I couldn't believe my eyes today. A honey bee landed on one of my roses. You would not think that anyone could get so excited at seeing a bee but as I did not see one last summer I could not help it Here's hoping it is the first of many.
I have found out that a common pest killer used in the gardens of many people can be harmful to bees and is being blamed for the collapse of bee hives it is Imidacloprid. My husband heard it on a gardening programme so our advice is do not use this on your garden plants, it is a systemic and gets taken up by the plant and goes into the pollen which the bee then takes back to its hive and the bees and larvae in the hive get poisoned by it. It does say on the bottle Apply away from bees but does not warn of the dangers of its after affects on the bee population.
Reading this thread this evening is very relevant to me as we currently have a swarm of honey bees in a bush just down our street. It has been there since before the weekend and we phoned the local bee keepers assoc. but they weren't terribly interested in collecting it as with the diseases and mites, they cannot afford to introduce a new swarm without first putting it into quarrantine so to speak. They told us that the swarm would probably go away within a couple of hours...well it has been a good 4 days and it is still there. Fortunately honey bees aren't aggressive and it gave us mums the chance to show the children up close what honey bees look like and to explain what they were doing and educate them. Someone did phone pest control, but they also weren't interested and really didn't know what direction to point us in. It isn't our bush, but the couple whos garden the swarm is in are away on their hols at the moment.
That's interesting EJ. I wonder why they are hanging around so long? Why, do you think? I haven't seen any honey bees at all so far this year. There have been a lot of large bees that look like bumble or carpenter bees hanging around the plants by my porch... yesterday I came home to find a perfect little pyramid of sawdust on the top of one of my porch steps where the bee(?? I assume it was a bee) bored a hole on the underside of the step above it. I put my finger under there and could feel a perfect hole about the size of a pencil, maybe a litle larger. I read where bumble bees nest in the ground and carpenter bees prefer untreated wood (whereas the steps are treated, albeit old, lumber). So maybe this is a carpenter bee laying eggs in there and in three months there will be a bunch of bee-lets. We shall see!
I have no idea why the bees are still hanging around, but they are still there this evening, so coming up to a week! They must be comfy.
