by Izolda | Oct 6, 2021 | Birds, Bees & Bugs, Thanks Plants!
If your garden has seemed different in recent years, with that familiar buzz much quieter, the air less colourful and alive, it’s probably not your imagination. Bee and butterfly populations face alarming declines worldwide. That’s a scary thought, considering that most of the crops we eat rely on these (formerly) frequent visitors.
It’s true that no one person can single-handedly restore the monarch butterfly and reverse the honeybees’ downward spiral, but as we work on the larger issues at play, like climate change and widespread pesticide use, pollinators need safe spaces to feed and find mates. That’s where you come in: make your own yard a pollinator-friendly pit stop with a few simple fixes.
Why are bees so important?
Bees are such a precious part of our ecosystem, and there has been some concern about their well-being over the last few years. It is thought that certain pesticides as well as mass monoculture farming are playing a key role in weakening their immune systems, causing colony collapse, and declining numbers. Loss of habitat and urbanisation are also taking their toll. This problem is far more severe in the industrialised northern hemisphere but is starting to gain ground in South Africa too.
By making your garden a biodiverse haven, you can play your part in keeping the bees thriving as an indispensable part of our ecosystem.
Pesticides
It’s important to make sure that you are not using nasty pesticides in your garden that are known to contain bee-harming chemicals such as neonicotinoids. Read your labels – they usually contain acetamiprid, clothianidin, imidacloprid, and/or thiamethoxam as active ingredients. Explore greener, healthier pest control options.
Plants that bees love
The most important step you can take is to plant a pollinator-friendly garden. Choose nectar- and pollen-rich plants such as vygies, rosemary, sunflowers, thyme, lavender, agapanthus and fruit trees.
Some more bee-loving tips
- Bees are especially attracted to purple, violet, blue, blue-green, yellow, ultraviolet, and white flowers, and they prefer scented flowers.
- Plant flowers that bloom at different times of the year to keep the bees well fed year-round.
- A bee bath needs to be shallower than a bird bath – a shallow tray-like bath of water is ideal. You can also put some marbles in a shallow pan and fill it with water – that way the bees will have somewhere to land and drink.
Care for our Butterflies
If you want the privilege of these floating jewels in your garden, you’ll need to make peace with a few munching caterpillars, because that’s how butterflies start off. To encourage butterflies in your garden means you must allow for the larval stage too – your garden should serve as a sanctuary to nurture and protect the butterfly throughout the stages of its life.
Pesticides
Go lightly on pesticides and only use them when necessary, to give caterpillars a fighting chance as they are already pitted against plenty of natural predators. especially if you are creating a diverse ecosystem in your garden. Toxic pesticides can also get into the plant nectar that adult butterflies drink.
Plants that butterflies love
Our top picks to include in your garden to attract butterflies are Cape plumbago, Cape honeysuckle, butterfly bush, lavender, daisies and impatiens.
Some more butterfly-loving tips
- When it comes to flowers, butterflies like colours ranging from blue to mauve, red, pink or white.
- Some butterflies like rotting fruit such as bananas or pineapple, so leave some fruit from your fruit trees to rot on the ground as food.
- They like to get some minerals from pockets of mud too, so a little mud puddle or two will be appreciated.
Bringing insects back into our garden
Let’s aim to bring back all the beneficial insects back into our garden and appreciate them for all pollinating services they provide. They buzzing of the bees and the colourfulness of butterflies definitely puts a smile on our faces.
by Izolda | May 23, 2018 | Birds, Bees & Bugs
Bees are classified according to common character traits
Bees can be classified in many different ways. Their taxonomic classification uses shared characters that are indicative of relatedness between species, and this is best expressed as an evolutionary tree. However, nest architecture, sociality and floral biology can also be used to classify bees. According to taxonomic classification, any species can only belong to one group. Other classification systems cross taxonomic boundaries, and species groups will differ according to the classification criteria. Buzz pollinators, for example, will include some carpenters and some diggers, but neither all carpenter nor all diggers. The different classification systems have their uses.
Bee identification
South African bees are divided into six cosmopolitan families. Four of them (Melittidae, Colletidae, Andrenidae and Halictidae) are short-tongued bees. They may be able to extend their mouthparts a long way into tubular flowers, but then the entire mouthparts will be elongated and not just the tongue. Two families are long-tongued bees (Apidae, Megachilidae). The South African pollen-collecting bees can all quite easily be placed into families using The Bee Genera and Subgenera of sub-Saharan Africa (http://www.abctaxa.be/volumes/vol-7-bees/). This booklet can also be used for identifying bee genera and sub-genera.
Bee nests
Bees construct their nests, and the cells within their nests, in many different ways. Some of these are unique to a taxonomic group: all leafcutter bees belong to the genus Megachile, but not all Megachile species are leafcutters – some are daubers or resin bees. Carder bees belong to several closely related genera. Mining tunnels into the ground occurs in many unrelated genera (and in different families), and boring into wood occurs in both long-tongued bee families. Knowing their nest architecture is useful for specific purposes. Tunnel-nesting bees, for example, only inhabit bee hotels, which are artificially provided tunnels for bees, usually in wood. Bees with similar nests could behave quite differently in them. Some small carpenter bees are social, with very small colonies, whereas others are solitary.
Most bees nest in cavities, while some have exposed nests. The best-known cavity nests are those of honeybees – they live naturally in holes in trees and in the ground, and are kept by beekeepers in hives. Stingless bees inhabit cavities similar to those of honeybees, but smaller, and they don’t dig their own cavities. All other cavity nests are tunnels. Some bore their own tunnels (miner and carpenter bees), while others use existing insect burrows, including those of other bees. They mostly raise their larvae in cells within their nests. Exposed nests are usually made of mud (daubers), resin (resin bees) or plant fibre combed to look like cotton wool (carder bees). Daubers, resin bees and carders have either exposed or cavity nests.
Exposed nests of dauber and resin bees are spherical, comprising several oval cells packed closely together. The whole nest, after all the cells have been constructed and provisioned, is rounded off into a ball with mud and/or resin. Carder bees simply have a ball of ‘cotton wool’ in which cells are constructed.
Among the cavity nesters, honeybees make cells out of wax (honeycomb). They use similar cells to store pollen and honey (made from nectar) that they feed to their larvae. Stingless bees have larval cells and much larger pots, also made from a waxy material, for storing honey and pollen. Only honey and stingless bees store food for their larvae outside brood cells. Other pollen- and nectar-collecting bees provision a brood cell and lay an egg in each cell. The materials used to make brood cells are reflected in their names: sand or mud (masons), resin (resin bees), wood shavings (carpenters), leaf or petal (leaf cutters), cellophane secretions (hyaline and plaster bees) or cottony fibre (carders).
Some bees do not collect pollen, namely males and parasitic bees. They are therefore not important pollinators. Most parasitic bees are cuckoos, meaning they lay their eggs in other bees’ nests. The parasite kills the host’s larva and feeds on its provisions. Social parasites replace, or co-exist with, queens of other social species. The host species’ workers raise the parasites larvae. Parasitic bees therefore do not construct nests.
Why are there so many female bees?
In bees, fertilised eggs develop into females and unfertilised eggs develop into males (therefore females have twice as many chromosomes as males). After mating, females store the sperm in a spermatheca and are able to control which egg cells are fertilised, thus they can determine whether they lay female or male eggs. This enables social bees, including honeybees, to have a hive full of female workers and only a few males – when needed.
Dr C. Eardley is from the Agricultural Research Council, Plant Protection Research Institute, and has worked on the taxonomy of African bees and the conservation of their biodiversity for 40 years. His email address is eardleyc@arc.agric.za.
