Author Paige Embry is on a mission to educate gardeners so they can help give these pollinators a leg up.
They’re not all honeybees. New book described here focusing on the many different species of bees in North America.
Excerpt:
Think fast, home gardeners. How would you handle this scenario? When you prune dead portions of stems, do you bury them in a compost pile with other lawn and garden debris or put them in lawn bags to be hauled away?
If you’re like most gardeners, you likely do the latter. And you’d be wrong.
That’s because females of a host of native bees like the small native carpenter bee that lives in eastern North America, Ceratina calcarata, hollow out dead areas of pithy stems and turn the canes into long tubes in which they lay their eggs. The eggs hatch in late summer, but the bees stay in the stem during the winter even after growing into adults, emerging sometime in the spring. If you discard the stems in which this process is taking place, you’re doing far more than killing the bees and destroying their happy home; you’re decreasing the number of pollinators for your garden.
“What I do is find some out-of-the-way corner where I don’t have to look at the canes that much, tuck them in there and the bees can emerge at the appropriate time,” said Paige Embry, author of “Our Native Bees, North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them” (Timber Press, 2018). “There may be more than one kind of bee nesting in those canes, so the times they leave the stem may be staggered,” she added. Some examples of plants with pithy canes that tend to be hollow or partly hollow include edible berries such as raspberries or elderberries, Embry said.
That’s just one of the easy things people can do to help native bees and one of the many useful as well as fun facts about some of the 4,000 native bees in the United States that Embry includes in her book. The idea to write the book started with a citizen science project in which participants wanted to know if yields in people’s gardens were limited by a shortage of native pollinators. “The people conducting the project were only interested in native pollinators, so they decided to study tomatoes because honey bees can’t pollinate tomatoes,” recalled Embry.
