Daylight robbery

I have seen bumblebees robbing nectar from comfrey flowers before but as far as I remember I haven't seen this behaviour from solitary bees.  Nectar robbing is when a bee takes nectar from the flower through a hole bitten in the side rather than entering normally and offering pollination, especially a bee with a tongue too short to reach the nectary.  I suspect the holes were made by bumblebees and the others were just taking advantage.  This is a Buff-tailed Bumblebee

and an Early Bumblebee.

A Common Carder Bee was doing it properly.

This was earlier in the week on the comfrey in the corner of the kitchen garden.  The most numerous bees were male red mason bees.

They were also patrolling the flowers in the vain hope of finding a new female.  In reality all the females are busy provisioning their nests and the males don't have long to live but that didn't stop them challenging and knocking each other off the flowers.

Female red masons were also robbing, obviously getting just nectar here and collecting their pollen elsewhere.

The most surprising to me was a nomad bee, a cuckoo that lays its eggs in solitary bees nests (usually mining bees).

It all goes to show that sometimes crime does pay.  You can read more about the biology of nectar robbing here.

News from the bee house

Fortunately the solitary bee season coincided with warm sunny weather in late spring and early summer.  Now it is wet and gloomy the season is almost over but it has been fascinating to watch and mostly very successful for the bees.  The most numerous residents of the bee houses are always red mason bees.  This is a female in the observation wing having a brief rest before setting off to forage again.

In most previous years I have had between half a dozen and a dozen completed red mason bee nests.  This year, with my new bee house, I have about 80!  Here are 34 of them.

In the next photo the rear cell is complete with a food store of pollen and nectar and an egg. Work has started on the front one contains a bit of pollen and a pool of regurgitated nectar.

A few days later it looks like this.

Here is another bee coming back with a load of pollen.

The bees always reverse in to unload pollen.

Here are a couple of bees plugging the entrances to their nests.

There was one blue mason bee nest from last year with nine cells.  The front six were males. This is one of them.

Once they had chewed their way out of their cocoons five of them sat in the nest for another 24 hours before deciding to brave the outside world.

The females emerged a few days later and one of them moved into my new bee house.

She uses chewed leaves rather than mud to the build the cells.

Here she is in the precess of laying an egg.

Another bee in the new house was a common yellow face bee (Hylaeus communis) but she completed only three cells.  She made several more cellophane walls along the hole before sealing it so three was all she planned.  The nectar pollen mix she brought in was almost black.

The observation part of my original bee house is still in use and this year, for the first time, it was host to a leafcutter bee.  I was very pleased until I realised that she was lining the cells first before working on them so I couldn't see what was going on!  The nest was in an old red mason nest, hence the mud lining.

The bee house has a wire mesh covering as protection against woodpeckers.  Rather than risk dropping the leaf if she flew through the mesh, this bee flew in the bottom each time and then flew vertically upwards to reach the nest.

I was struck by the precision in the final work to seal the nest.

Another resident of the "bee" house was a mason wasp, a solitary wasp that uses mud in the same way as the red mason bee does.  It used a smaller hole and filled the cells with caterpillars rather than pollen.  Here it is clearing out sawdust before starting to build cells, with a red mason bee in the background.

There were other solitary wasps which were tiny.  They made their own holes in the wood, about 1mm in diameter, and stocked them with aphids.  Louise Hislop, our local bee & wasp expert, says they are Passaloecus sp. females.

Perhaps the most exciting bees I saw in the bee house were fork-tailed flower bees.  They nest in rotten wood so I made one panel out of dried rotten wood, specifically in the hope that they would move in.  I made three small starter holes and was surprised and delighted to see that for several days two of them were excavated by female fork-tailed flower bees.  But although I often saw the bees pushing their way out through clouds of sawdust I never saw them going in with pollen.  I wonder if they didn't fancy the holes after all after all that digging.  With luck they did continue when I wasn't looking.  I'll be able to remove the panel later in the year to take a look.

I am already making plans for next year, to make sure there will be room for perhaps an even larger population of bees.

Wool carder bee

I have only once seen this bee before, six years ago in London.  It is the wool carder bee (Anthidium manicatum), widespread in the south of the UK but rare this far north.  These bees were in Kiftsgate Court Gardens in north Gloucestershire last week.  The first I noticed was a male, patrolling his territory around some lambs' ears plants (Stachys).  Every few minutes he paused to refuel.

At one stage he took a short rest on my boot.

Wool carder bees are unusual in many respects.  The male is larger than the female and defends a territory against other males and against most other insects, allowing in only females of his species.  Most solitary bee females mate only once but these bees have to put up with frequent mating as the price of access to the flowers and the leaves on the Stachys.

The female bees bite off the hairs from the leaves and roll them into balls to carry back to the nest where they are used to line the cells, behaviour I have yet to see.  These females were mainly collecting nectar.

Although Anthidium manicatum is rare this far north there have been a few records along the Tyne valley in the last couple of years, including in my friend Liz's garden.  Liz spotted a male bee last Saturday and when I called in on Sunday he was resting in a hole in her bee house.  I managed to get this picture of his tail, showing the three spikes he uses as weapons to defend his territory.

I hope there will be more sightings of our northern wool carder bees to report soon.

My new bee house

I have just finished making the new, improved, deluxe, mark IV bee house (2023 model).  The central section is fairly conventional but also contains a solid piece of rotten wood, in the hope of attracting fork-tailed flower bees.  The side doors are recycled from my old kitchen units.  They extend in front of the rest of the house so I can put on a wire mesh to protect against woodpeckers and blue tits.

The side panels are covered by perspex so I shall be able to see the occupants.  Three are made out of dead sycamore and the fourth out of rotten dead sycamore.  It was interesting machining the wood but I hope it will have been worth it.  I have put in a mixture of 3, 4, 6 and 8mm holes to attract a variety of species.

The panel with rotten dead wood has just three short starter holes because fork-tailed flower bees apparently like to excavate their own holes.  If one does come in I hope it will stay next to the perspex so I can see what it is up to.

I have transferred canes and tubes etc, some of which contain bees, from the mark I bee house which is now retired.  (The mark II and the mark III are still in use.)

Since taking the above photos I have modified the top section with another log to make it easier for bees using that to get their bearings and I have fitted a clip-on wire cover to protect against blue tits and woodpeckers.  The bees can easily fly through the mesh and I can remove it for photos.

So it's all set to go.  I'll report back later in the spring or summer on which bees have moved into this luxury accommodation.