Single, striped, females

This week I have acquired my first solitary bee hive. It is a PVC tube that hangs from my window security grating and houses a group of 10 smaller tube “apartments”.  If you’re in the NY area come get a hive of your own at Habana Outpost’s Earth Day Celebration this Saturday!  Brought to you by NYC Beekeeping, $25 includes the hive, bees & 2 relevant classes. These hives are easy to maintain, compact & solitary bees are super efficient pollinators. 1 small hive is enough bee power to pollinate a good sized garden! So come on out and support the program!

You can see from this picture there is one tube that is plugged with mud. This houses the larvae that will eventually populate the other compartments. If I’m lucky I may just get a rogue leaf cutter bee  (who is quite different from the leafcutter ant profiled in this article) or a resin bee who lines her nest with tree sap.

The vast majority of the world’s 20,000 bee species are solitary creatures. Solitary bees are the unsung heroes of the order Hymenoptera. Their nest building, elaborate mating rituals and dynamic pollination more than make up for what they lack with regards to honey production.

Still, you’ll have to fill your Hive Honey Set elsewhere.

Speaking of design; there is one little lady who embraces aesthetics as few other insects can.  For her, no drab mud or sap walls will do.

Osmia Avosetta lines her nest by sandwiching two layers of petals together with mud. She then fills the nest with pollen mixed with nectar and caps everything off with a mud plug.
Jerome Rozen, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History discovered the unique nest-building habits while in the field in turkey. Coincidentally another team that was studying the bees in Iran made the exact same discovery on the same day, they struck a compromise by co-publishing their findings.

“They’ve found a way of protecting this immature stage by creating an environment with fairly high humidity,” Rozen said. “The humidity is high because the chamber is constructed with two layers of petals with mud in between, which means the food will not dry out while the larvae feeds. Meanwhile the outside becomes very hard like a nut. This makes it very comfortable and very safe because nothing’s going to come down and crush them. Anything that wants to eat them from above is going to have a hard time.”

As these bees only hail from semi arid climes, I’m going to have to content myself with mason bees and dreams of curling up in a petal cocoon of my very own.