Leaf Cutter Bee

Buzz building for bee fest

The Huronia and District Beekeepers’ Association is celebrating National Day of the Honeybee with a bee festival.

“This is the first year we’re doing it,” said Gord Slemin, president of the association.

Slemin said he’s always been interested in bees.

“I like the way they work and live in a colony. They all have an individual role but work together, and they are important to so many things around us.”

He’s been a hobby beekeeper for nine years, and keeps 15 hives just outside of the city.

The Huronia and District Beekeepers’ Association spreads from Innisfil to Wasaga Beach, Orillia and Beaverton.

Bees are important because they are pollinators, providing life to flowers, fruit and vegetables.

“It’s the most important thing they do. They pollinate 30 per cent of the food we eat; it’s up to them to bring a successful crop. They provide the colours we see along the countryside,” said Slemin.

And indirectly, they affect other species. “They pollinate alfalfa seeds. Without that, we wouldn’t have alfalfa to feed to cattle.”

Bees have been in the news recently after a few years in decline.

“Four springs ago, beekeepers on average lost 33 per cent of their hives. Last year was a big improvement, but this year, our local survey shows out of 532 hives, 273 didn’t make it through the winter.”

That’s a 51-per-cent-loss for the local honey beekeeper.

“It’s pretty serious. And if it’s happening to managed hives, then the bumble bees and leaf cutter bees must be declining as well.”

But those headlines might also be responsible for the popularity of beekeeping, said Slemin. “Participation has been up quite a bit. We used to get 20 members out to our meetings. Now we have 40.”

And more than 60 people are part of the association, said Slemin.

One of the causes for the decline of the bees is the varroa mite, which is a bloodsucker that leaves bees with a wound that can easily be infected.

Another problem can be the lack of food sources. “Farmers are growing single crops in large areas. There’s not a diversity of forage for pollinators.

“It would be the same if you ate the same thing everyday, it makes the bees weaker and not able to function as well.”

With the hit to the population this year, it means farmers are going to have to once again split their hives to rebuild.

Finding leaf-cutter bee eggs in compost - Miranda Hodgson

We were up at the farm vegetable garden the other day, where I should have been busy weeding and sowing more seeds, but instead I had gone to see the nice lady who lives at the farm. We were rooting through her flower pots to see if the Canna rhizomes had survived the winter (they had), when I came across something exciting. Sifting through the compost, I unearthed what I thought were cigar butts for, at first glance, that is exactly what they appeared to be. A closer examination revealed them to the be something much more interesting: the carefully wrapped eggs of a leaf-cutter bee ( Megachile centuncularis ).

These are the bees that cut discs from leaves, often from rose leaves, and use them to form tubes, into which they lay an egg. The bee makes a tube-shaped burrow in soil, compost, gaps in rocks, old plant stems or dead wood and then lines it with pieces of leaf, so that one egg cell follows the next, like a string of sausages, with each cell being sealed with several layers of leaf discs. As the bee works, she will carry pollen to the nest and place some with the egg in each cell, until she has completed up to ten cells.

In early summer, the bees will hatch out, with the last to be laid being the first to emerge. It is said that the first bee out is often a male and he will wait for a female to emerge so they can mate and start the whole process off again. In the above picture, you can see an unwrapped egg next to the still-sealed leaf tubes. Elsewhere in the garden, hornets ( Vespa crabro ) are looking for nesting places and three have been spotted flying around. I saw one crawl into this hole in one of the posts of a compost bay.

Although I watched and waited, it didn’t come out again, so it may have found a suitable cavity for laying eggs. Hornets aren’t the vicious creatures they are made out to be, but will defend their nests with vigour, so if it does use that post for a nest, we’ll just have to use another compost bay! Fortunately, that bay is pretty much full and we need to start on another one anyway, so perhaps it won’t matter.

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