Bumble Bees

[diane]

Alliums are a bee magnet. The ones I have that flower in summer are chives of several kinds and leeks.

[shoshannah]

Thanks Diane I just remember I have to plant chives.  My DIL got a clump from someone and it was so full of grass I think we were eating more grass than chives.

I tried to knock it it out of the pot to separate them but the dirt was hard clay and couldn't begin to separate.  I had a lot of onions go to seed and we found out

 the flower stems are very tasty until they start to get woody.  I also found out that I like the allium greens better than the bulbs.  So far only the chives and onions

have flowered for me.  DIL has some ornamental alliums in the flower garden.

[shoshannah]

Honeybee noticed my marigolds.



This little bee was on the fuchsias.

[philagardener]

The insect on the fuchsia is actually bee mimic, probably a hoverfly.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoverfly

[RpR]

Our late Raspberry crop has attracted a LOT of Bumbles.
I was worried as the first crop did not attract the large number normally around and all summer bees and wasps were a fraction of what I normally see.

[diane]

This shows pictures of many native bees. Fascinating! Squash bees, blueberry bees, even bees coloured blue or green.

www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5306468.pdf

[reed]

I discovered a terrible bee disaster the other day while washing my truck, something I do every three or four years if it needs it or not. The truck spends a lot of time sitting with the driver window open and the passenger one closed. There was something green and shiny in the rubber at the bottom of the closed window. It was the dried bodies of lots of the pretty little bees! They must have gotten trapped and died in the sun trying to get out the wrong window.  From now on either both or neither window will be open!

[shoshannah]

Thanks for the pdf link diane.

reed, poor bees

[steev]

That's a good link about bees; I think it reinforces the problems relating to mono-culture and native bees. If we screw up the introduced European bees, what if we've also fucked the indiginous bees, by mono-culture? I'm not saying I'm worried, but I have only myself to feed, unless I feel socially responsible, as the mono-culturalists clearly don't, despite all their bullshit about feeding the world, when so much of their production really goes to feeding livestock in CAFOs, not a great benefit to hungry humanity.

I'm not saying that horseshit isn't valuable to agriculture; but only that there's a lot of horseshit that has nothing to do with agriculture.

[prairiegarden]

A few years back when there were food riots happening, the shortage wasn't because of cafos it was because production was going to produce biofuel. Poor people in developing countries can't pay for food what the people in rich countries can pay for fuel. Nothing personal, just more profit and they are after all, in business...

[steev]

I quite agree; business is generally more important than people, it seems.

[shoshannah]

I was reading in "Attracting Native Pollinators".  pg 12

"In China's Sichuan Province, one of the largest apple producing regions in the world, farmers perch on ladders in mountainside orchards to pollinate the blossoms by hand.

The farmers have adopted this practice because wild bees are now absent in the area, and honey beekeepers refuse to bring in their hives due to excessive pesticide

use in the orchards."

[prairiegarden]

Humans are nothing if not stubborn. Curious that it would seem not to have occurred to them to stop using pesticides. Fear is a mighty motivator, perhaps, and maybe they have been conditioned to think the trees will all instantly become a heaving mass of hostile insects if they stop. Maybe now they would, if they've killed off all the insects then they have killed off the predator insects as well as the ones which might be a problem.

It's going to be a very dark day when insects/diseases that have evolved to deal with the pesticides turn up, as they absolutely will, in time. It's a one way street to more and more virulent poisons until the food is clearly poisonous to people too; right now that takes long enough to show up that it's a bit ambiguous to some people, most of them in government regulatory agencies.