Forget all those expensive manufactured solitary bee houses or hedgehog homes, you can make your insect habitat out of scrap materials and old pallets
Here is an idea developed by Chris Beardshaw, spotted at Hampton Court Flower Show in 2008.
Read more here.
Bugs are hugely important to our ecosystems, so why not make this easy bug house to keep them pollinating your garden!
This bug house uses some easily found natural materials, such as bamboo canes, pieces of wood, twigs and plant stems, to provide a range of homes for lots of different invertebrates. This project is perfect for making with kids. Start with a search for suitable branches and twigs, and then make your bug house to suit the materials available. Materials that are sourced in the location where you intend to site your box are likely to be attractive to suitable inhabitants.
A vast number of invertebrates, including spiders, ladybugs, solitary bees and beetle larvae will find the wood and plant-stem tunnels irresistible and quickly make nests or hibernate in them.
This bug house might become occupied by:
UK species – wood-boring beetle larvae, spiders, ladybugs (right), lacewings, solitary bee species (including leafcutter, mason, sweat, wool-carding and carpenter bees).
US species – wood-boring beetle larvae, spiders, ladybugs, lacewings, solitary bee species (including leafcutter, mason, sweat, wool-carding and carpenter bees).
Read more: http://www.permaculture.co.uk/readers-solutions/simple-bamboo-bug-house
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
But the bees also need us and now more than ever.
They need us to provide nectar plants for them, especially in the form of wild flowers and not just crops that we want them to pollinate.
Too much of the natural habitat has been destroyed and meadows with wild flowers have nearly become a thing of the past due to the overuse of herbicides on farms.
Therefore it is up to us, all of us, to feed the bees and plant the flowers that will do this and at the same time attract them to our vegetable gardens to pollinate the crops.
Do them a favor and plant a patch of wildflower, annual or perennial, even in a large tub or such, and also add some other flowering plants and flowers to your garden, even if you just grow veggies, to attract the bees and to feed them. Ideally those flowers should be nectar-rich.
There are resources all over the Internet that will advise you are to the flowers, wild and cultivars, that are right for bees and especially for your area.
Let's all give the bees a helping hand. They sure need one.
© 2013
by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Farmers who grow these crops often rely on honeybees to do the job, but scientists are now reporting that honeybees, while convenient, especially so as they also provide us with honey, are not necessarily the best pollinators.
A huge collaboration of bee researchers, from more than a dozen countries, looked at how pollination happens in dozens of different crops, including strawberries, coffee, buckwheat, cherries and watermelons and have found that even when beekeepers installed plenty of hives in a field, yields usually got a boost when wild, native insects, such as bumblebees or carpenter bees, also showed up.
When it comes to beans and peas the only ones that can really do the pollination are bumblebees. Legumes have, in the main, closed flowers and the ordinary honeybee does have a problem getting into the back of it. Not so the humble bumble.
The message in all of this is that honeybees cannot carry the load. Honeybees need help from their cousins and relatives, the (other) wild bees and we must do something to promote it, so that we can keep honeybees healthy and our wild bee populations healthy.
Unfortunately wild bees aren't having an easy time of it as much of their nesting sites and habitat is being destroyed by monocultures of soya and corn (in the case of the USA) or suburbs. The woods and forests and the areas upon which they relied are gone. Changing climate may be another factor.
This means that is we want to have food tomorrow – and I sure think that we all do – then we must do something to keep our wild bee and pollinator populations healthy, as well as the honeybees, whether wild (yes, there are many) or in hives. Without bees there is no food.
The bees that have disappeared tended to be species that depended on just a few kinds of flowers for food. For those bees to survive, their preferred flowers have to be blooming when the bees start flying and need food. The warming trend might have thrown off that timing and timing is crucial for their survival.
One of the biggest problems for wild bees is the agricultural specialization that has produced huge fields of just one crop.
The almond groves of California, for example, are a sea of blossoms in February. It's a feast, as far as the eye can see, for honeybees that are brought here from all over the country, but for the rest of the year there is nothing blooming and that means there are no bees.
In fact, in places where there are very large monocultures of almond, we don't find any native bees anymore at all.
Planting other flowers in and around these almond groves, maybe as hedgerows, blooming all summer long, would help. But even better still would be farms with smaller fields, and lots of different crops flowering at different times. Wild bees need diversity.
This proves, yet again, that our commercial agriculture, as it is, with huge tracts of monocultures of this or that, is not good at all for the environment.
While there is colony collapse in the honeybee the wild bees also suffer and that, more than likely, due to our agricultural practices that are totally against Nature.
Remember: No bees, no pollination.. No pollination, no food!
© 2013
