Red mason bees
10th May 2008, SaturdayFor the last three years I have had a red mason bee Osmia rufa nest tube in our back-garden in Northiam, and it has been very successful. The nest boxes, purchased from the Oxford Bee Company, contain 100 cardboard tubes which the bees nest in. Here they store pollen in a series of clay-capped cells in the tubes. We got so many last year that I bought a second cylinder this year and both are well on the way to being 100% occupied. You can see the clay seals at the ends of some of the tubes signifying a complete row of occupied cells.
These nest boxes, judging from the droppings on them, seem to have generated a bit of avian interest, and occasionally I find some of the tubes pulled out suggesting the birds have been after the contents.
The favoured pollen at the moment seems to be Echium pininana, the Tree echium, a species that hales from the Canary Islands. Compared to the British viper’s bugloss Echium vulgare it is a monster, reaching 4m in height in our garden. Although rather frost tender, plants have grown from seed with minimal protection from winter frosts. They are a bee magnet, attracting the red mason bee and the early nesting bumblebee Bombus pratorum. If our winters keep getting milder this could become a pest species, but for the moment it is tender enough to be a welcome bee food-plant.
An exciting member of the Hymenoptera family livened up our kitchen on Friday - a queen hornet Vespula crabro. I saw none in the village last year, the first time for several years, so this was a welcome visitor. I should add that while doing a torch-light survey for North American Bullfrogs near East Grinstead last September my torch proved to be an alarmingly powerful attractant to hornets from nests in two large trees, so much so that I had to walk carefully past the nest with lights turned off - a new item for the Risk Assessment!