Cool story.

Well done,ksrogers, bees are in trouble and need friends. This story was in my Sunday paper. It might interest some of you.

Here is a link that might be useful: Bee troubles

Shrieking? I always have to wonder when people get so upset about bees. I have yet to come across an attack bee! I think bees are so interesting to watch. My mother told me that when I was very little, my older brother had a book about bees and read aloud from it for me. In the book, it said that bees communicate with each other about where the best flowers are, and you can watch the new bees land on the same flowers as the old bees etc. Apparently, she found me out in the yard, following bees around to see if it was true. A skeptic even at that tender age! :D

Yes, that 'shimmy' was quite noticable and was from a larger bee with brigher yellow and black stripes. There was only a couple of them, and they seemed to be close to the wax combs. I watched about half an hour. Went on the internet to look up bee keeping, but because there are so many ways to house them, and the web sites had way too many options for the different cultures of honey bees, as well as screens, landing pads, extractors, protection, and a lot more terms I was not familiar with, it was a bit danting to go any further, other than reading a little. I remember as a young kid screaming in the bath tub with my sister and my cousin, after we were stung by a mass of bees that were nesting in the ground. they were not honey bees, but found their way into our ears, noses, and mouths. It was painful and I was just too young to recall anything but the tub of water we soaked in. My dad had come flying over bushes to carry us back to the house. It all started when my cousin wanted us to hear the funny buzzing noise in the ground and poked a stick in their hole..

Ground bees are nasty! and not to be messed with.

I think the ground beess are actually wasps (yellow jackets) and are quite aggressive. The honey bes actied as if we were not there, even though the bee keeper had cut off the limb and gently placed it into the pail.

Good for you! There are a lot of honey producers in this area, but I hardly ever see Honey bees in the garden...or Bumblies for that matter.
When we lived in WA state, both were everywhere all season long. I miss them.

There are a few active bumble bees here all summer. I even made a couple of small bumble bee nests from bird houses, by adding some cotton inside and several small holes with seperate chambers. My orchard mason bees do the very early pollinating when the first blossoms appear on the apricot part of one of my trees.

You are Awesome! *HUG*
I am still trying to talk my neighbors out of killing honey bees when they see them. "But I'm allergic!"

It's not the bee that you see that's going to sting you. I'm *this* close to calling my incredibly allergic sister (She keeps an epi pen on her), and having her yell at them. She pretty protective of the honey bees.

Honey bees will only attack if they feel threatened and see their hives being disturbed too much, or are swatted and chased. Yellow jackets and wasps are the really nasty ones and those brown hornets. I have to keep looking inside my greenhouse for paper wasp nests and have found them several times underneath the work bench in there. While fixing the vinyl siding that became loose, I discovered many paper wasp nests that were underneath the siding. I have no mercy for these as they are just a not useful in anyones garden.

I have to admit I'm scared of spiders and stinging insects. I'm especially terrified of the yellow jackets, and we have tons around here. The exterminators destroyed a small nest that was in the siding by my front door, and they knocked down two abandoned nests over my garage door. I've three times this past winter found queen yellow jackets IN THE HOUSE. As I'm allergic to pretty much everything, I'm scared of getting stung.

ksrogers, the idea of helping start a small bee hive in a bird nest is cool. I wish DH wasn't allergic to bees.

This nest made in small birdhoues are bumble bee nests. I do have several of them around here (the bumbles that is) and they do a great job on the fruit trees and now the red raspberry blossoms. Most of the pollenaters around here are tiny bees, that seem to love to buzz around the dill flowers when they begin to bloom. Not uch is flowering now, except for some regular flower plants, and my scrub roses. I have never seen a big fuzzy bumblebee sting anyone. They fly so slow, they can barely get out of their own way..

ksrogers, are you taking just any old birdhouse and stuffing with cotton? Does it matter the time of year? Do you sugar water to the cotton?

The bird houses were very inexpenive kits that had small precut wood and fiberboard as piece parts. The small round opening was originally for a chickadee size. I blocked the holes and added some seperate compartments about 3x3 inches each, before putting on the small roof. A wad of plain cotton was added to each partition and small 3/8 inch to 1/2 inch diameter holes were drilled to enter into each seperate compartment. I knew that these were used, as a woodpecker had detected something and tried to peck big holes around the tiny openings, but didn't succeed. I also have a 6x6 inch chunk of wood that I drilled many various sized holed about 5 inches deep all over the four sides. Its way up on a pole with a metal trash can cover acting as a roof. Not sure if all the areas are activly supporting bees, but I also have a large mason been house that has 6 inch long tubes that are 5/16 inch in diameter, and are grouped together. They have liners inside each tube and these get replaced once per year, after the bees used the tubes. There are about 100 tubes per nest. The mason bee lays several eggs in the tubes and adds food, then plugs up the opening with mud. They hibernate and then wake up the following spring and eat the food, while opening up the end of the tubes. They are the earliest bees, earlier than even any other pollinating insect. They are noticably gone once the warmer weather is here, about mid April. By then, some of my fruit trees have been flowering already, and have been pollinated. Adding any moisture or sugar to the cotton can cause it to mold. The bumble bees treat the cotton like a bird would do for building a nest.

Actually the paper wasps are active predators of bad bugs. I don't want them in the house and give them a wide berth outside but the world is big enough for both of us. Now yelow jackets are something else because their motto is 'attack!' They get treated with one of those long distance wasp sprays used with extreme caution.

Here its those annoying horsefiles. They buzz around my head several times and sometimes try to land. Yellow jackets love sweet, so they make traps that let them in, but they drown in there. I see paper wasps trying to make nests in the eves of my shed and under the bench in my greenhouse. Its odd to see them get cooked in there when its midday and the temp inside the green house is 150 degrees. I have to get my plants out of there soon as they wilt every day.

After posting the above message, I had the experience this week of finding a bee swarm in my peach tree. A couple buzzed by me, but otherwise they didn't bother me, even though I stood there about 8-10 feet away and took pictures. I called a beekeeper that I found online, and they were going to see if there was someone in my area who could take the bees and give them a home, but they never got back to me, and the next day the swarm was gone.

I hope they found a safe place to build a hive. And I hope they--singly--come back and visit my garden occasionally, like when my squash blossoms open.

The ones I had here were bulding a nest of white wax cells already. It was about the size of my open hand and a piece about 2 inches broke off. I think they planned to say there a while in hopes of finding another suitable site, but because many of the workers were loaded with honey they had to set up 'shop' someplace quickly. I was able to find a local guy in in the yellow pages in the next town over who sells bee keeping supplies. Not all the workers went with the newly created hive, so who ever is left, may either find another colony, or start up a new one somewhere. It may heve been that the queen just simply decided to go to another place and start a new nest.

Was out today and saw about a dozen honey bees busy on my scrub roses. They were all over the bushes and, a few bumble bees were trying to get pollen out of the delicate dill flower heads. It was funny to watch that heavy bumble trying to hang on with his weight pulling down the dill. In any case, relocation of that bee colony has not affected my area, which is a good sign. Every honey bee had its two pocket legs just loaded with yellow pollen from the open blossom roses. I call then scrub roses as they are only single layer of petal flowers, with an open center. Pink with a white inner circle. Would have shot a photo, but its been hectic with an AC unit installation and a big dead tree falling onto my property from next door.

For the past few years I've been encouraging the clover to take over my lawn. Trading one monoculture for another I suspose. LOL I mentioned to my neighbor that I hadn't noticed any bees yet this year. She and I spend a lot of time chatting as we work in our yards. She remarked that this year is very different from the past few. She had checked her garden book and this time last year I had already given her 2 quarts of big juicy blackberries. This year they are tiny and just barely starting to ripen now. Our peonies were stunted and our mutual border garden is taking forever to grow.

On the other hand, all the woody shrubs are growing like crazy. My neighbor's snowball bush was loaded as were all of our red bud trees. The mock orange on the south side of my house is in full glorious bloom. Even my maple trees seem to have pushed out extra growth this year.

Lack of bees might be the cause, but with flowers it could have started to affect them last year. In my Z6, the weather has been quite cool. Most nights are still down to below 60. Many plants like watermelon and other heat loving plants always do much better in the hot heat. Red Raspberries here are still just flowers and even those are getting pollinated, by the bees that are still around. I suspect that if they find an area where there is plenty of stuff for them to forage, they will either move closer, or call their 'buddies' to the area. The bee 'shimmy dance' I witnessed, was the dance of where the food is found.