Leafcutter Bees & Wildlife Gardening Notes

 

28 July Facebook

Leafcutter Bees & Wildlife Gardening Notes

Stop Press! Where are the Leafcutter Bees? Many bee doors still closed from the end of last June


( top left), one open (top right)... others disturbed, but are these dishevelled barriers from creatures within leaving or another animal trying to gain illicit entry?

Elsewhere all is well – bumbles delve deep for nectar of Evening Primrose


 whilst Rose Campion tempts the butterflies and bright Pot Marigolds

 are feeding us and a myriad of bees and other insects. July has come in, but all is still quiet in the bee hotels...

The Red Masons have set up for next year’s generation quietly hidden behind tight mud and pollen doors. I am getting concerned. 1 -The Leafcutters are nowhere to be seen. Has a spider or other predator taken all?

These solitary bees are very visible in the garden as they cut tiny leaf circles


 – the bee dropped these) to make their constructions – don’t worry, they do no harm to the roses (a frequent choice). They fly back to their chosen hole tightly holding the leaf circle with their feet and carrying it efficiently beneath their body, facing fore and aft – an extraordinary sight! Then there is the job of arduously pushing, pulling, twisting and shoving leaf bits into openings and squeezing down into the tube




. They tend to choose a larger diameter tube than Red Masons 

 They nibble and chew round the edge of each circle so they are the right size to make thimble-shaped structures inside the ‘nest tube’ for each egg and its food stores. Then they construct secure partitions between these inner nurseries, and finally the final secure outer door (1, 8). But there are no such structures in this hotel this year... so far...

THEN... when sorting out a pile of ‘leaky hose’ moistening the compost heap we notice something familiar in a T-piece –


 a green door, freshly nibbled to fit! And not content with that, the straight lengths of the hose have also been purloined for leafy constructions! No leafcutter worries and no more detective work needed! ... And no usable ‘leaky hose’! (Our wildlife residents seem to have a thing about potential homes in our hoses –



our robin purloined stored hoses in 2022. 11 – Look carefully and see an eye and a white wide young beak!)


Mid-July and the bees are back on the orthodox track


– using holes provided in our bee hotels, squeezing into Mason Bee sized tubes. Meanwhile, up in the compost heap it’s a bit dry!

 At last she’s finished it after some sun two days later, 21 July.


Nature Chain Diary Dates for your calendar:


Talk by Bat Expert, Ellie Hack

(who nurtured the exhausted young Bechstein’s Bat back to health -see post last October)


St Nicholas Church Winsley, 7.30 pm

Tuesday 30th September.



2. Talk by Alison Green on Fungi (now recognised as vital to 80-90% of plants for growth, stress tolerance and disease resistance.)


St Nicholas Church Winsley, 7.30 pm

Tuesday 14th October

---------------------------------------------------------------------------


3. Please avoid seasonal ‘tidy up’ of straggling, drying up wall plants e.g. Ivy-leaved Toadflax (if seeding -collect !) or ferns or other wild plants you may have in your garden. These and their progeny could be at the core in an exciting plan for a future project... and every plant will count! Watch this space...!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Which Bird Feeder? and Swans

Image
Wildlife Garden Tips Which Bird Feeder? and Swans As winter gets colder (and wetter) bird food ‘sharers’ and the ‘wide boys’ get hungrier Attempts to give the little birds a share leads to feeder defences becoming an escalating battle of wits, expense and ingenuity! As a special Christmas gift, I have just indulged myself with two new Red Barn feeders - one for seed and one for fat balls  I felt I deserved it, having for some years improvised with an old broken feeder for balls ... replaced wire access, hung it upside down in order to support balls, clad it in wire netting for extra protection, and battled with bits of bent wire to refill it! The solid base designs (5) will catch dropped food and the sturdily constructed cage simply lifts off for refilling and cleaning. It is quite a lot cheaper than the Squirrel buster design which works on a sliding collar principle – creatures over a certain weight close the access (one can adjust the critical weight). Above shows a Red Barn nut...
Read more

Roses and Wildlife Gardening

Image
  30 June 2025  Roses and Wildlife Gardening Summer, roses, warm scented days ‘... are such stuff as dreams are made on...’ or gardener’s dreams certainly! Carefully placed in grand designs, climbers and ramblers sprawling over cottage gardens, allotment flowers for cutting – roses are the all-time favourites.  Vibrant bright red,  (  ‘Parkdirektor Riggers’),  delicate apple-scented pink  (  ‘Albertine’), profuse bunches of bright pink ( 3 ‘ Dorothy Perkins’) – all gardener’s favourites standing the test of time from 1957, 1921 and early 1900’s. Wildlife Gardening Tips : But are they any good for a wildlife garden? Photo says ‘definitely yes’ – quote White-tailed Bumble Bee! Families of Bluetits would also vote ‘yes’. Frequently I see them working their way steadily along this ‘Dorothy Perkins’ stem and other roses, picking tiny creatures from amongst the leaves... presumably greenfly, as a visiting professional gardener marvelled at the fa...
Read more

RiverFestival

Image
New life emerges > RiverFes The season of new life emerging and in the making! Fresh female Red Mason Bees have emerged from my bee hotels, mated and laid eggs provisioning them with food for next year’s newborns, closing off each ‘nursery’ with a neat door of pollen and mud In a  thicket by the river there are more eggs in waiting - five speckled blue eggs lie cradled in a carefully structured masterpiece of woven stems and dead strands Elsewhere, more eggs have hatched - the still of the water is rippled by a passing family of Canada Geese Between egg and adult, many types of insects pass through several stages: here  a Bush Cricket in miniature clambers laboriously over Veggiemesh. It is extremely miniature... Bush Crickets change form and shed hard outer skins 5-6 times before becoming adults. In another part of the garden, underneath a Hop leaf  an unknown inert creature, somewhere between caterpillar and dormant pupa, is hidden. It will soon emerge with win...
Read more