Here are a few photos from our gardens taken this week. Click on any to see an enlarged version in a new window.The photos of bees (one caught in mid-wingbeat -- I love how its air pressure has curved the wings -- and another beside a newspaper shred, which is undoubtedly a spelling bee) are a bit of a conundrum that perhaps readers can help out with. I mulched a potato bed with shredded paper and found I had a bee situation on my hands. Zillions were buzzing around trying to get through the shreds into a nest (or nests) in the ground. I had forgotten I had noticed bees of some sort entering and exiting a ground nest earlier in the week. I thought I saw only one egress, but it's possible I was mistaken.
I certainly don't want to hurt any pollinators -- they have trouble enough without me giving them grief. So around 5 PM, we pulled back the mulch to allow them to go home for the night.
The bees flew around like mad for a while, all loaded with pollen, but as evening came on, they... disappeared. Went underground? I don't know. When I went out at 9 PM, I was able to put the shredded paper back in place without encountering any bees.
I don't know exactly what happened in the morning, but we do see bees coming and going, the paper shreds presenting an obstacle, but perhaps not an insurmountable one.
I do believe these are some kind of bees -- they are smaller than wasps/yellow jackets which are the other ground-dwelling choice. They were totally unaggressive with us, even though it still gave me the heebie-jeebies to get close to so many of them flying about. It's quite likely they are miner bees, which would mean there is a hole for each bee as they are "solitary," each having their own nest, and I just didn't notice the multiple holes. We would love an ID from anyone reading this -- email us at blog@concordMA.com.
 |  |  |
 |  |
