Native Bees

In todays blog Cindi Martineau discusses the importance of native bees in the environment and explains to us common concerns about bee stings!

Think for a moment about what you ate the last few days.  Whether you had a bowl of strawberries for breakfast, a sweet potato for lunch, or corn-on-the-cob for dinner, it is very likely that some or all of the foods you ate depend on bees in some way. 

Polliators, including honeybees, native bees, and other insect pollinators are considered to be key-stone species.  This means that a large amount of other species depend on these pollinators for their survival, or in other words, are necessary for their reproduction.  Honeybee and native bee populations have declined dramatically over the last several years due to both pesticides and genetically engineered (GE) seeds.  These GE seeds are treated with neonictinoids which have a detrimental effect on bees.  Neonictinoids were recently banned in Europe, but it hasn’t happened here in North America.

This is bad news not only for the bees, but for other wildlife and ultimately humans.  Our species depends on bees for survival.  In China there has been such a loss of bees that farmers have to manually pollinate their crops.  There are scientists and farmers who are seeing that in the near future in North America.

The good news is that we can help.  We can do this by creating habitat that supports native pollinators.  This habitat needs to be rich in flowers, have no pesticide application and provide nest sites for the bees.  Fenner Nature Center has the potential to meet these requirements as a part of a project being done by one of Fenner’s Youth Leadership Program members.  I’ll detail more about that in a minute, because I want to address a common concern about bees.

Many people are wary of inviting bees into their yard or into an area where people gather.  People don’t like the threat of bee stings and additionally, some people are allergic to stings.  This is a legitimate concern.  However, upon learning more about both honeybees and native bees, my mind has been put at rest on the matter.

First, bees are gentle creatures that only sting if they are in immediate threat of being killed themselves or in defense of their nests.  Second, many native bees are solitary, rather than social like honeybees.  Being solitary creatures, they don’t have the energy to defend their nests because they have to focus on reproduction.  In addition, the female can’t risk being killed because that would preclude reproduction.  Finally, many of the native bees either don’t have stingers, or don’t have stingers that can penetrate human skin.

In the upcoming months, Elijah Martineau, a member of the Youth Leadership Program at Fenner is going to be working on the bird feeding area on the south side of the building.  One of his goals is to plant native flowering plants, which will be attractive to both birds and to insects.  While we were researching books to get ideas for his project we came upon information about providing houses for solitary mason bees.  Mason bees will use holes drilled into blocks of wood to make their nests and lay their eggs.  It is best if these wood blocks, usually mounted on posts, are located near a building so that the bees can navigate back to the nest after they have been out foraging for pollen.  It’s also good to have them in a southern garden so that the nests get warm enough for the larvae to develop.  Other native bees, Miner bees, will use dig into bare ground to make their nests.  Elijah is planning to include bee houses into his bird feeding area project to help conserve native bees!