Corrugated plastic
totes can be converted into convenient nesting
shelters for several wild bee species. Nesting
materials encased in milk cartons (lower right)
can be stacked in the tote for female bees to
use as homes for a new generation of
pollinators. Drawing courtesy of Ellen M.
Klomps, ARS |
Need Wild Bees?
Plastic Totes Make A Superb Bee "Nursery"
By
Marcia Wood
March 20, 2009
Corrugated plastic bins like the kind sold for
handling mail and packages can be quickly and easily
converted into a durable "nursery" for wild bees,
according to an
Agricultural Research Service (ARS) research
entomologist.
James H. Cane, with the agency's
Pollinating Insects Biology, Management and
Systematics Research Unit in Logan, Utah, says
that female wild bees will readily use a properly
placed, suitably furnished tote as a shelter for
their nests. Turned on their long side, the totes
can be held firmly in place on a wooden or metal
post by means of a lightweight steel chain and a
customized metal support frame.
Cane came up with the idea of using corrugated
plastic totes—available from suppliers of mail and
package handling equipment—as nesting shelters, and
has tested them during spring and summer in
California, Oregon, Wyoming and Utah. His
experiments show that the lightweight, rectangular
bins, each 23-1/2 inches long by 15-1/2 inches wide
by 15-1/2 inches high, serve as a sturdy,
inexpensive and reusable shelter for protecting bee
nests against wind and rain.
Growers, professional and hobbyist beekeepers,
and backyard gardeners who want wild bees to live
near and work in their fields, orchards, vineyards
or home gardens can use the totes to house nesting
materials, such as five-sixteenths-inch diameter
paper drinking straws enclosed in cardboard tubes
and stuffed inside empty cardboard milk cartons.
Wild female bees such as the blue orchard bee,
Osmia lignaria, can use the straws as homes for
a new generation of pollinators.
Wild bees are needed now, perhaps more than ever,
to help with jobs usually handled by America's
premier pollinator, the European honey bee, Apis
mellifera. Many of the nation's honey bee
colonies have been decimated by the puzzling colony
collapse disorder or weakened by varroa and tracheal
mites or the microbes that cause diseases such as
chalkbrood and foulbrood.
A single corrugated plastic tote can accommodate
as many as 3,000 young, enough to pollinate one-half
to one-acre of orchard. And, unlike bulky or
stationary shelters, the tote houses can easily be
moved from one site to the next.
Corporate collaborator Quiedan
Co., of Salinas, Calif., helped design and now
sells the support frame and mounting plate unit.
Cane published the shelter research for the first
time in a July 2006 article in
American
Bee Journal. The totes are now being used in
California and for Cane's own research in Oregon.
