First bee of the season

[randy_byers]

The raspberries have just started to blossom, and I saw my first bee of the year. I still don't know what kind they are. This one was pretty much as I remembered the bees that have shown up the past couple of years since the local wild honey bees apparently died off. It was a little bit bigger than a honey bee, quite hairy, with bands or areas of black and a pale, buttery yellow. It may be a mason bee, but it's not the Orchard Mason Bee, which seems to be all black with a metallic green or blue sheen, from the pictures I've seen. Is this some kind of bumblebee instead? I guess I did see a bumblebee earlier this year -- not in my garden -- that was what I think of as the traditional kind, with lots of black and a few bands of bright yellow.

This hornfaced bee is close in coloration and hairiness to the bee I saw in the raspberries. I guess the hornfaced bee is another type of mason bee, so maybe that's it. I'll have to look for the horns next time.

Hm, just stumbled upon this page about the type of garden plants that attract mason bees. Raspberries are on the list. "There are about 3,500 species of native bees in the USA," it says. Good luck identifying the species in your garden, it might as well say.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I had a minor fascination with bees a couple years ago, when I first moved into 4119, and wanted to set up a bee garden, but lost interest after a while. Bees are great, I think, and plants that attract them are usually neat plants.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've never paid a lot of attention to bees, and what attention I have paid has been a byproduct of gardening. I've been planning to expand a bed out front just on general principles (the slow project of getting rid of the lawn), and maybe I'll use the opportunity to plant some bee-friendly flowers. Maybe monkshood, which relies on bumblebees for pollination.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

One of the things I've always liked about gardening is how much face-time it gives me with bugs, particularly when I'm weeding. I'll be pulling a mess of weeds and watching ladybugs having sex or eating aphids, and think, yeah, this is the life, this is so great. And it is so great, really, it is, but it's a little difficult to explain precisely why it's so great to see bugs going about their normal bugly lives under one's very eyes. Some of it is that they're so small, and some of it is that they're so non-mammalian, and some of it is that they're so aesthetically pleasing, particularly the afore-mentioned ladybugs, the wasps (but not the yellowjackets), the bees, the ground beetles, and those small bright green or bronze beetles that shine as if they're made of metal.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

A week or two ago I was digging up the end of an old bed and unburied a chrysalis that was oxblood colored. The details in the casing were delicate and precise, and the whole thing looked like a carved gem, perhaps a garnet. It looked abstract -- a totem or symbol. I reburied it, not knowing what creature would eventually emerge.

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Mason bees have many variations. The ones we have gotten are all black and look much like a housefly. The Hornedface bee is also common, and like the other Mason bees, are hard workers. I think they are making a resurgence because people are spraying less. Yet, that will not bring back the native honey bee. Every time the state sprays for the cotteling moth, they kill off the bees, too. It's probably time to let people know the amount of destruction spraying does. I am looking for large amounts of pheromone traps. Do you have any leads?

[farmgirl1146.livejournal.com]

Sorry for the braino/typo, it is codling moth.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

The pictures I've seen of the Orchard Mason Bee definitely look like a housefly. Yesterday I saw an old school bumblebee in the raspberries, big and black with a couple of bright yellow bands.

I don't even know what a pheromone trap is, but you might poke around at Pollinator Paradise. They appear to have lots of information and lots of links, including links to your bee supplier in Bellingham.