite difficult to identify the various types of bees, despite referring to guides and identification charts and photographs.  There are so many variations of colour and shape, and every species seems to look different from photograph to photograph! I’m still very much learning how to tell one bee from another, so if you can identify any of these bees I’d love you to get in touch – email link is below, or there is a tab above for making comments – thanks in advance!

Other bees, flies and wasps were also enjoying the sunshine. Including this honey bee, below centre, which can be identified by the pollen sacks, and this below right, which I think is a Narcissus fly, doing a very good impression of a bumblebee.

Fabre’s Mason Bees:

Finally, for now, a little note about “The Mason Bees“, by Jean-Henri Fabre, which I spent some time reading last week. It’s a fascinating and engaging read, full of the observations and thoughts of this pioneering entomologist. It really is a series of essays which describe Fabre’s first enounter with the bees while he was a schoolteacher, and a number of his experiments and hypotheses. The entire text can be read in several places online, including here at Project Gutenberg.

An update to this page can be found here: About the bees II.

A post about the bee drawings coming soon!

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Why attract leaf-cutter bees?

Leaf-cutter bees are incredible creatures to encourage into your garden or allotment – great to observe and look after, and they are wonderful pollinators. This kind of bee is a ‘solitary bee‘ which does not form a hive or make honey, but works alone, although they will nest side-by-side and not fight or compete. They are in fact perfect bees for the garden, and safe around children as they do not store honey and so have nothing to ‘defend’ from attack. They are quite happy to let you go right up to the nest to see what they’re doing, as you can see from these shots of a bee hatching in my garden this week (click for a closer view):

What do the bees do in the tubes..?

The tubes are just the right size to allow the bees to easily construct their nest cells, which they make from circles of leaves. The bees fly out into your garden, cut perfect circles from your rose bush leaves (see also photo below, third from left), and fly back to the nest. You can follow them around your garden as they do this! Once back at the nest, the bee will curl up the circle of leaf, and take it into the tube with her. A bee will need many leaf circles to make each cell, since she lines the sides of the tube as well as sealing both ends of each cell with many layers of leaves. Before she seals each cell, she lays one egg, and puts food of pollen ‘bee bread’ to enable the hatched larvae to eat and grow during the time the cell is sealed. All of these activities can be observed by watching the tubes during the summer. Also fun to watch are the females bees clearing out old tubes at the beginning of the season; kicking out old leaf-debris in previously-used tubes, or removing the paper inserts from newer tubes (see photo below, second from left). These bees prefer to re-use an old tube rather than re-line a completely new one with leaves, and will ignore new tubes if there are any empty, weather-beaten tubes to re-colonise!

The life-cycle of leaf-cutter bees, in brief: The young bees emerge from their nests in June, and mate. After this the males die, and the females begin the work of nesting and laying eggs. Once sealed into the cells the eggs hatch, and the larvae feed on the ‘bee bread’, grow, pupate and develop into the bees which then hatch almost a year after they were laid as eggs. These newly-hatched bees mate, lay their eggs, and die before the summer is over, never seeing their off-spring.

How can I start encouraging solitary bees into my garden?

Where to buy the nests: The Oxford Bee Company who originally sold the cylinders and tubes is no longer trading, but cylinders and tubes can be purchased from various places online, for example WigglyWigglers and CJ Wildbird Foods. Or search online for ‘Oxford Bee Company’ for other suppliers. You can also make nests yourself out of old garden canes and similar stems, or by drilling holes in a block of wood, and these are successful. But I have found that the bees can be a little fussy about the diameter of hole they prefer, and many of the tubes may go unused if they are too big or too small – however these may be used by other bees or insects. I have had mason bees (which make their cells out of mud) nesting alongside the leaf-cutters in my nests.

Siting: The first year I tried the cylinders I attached them to a sunny wooden fence, but while there was some interest from bees that summer, none of them nested. I have since found that the bees do not particularly like the tubes when they are new, and prefer them to be somewhat weathered. However, I have also heard that the vibrations caused by the fence moving in the wind may also have discouraged them from settling. So I have followed advice to place the cylinders in a stable and sunny spot, a few feet from the ground, and preferably somewhere the tubes won’t get wet.

Plants to grow: There is a very useful site here which lists the kinds of plants that bees love. Obviously, leaf-cutters also like roses from which to harvest nest material, but they will use other similar plants and of course fly around the neighbourhood in order to locate suitable leaves! And equally obviously don’t use chemical sprays in the garden, as these are poisonous to bees; consider gardening Organically with wildlife controls, barriers, etc., it really is the only way if you want to encourage any kind of wildlife.

Over winter: Once the summer is over and the tubes are all sealed, you will need to put the cylinders somewhere dry and cool for the bees to over-winter. A garden shed seems ideal, but don’t forget to take them out again next Spring! Once Spring comes, re-position your cylinders where they were the previous year, and wait for the new bees to hatch. My leaf-cutters begin to hatch in the first weeks of June, towards Midsummer.

Lastly: Don’t be discouraged if no bees nest in the first year. It may well take a little while for them to find the nests and settle in. Also, you will find that if you stop spraying chemicals in your garden, and plant more of the bee-friendly plants, you will see a definite increase in bees and other interesting wildlife in your garden anyway!

Also, check out these articles on solitary bees, the best plants to grow for bees, and the Co-Op site on saving bees.

Follow this link to see all posts on leaf-cutter bees.

 | Solitary Bee Pages |

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Above: Stages of work on the studio drawing – the final piece can be seen below.

When I was young I always wanted a little place at the bottom of the garden to which I could retreat and take my books, notepaper and pens, and found items such as the stones, shells, feathers and other objects that still fascinate me.  Now I have managed to create that retreat as somewhere to work, to imagine, and to get my ideas out on paper in words and images.

My new work concentrates on the need we have to create and retreat to our own spaces, whether they be dolls’ houses, childhood dens under a hedge, or the garden shed. I think it’s an impulse entirely natural to us; something like animals creating their own homes in trees and hedgerows, and furnishing them with feathers, moss, leaves and sometimes more decorative items. I suppose this is one reason I am interested in birds’ nests, bees creating their little cells and storing pollen, and even in the tunnels of the ants’ nest under a stone.

Above: Some of my garden wildlife – click for larger images.

Six months ago, I set my mind on a completely new career in Art. I had been drawing again after a hiatus of two decades, re-visiting my early fascination with extremely detailed pen and ink work, and I came to realise that this was something I’d love to do on a full-time basis: but where? Up until then I’d been using the dining table for drawing, and storing my paper and drawings in portfolios behind the sofa. I knew that if I wanted to approach this professionally I’d need to find space for a full-sized drawing table and map chest at minimum. And preferably more space to allow for cutting, storage of art materials and a computer and printer. I needed a place for thinking and doing; somewhere which would be entirely devoted to all phases of the creative process from staring out of the window, onwards.

I’d already been using the tiny summerhouse as a place to sketch during the summer, but being small and either damp from the rain or baking in the sunshine (and often full of tomato plants) it was no place for paper! I began thinking of a much larger garden shed, did some searches online, and discovered a whole new world of ‘garden offices’ , gyms and saunas and all sorts of structures that could be erected in just a few days. I decided to turn the available space at the end of the garden over to a brand new purpose-built studio; a place which would be a world away from drawing on the dining room table when household activities permitted.

Above: Working on the dining room table, and the old summerhouse.

In a matter of weeks we’d had a site visit from one of the building companies, and discussed with them exactly what size building could be squeezed into the tiny space available, and what features I could have. Having everything to hand, in a beautifully sunlit, warm, dry atmosphere was the vision, and  I chose a higher-than standard ceiling (though it still seems only ‘adequate’ to me – I can’t bear low ceilings!), full windows along the south-facing entrance, and two more on the eastern side. In less than a month the structure was made in their factory, and then erected here on site in just under three days. By Christmas I had my studio, with electricity, heating, Internet access and plenty of space.

Click here to see the before and after photographs of the building process.

The next step was to furnish it with a drawing table and other necessary furniture. I bought and re-covered the drawing table, a complete bargain on Ebay, and also the map chest which is from around the 1950s and beautifully constructed. Then it was time to start deciding on a computer on which to write my all-important artist’s web-site; the process of which will be the subject of a future blog post.

Above: The finished studio.

After working here now for a few months I can say that the decision to have the studio built was probably one of the best I’ve ever made, as it really is no exaggeration to say it has changed my life completely. I absolutely love the peace and quiet of the setting, which is right in the heart of the garden with all its life and action: something not even visible from the house because of the layout of the terraced property. Now every day I’m at work is enlivened with animal and bird activity, from the inquisitive squirrel staring in through the window to the strange scrabbling of the pigeons on the roof. Even rainy days become interesting with frogs flinging themselves from the pond in search of lunch! Coffee breaks can be taken on the decking overlooking the pond or staring at passing clouds, and the home commute is blissful.

Living in the Midlands, I’m about as far as you can get from the sea in Britain, and yet my garden has something of the feel of the coast because of my love and collection of shells and pebbles. Dad loved to sail, and I have remnants of his little boat all around the garden; the mast and boom provide climbing frames for hops and vines, and this last picture of my ‘commute home’ (above) shows part of his small anchor. Everywhere I look there are things to fascinate and remind me of why I do what I do. All these objects, and the setting, are of vital importance to the creation of my work, which is all about memory, remains and place.

The Studio, Stourbridge: Graphite on paper, 2009.

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