Bee Ranchers
What you’re looking at right here is a Starter Cottage for Mason bees. It goes along with these:
10 Bees. In cocoons. In the fridge. That’s where they have to stay, sleeping until it gets a bit warmer out. Then we need a sunny morning with little wind and a half an hour for them to wake up. Et voila – official bee ranchers!
Both were picked out of the West Coast Seeds catalogue (the bible of coastal gardening) on the assurance that “Mason bees are…a fairly harmless bee. They can sting like any other bee but we’ve never heard of it happening.”
We’re hoping this will be good for the garden. The ladybugs we ordered/released last year to control the aphid population did not work out that well as they all basically flew away (thanks for nothing ladybugs!) Hopefully with the cottage things will work out better with the bees.
I do harbour a dream of someday having a full-on apiary but it’s probably not possible in the city. Baby steps…
p.s. The West Coast Seed Catalogue is the most addictive thing I’ve read in ages. It’s free too – you can order one here.
Category: Outdoors, Vancouver | Tags: aphids, apiary, b.c., bee, bug, catalogue, coast, coastal, cottage, flower, gardening, kitsilano, ladybugs, mason, Outdoors, rancher, Seeds, spring, starter, urban, Vancouver, west 2 comments »
March 6th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
hey andrea…
someone i used to work with used to be a huge “ladybug as aphid population control” advocate and he told me you had to release them at night. something about how they are asleep in the box you get (kept in fridge??) and they stay asleep in the cold so when you release them at night, they kind of wander out in a stupor and since they are hungry, they much on the aphids right away and stay. i may have got it all wrong and perhaps that was in the instructions already. i’ve been thinking of ordering the ladybug but never knew where to get them.
March 7th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Interesting – the instructions didn’t say anything about night – maybe that’s the trick. It just said to release them right on to the plants with the aphid problem. It was very weird – we had quite a few aphids and they didn’t seem to get eaten by the 200 or so ladybugs we set loose. Oh well, the ladybugs had to end up eating aphids somewhere, right? You’re welcome, Kitsilano! We ordered the ladybugs from the David Hunter Garden Centre on Broadway/Arbutus. They have a little fridge in the indoor area where you pay that has a variety of bugs inside. They didn’t have the ladybugs on hand but you can order them and they will call you when they get a new shipment. As for the aphids – we returned to the old-fashioned hose method of getting rid of them.