August in the garden with leafcutters!

It is August 1st in the MSU Pollination Demonstration Garden and the garden is in its prime. Above is a view of the lovely flower garden that was planted by Art Cameron and his crew in the gardens and to the left you can see the Bee Hotel. When I was out there this afternoon, I saw females of this bee buzzing in and out of the bamboo in the hotel:

Its Latin name is Megachile pugnata, one of the largest leafcutter bees found in Michigan. I couldn't get a picture of it myself because it zipped in and out so fast, so I have borrowed a picture from www.Bugguide.net. It is native to North America and it cuts leaf pieces and mixes them with plant pulp to partition and cap its nests.

Bats and Louie Schwartzberg: The hidden beauty of pollination | Video on TED.com

This weekend I was in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan at a wedding by an inland lake. I stayed in a cabin that also turned out to be inhabited by bats, which I will admit was rather disconcerting. Listening to them flying overhead and trying not to freak out, I reminded myself about how important bats are for keeping populations of mosquitoes and other dusk-flying insects in check, I was reminded also of their importance in pollinating night-blooming plants like cactus. You can see some really lovely footage of them doing so along with hummingbirds, butterflies, and bees in this clip of a documentary by Louie Schwartzberg on pollinators and pollen called  "Wings of Life".

P.S. If you want to skip past the introduction, start the clip at the 3:17 mark.

Do you have pictures of bees?

How do you know when you have a taken a picture of a bee? If you don't have a handy field guide like one of the following:

...the next best thing to do is to post it up on the Bugguide.net website. There are hundreds, if not thousands of pictures posted there and taxonomists (people who know how to identify insects) who regularly visit the site look at the posts and comment with identifications. If you think you know what you have, it is also a great place to make a visual confirmation. Here is a screen shot of a page that I used recently to help confirm the identity of a bee specimen that I had never seen before:

Of course it is often difficult to determine what species of bee you have unless you collect it and can examine it under a microscope, comparing it with an interactive key like the one found at www.Discoverlife.org

Here is one of my favorite bee pictures - it is a Megachile species of some kind, commonly called a leafcutter bee:

Happy Bee Spotting!

Installation of the Bee Hotel!

This is the fourth of four archived posts:

(Originally posted in April 2011) Recently we installed a "Bee Hotel" at the MSU Pollinator Demonstration Garden. This structure will provide homes for stem nesting, solitary bees and wasps, and will help increase the abundance of bees in our garden.

Bee hotels are simple to make if you have basic carpentry skills. Building bee nesting boxes is a combination of art and science. Use your imagination for the design, but please check this resource for some important guidelines. Use key words like ‘bee nesting box’ to search online for more design ideas.

Slide show of the MSU Pollinator Demonstration Garden

This is the third of four archived posts:

Emily Lawler from The Big Green interviewed me in August 2010 and composed this slide show about the new Pollinator Demonstration garden at MSU:

Winter post on the MSU Pollinator Garden

This is the second in a series of four posts that are being archived from another blog:

(Originally posted in January 2011) All is currently very quiet in the garden here in East Lansing, MI. Up until just last week the garden was covered by a blanket of snow, which during a brief warm spell melted away to reveal the dormant remains of the garden. Over the holidays someone asked me, "Where do all the wild bees go during the winter?" And by wild, they meant bees other than honey bees. "Well," I said, "that depends on the species."

Most wild bees complete their adult lives at the end of the growing season and it is their offspring, the next generation, who await the next season, lying in their nests, dormant, much like plant seeds awaiting the right environmental cues to emerge the following year. These are the solitary or semi-solitary bees. Solitary bees that typically emerge in early spring will be fully formed adults by the time winter is upon them the previous year. Summer-emerging solitary bees will overwinter in a pupal stage and are largely immobile. Bumble bees are not solitary, but form colonies, and therefore follow a different pattern. Bumble bee queens are produced and emerge at the end of the growing season, mate, fatten themselves up - just as bears do before hibernation - by visiting late summer and fall-blooming flowers, and then they find a sheltered place to overwinter while all the rest of their colony dies at the end of the season.

 

While we wait for winter to end and spring to begin, here are some photos I took back in August and September to get us excited about this coming season... 

 

August 2010 in the garden.

 

September 2010 in the garden.

 

A small halictid (a.k.a. sweat bee) on a flower in September 2010.

Retroactive! - the Vegetable and Pollinator Demonstration Garden at MSU

Hello! Welcome to the Gardening-for-Bees-in-Michigan blog! This blog is an archive of posts that originally appeared on the Gardening in Michigan website, but it is also where you will find new posts on topics related to gardening for bees including upcoming events around the state related to pollinator gardening and conservation.

For now, here is the first of several posts to be archived:

(Originally published in June 2010 with a few edits since then) My name is Julianna Tuell, and I am a pollination ecologist in the Entomology Department at Michigan State University. My interest in gardens predates my interest in bees, but very quickly I learned that bees are an essential part of the kinds of gardens that I prefer and especially, the food I like to eat. For instance, do you like blueberries or apples? How about squash or cucumbers? Sunflower seeds, almonds or even the coffee you drink every morning? We have bees to thank for these crops, and in fact, four out of every five flowering plants need the help of animals like birds, bats, and most importantly, bees in order to reproduce. Bees move pollen from male flower parts to female flower parts resulting in the development of seeds and fruit. 

Most of my research at MSU has focused on the native bees of Michigan, none of which make honey and most of which are solitary, that is, every female builds her own nest and collects enough pollen and nectar for the eggs she lays in that nest. Solitary bees are unlikely to sting because they do not expend energy to defend their nests from would-be invaders. In a future posts, I’ll describe some of the common native bees you’re likely to find in your garden.

For now, I would like to introduce the new Pollinator Demonstration Garden on the MSU campus in East Lansing, Michigan. The new garden is a work in progress and is part of the MSU Horticultural Demonstration Gardens open to the public. There are two main objectives in the creation of this garden: 1) to educate the public about pollinators, what they are and why they are important, and 2) to show what gardeners can do to incorporate bee-friendly elements into their gardens. 

When these pictures were taken in the spring last year, not much was blooming in the Pollinator Garden except for one of the native perennials. The garden has been installed in an area that remains wet late into the spring, delaying the planting of the vegetables, herbs, and flowering annuals. 

The bare patch of ground you will see out in front in the northwest corner of the garden very soon will be a colorful bee-friendly annual garden. On the west side of the garden we will be installing a six-foot tall wooden fence to cover up the mulch and compost piles. In front of the fence, we have plans to construct a “bee nesting wall” (look for a future post all about the “bee wall” and constructing your own bee nests.)

 

Sketch of garden design

                                                               
 
Sketch of "bee hotel"