Wonderful, Inspirational Fabre, again…

I have been doing some more general bee reading today, mostly about the fascinating little bees that use snail shells for their nests. I always like to read Fabre and I have mentioned him in the blog before.  If you had ever thought that wild bees might be boring or uninteresting…(how could you??)  just read the passage below.

I know it is a translation but it is still such lovely writing.
From the introduction to Jean Henri Fabre’s  Book of Insects, retold from Alexander Teixeira de Mattos’ translation of Fabre’s “Souvenirs Entomologiques,” 1921.
Fabre is describing his delight in getting a small piece of land where he can observe his insects uninterrupted…

“For forty years it was my dream to own a little bit of land, fenced in for the sake of privacy: ….And then, at last, my wish was fulfilled. I obtained a bit of land in the solitude of a little village. It was a harmas which is the name we give in this part of Provence to an untilled, pebbly expanse where hardly any plant but thyme can grow. It is too poor to be worth the trouble of ploughing, but the sheep pass there in spring, when it has chanced to rain and a little grass grows up.

My own particular harmas, however, had a small quantity of red earth mixed with the stones, and had been roughly cultivated. I was told that vines once grew here, and I was sorry, for the original vegetation had been driven out by the three-pronged fork. There was no thyme left, nor lavender, nor a single clump of the dwarf oak. As thyme and lavender might be useful to me as a hunting-ground for Bees and Wasps, I was obliged to plant them again. There were plenty of weeds : couch-grass, and prickly centauries, and the fierce Spanish oyster-plant, with its preading orange flowers and spikes strong as nails.

Above it towered the Illyrian cotton-thistle, whose straight and solitary stalk grows sometimes to the height of six feet and ends in large pink tufts. There were smaller thistles too, so well armed that the plant- collector can hardly tell where to grasp them, and spiky knap- weeds, and in among them, in long lines provided with hooks, the shoots of the blue dewberry creeping along the ground. If you had visited this prickly thicket with- out wearing high boots, you would have paid dearly for your rashness! See here is a Tailor-bee. She scrapes the cobwebby stalk of the yellow-flowered centaury, and gathers a ball of wadding which she carries off proudly with her mandibles or jaws. She will turn it, underground, into cotton satchels to hold the store of honey and the eggs.

And here are the Leaf-cutting Bees, carrying their black, white, or blood-red reaping brushes under their bodies. They will visit the neighbouring shrubs, and there cut from the leaves oval pieces in which to wrap their harvest. Here too are the black, velvet-clad Mason-bees, who work with cement and gravel. We could easily find specimens of their masonry on the stones in the harmas. Next comes a kind of Wild Bee who stacks her cells in the winding staircase of an empty snail-shell; and another who lodges her grubs in the pith of a dry bramble-stalk; and a third who uses the channel of a cut reed; and a fourth who lives rent-free in the vacant galleries of some Mason-bee. There are also Bees with horns, and Bees with brushes on their hind-legs, to be used for reaping.

On my doorway lives the White-banded Sphex: when I go indoors I must be careful not to tread upon her as she carries on her work of mining. Just within a closed window a kind of Mason-wasp has made her earth-built nest upon the freestone wall. To enter her home she uses a little hole left by accident in the shutters. On the mouldings of the Venetian blinds a few stray Mason- bees build their cells. The Common Wasp and the Solitary Wasp visit me at dinner. The object of their visit, apparently, is to see if my grapes are ripe. Such are my companions. My dear beasts, my friends of former days and other more recent acquaintances, are all here, hunting, and building, and feeding their families.”

 

A wonderful and affectionate introduction to our wild bees. I, too, am hopefully on the brink of getting a small garden which sounds very much like Fabre’s… not overgrown as such but with nothing much there.

I will hope to create as good a bee haven as his and I did notice a small vine growing on the fence, so I will also be looking forward to having the company of wasps at dinner.

Snails shell bees roughs I worked on the sketches a bit more today. They are Osmia bicolour male and female..

osmia bicol male sm     osmia bicolour female s

. snailshell bees

More about them in the next post.. I am just off to read a bit more of Fabre’s writing. You can find a great page which has links to his books on line here.
This book site has been complied by John Mark Ockerbloom, digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who deserves a medal. We are so lucky to have resources like this!

BOB, The Gentle Blue Orchard Mason Bee : Osmia lignaria

The headline that first caught my eye when I started reading about these bees, says it all.. “This Bee Is Gentle” … A fact that is reiterated again and again, here is a quote from “The New Mexico Native Bee Pollinator Project” calling on gardeners in NM to help make “bee corridors”;

“Gardens for the more flamboyant hummingbirds and butterflies have become popular; now the bees need our support. There’s a fear factor with bees however, even among nature lovers.
Honey bees sting because they have a treasure trove to defend, and a queen who lays all of the eggs. Not so with native species: the vast majority of them are solitary bees who ARE VERY DOCILE and do not sting unless they are handled roughly.

When we become educated about our bees, a new understanding develops that they can be both safe and a delight to have around.”

This comes from the USA site Pollinator Paradise which has as much information about Blue Orchard Mason bees and other helpful native bees as you could ever wish for. It is run by Dr Karen Strickler who I have to thank for information, samples and pointing me in the right direction for my research on these bees.
Orchard bees have many champions and I have been amazed by how many suppliers are selling mason bee items, you can buy mason bee homes, which come in many different varieties from high rise blocks to bundles of straws; you can buy mason bee videos, mason bee online courses, and of course the bees themselves which come as little cocoons with full owners manuals.

Blue orchard bees overwinter as dormant adults so you can watch them emerge in the spring ready to start work, For a comprehensive listing of suppliers of everything, go to Pollinator Paradise here. You will be there for hours..!

So why all the fuss? Well this little bee is an ace pollinator of fruit crops and again, in face of the honey bee decline, the native bees are coming into their own.
If you have a small domestic orchard.. apples, cherries and other tree fruit just 50 blue orchard bees will help secure you a good crop.
(These bees are endearingly referred to as “BOBs” by the US Dept of Agriculture and there is a good article about them plus their possible predators here.)

Osmia_Apple9

BOB, on apple blossom from Karen Strickland at Pollinator Paradise

Minor mining

Although these are “solitary” bees, with each female making her own independent nest, they are gregarious and like to nest close to each other. They are opportunist nesters and will use old insect holes in wood, nail holes, and spaces in crumbling mortar.
They are not destructive as often thought as they do not burrow into mortar, but just make do!

Their name mason bee comes more from the fact that they seal their nests with mud.. so they make rather than destroy. They also like old hollow canes and can have as many twenty nest cells in one cane. J

ean-Henri Fabre, who I mentioned in the last post had hoped to find some Osmia nesting in the upright hollow reeds used by gardeners and farmers for fencing and supports…..from “Bramble Bees and Others” 1915:

I have often explored them in the hope of finding Osmia-nests. My search has very seldom succeeded. The failure is easily explained. The partitions and the closing-plug are made, as we have seen, of a sort of mud which water instantly reduces to pap.
With the upright position of the reeds, the stopper of the opening would receive the rain and would become diluted; the ceilings of the storeys would fall in and the family would perish by drowning.

Therefore the Osmia, who knew of these drawbacks before I did, refuses the reeds when they are placed perpendicularly.

 

Smart these bees..!

diagram nest

Drawing by Mike Kridle from Pollinator Paradise here

 

The Orderly Queuing of Bees.. with just a bit of nipping and shoving.

The tubular nests are fascinating and it seems that the size of the bee may depend somewhat on the size of the tube. The bee painstakingly makes each cell, bringing pollen and honey to each, lays her egg, seals the cell with mud, then moves on.
The lava will eat the provisions, spin a silk cocoon and stay in this safe house until the spring. In a way that is still not understood the lava knows which way to face before it spins the cocoon, facing backwards would be a disaster as there is only one way out.
I detected a problem here… if the first bee at the back of the nest develops first how does it get out when its younger siblings are still in their cocoons?

“Bees of the World” by Christopher O ‘Toole and Anthony Raw explains:

“Because of the linear arrangement of the cells ..the youngest bee emerges first, followed by the progressively older bees. However as may be expected the oldest bees in the deepest cells often awake from their winter dormancy first.

An older bee is thus likely to meet with a still dormant bee in the next cell between it and the nest entrance.The problem is solved as follows: when the bee has bitten through the partition into the rear of the next cell it bites its way through the cocoon of the bee in front.
If the occupant is inactive the bee nips the rear of its abdomen. This awakens the second bee which begins to vibrate its wings.. Nipping is repeated if necessary until the bee nearest the entrance starts to bite its way through the nest enclosure
.”

This is an empty cocoon which Karen Strickler kindly sent me.
It is a beautiful translucent thing, light but very strong and fibrous.. just 1/2inch long

.cocoon

It occurs to me that Orchard bee cocoons complete with housing would make a wonderful Xmas gift for the keen gardener and nature loving child.. and me… (taps Chris on shoulder!)

If you in the UK there is lots of advice in the Nigel Jones’s excellent “Solitary Bees” pages here. (interestingly Nigel appears to be a cat)

Bee Friendly Gardens

Dr Strickler has some good advice for creating a bee friendly garden here.
Attracting these little bees is more about getting the right flowers at the right time, as they are most active between April and July.

Bob sketches

This is a pretty bee, and another challenge as she is a shiny blue/black but also quite a hairy little creature. This is the female. The smaller male has a rather fetching moustache and longer antennae. I am saving him for later.

 

sketch

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Bee number 14: Osmia lignaria, the very dainty Blue Orchard Bee


osmia lignaria blue orchard mason bee

Watercolour on Arches 300 HP, image 3.5”

Anna’s Anthidium: Bee No 12:The Wool Carder Bee

Over the last few weeks I have been writing to various people to get some help with my bee paintings.

I like to work from real models if possible and thought one way round this was to beg or borrow some spare bees from researchers. Anna from Anna’s Bee World who I have mentioned before and who helped me with the blue wasp identification has very kindly sent me a couple of samples, one of which was this beautiful Anthidium.

It is wonderful to have such good reference. Thank you Anna.

Seeing these striking black and yellow markings, you could be forgiven for thinking this bee was a wasp.
This is the Wool Carder Bee, Anthidium sp so called because they “card” the wooly covering from leaves to use as nest material.

The female has five sharp teeth on her mandibles with which she bites through the downy fibers. She then rolls them into a ball, tucks it under her body and carries it back to the nest .

3. -- rolls it into a neat ball

‘A female Anthidium manicatum commences cropping the woolly tomentum of a leaf ‘ from a series of photos by Neil Robinson BWARS here.

There is a very good article about Anthidium manicatum from Insectpix.net here

These bees are members of the Megachile family whose females carry pollen on the underside of the abdomen in the scopa (stiff hairs). This is quite different from other bees who carry the pollen on their hind legs.
The male bees are territorial and armed with three spikes at the end of their abdomen.
They will use these to deter other insects while patrolling their patch and keeping a lookout for females. They nest in pre existing cavities, often in old plant stems, laying eggs in their downy nests and providing pollen balls for the hatched larvae.

I am always struck by the lack of affectionate writing about nature these days. Books and websites tend to be either simply factual or rather vague.
I generally try to find good writing from an earlier time where there is still that sense of wonder. It was nice to discover that the great writer and entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre shared my view!
He was criticised by his contemporaries for his gentle and colloquial style of writing.. here is his excellent reply:

“Others again have reproached me with my style, which has not the solemnity, nay, better, the dryness of the schools. They fear lest a page that is read without fatigue should not always be the expression of the truth. Were I to take their word for it, we are profound only on condition of being obscure.”

and here he writes about the Little Wool Carder Bee, which he calls the Cotton Bee:

We have but to see the nest of a Cotton-bee to convince ourselves that its builder cannot at the same time be an indefatigable navvy.
When newly-felted and not yet made sticky with honey, the wadded purse is by far the most elegant known specimen of entomological nest-building, especially where the cotton is of a brilliant white…
No bird’s-nest, however deserving of our admiration, can vie in fineness of flock, in gracefulness of form, in delicacy of felting with this wonderful bag, which our fingers, even with the aid of tools, could hardly imitate, for all their dexterity.
I abandon the attempt to understand how, with its little bales of cotton brought up one by one, the insect, no otherwise gifted than the kneaders of mud and the makers of leafy baskets, manages to felt what it has collected into a homogeneous whole and then to work the product into a thimble-shaped wallet.
Its tools as a master-fuller are its legs and its mandibles, which are just like those possessed by the mortar-kneaders and Leaf-cutters; and yet, despite this similarity of outfit, what a vast difference in the results obtained!

Fabre wanted to try to see how the bees manipulated the wool to make the nest and so replaced their reed homes with glass rods. It worked for some bees but not others:

For four years I supplied my hives with glass tubes and not once did the Cotton-weavers or the Leaf-cutters condescend to take up their quarters in the crystal palaces.
They always preferred the hovel provided by the reed. Shall I persuade them one day? I do not abandon all hope.

There is much much more of his delightful writing about the Wool Carder Bee here, part of the excellent website about Fabre complete with electronic texts: http://www.efabre.net/

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There are many different species of Anthidium and they have beautiful distinctively different patterns. I have spent quite a long time looking at the patterns and feel I really need to paint them all.

I was asked how I worked on these paintings, so this is my set up for the Anthidium. I will record a close up step by step if I can remember.
I often intend to, for my own records, but normally get so engrossed that I just work from start to finish without stopping.

I have a little magnifying “third hand” which helps hold the bee in position and I used the back of an old picture frame as a small sloping board.
After the initial sketches to determine the position, (in this case I really wanted to show off the beautiful markings on the abdomen) I draw the image lightly on the paper and then with the bee next to me, a good light and a lot of patience, I work on the painting in stages.

I have 2 good W&N series 7 sable brushes sizes 0 and 00 and some cheaper synthetic ones for the initial washes. This painting took 5 hours once I had the image drawn on the paper. There are more details and more colours than show in the low resolution scan which tends to flatten the colours rather.. but it does give an idea.

sketches sm

desk 2      desk 3

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Bee No 12: The Wool Carder Bee, Anthidium sp.

anthidium sp