Help about Bees!

[AnnaIkona]

Just wanted to say that's to all of you who have answered all my previous questions (I know it was a lot )

Anywho...I think I know why my cukes weren't growing last year- probably cause I didn't have any bees to polinate the flowers on the cukes plants!

So, I really want to somehow attract bees over to my homestead. What's the best way?

I know there are bee-hotels I think they're called, or bug-homes maybe?

[rainbowgardener]

This thread https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/vi ... =4&t=65917 has a lot of info in it about attracting bees, other pollinators, and generally beneficial insects to your garden.

I don't know where you are located; it may not all be relevant to you.

Honey bees live in hives and they have very specific requirements; you need to know what you are doing before you get into hives and bee keeping. A lot of equipment to buy.

Carpenter and mason bees live in houses like this:



there's various plans on line for variants you can make yourself.

[imafan26]

Cucumbers are pollinated by bees, but bees prefer a diet of a variety of nectars and they need a reliable food source. You can increase your chances of getting fruit by hand pollinating or you can plant parthenocarpic cucumbers like Sweet Success, Euro-American, Socrates, Tyria, Diva, Tasty Jade and Suyo Long. I have grown Tasty Jade, Diva, and Suyo Long.

You actually want to avoid pollination of parthenocarpic fruit. They can be pollinated but it is better if they are not.

I have a lot of bees because I have a diverse garden with many long flowering plants like allyssum, cuphea, penta, as well as vegetable and citrus trees and I try to limit pesticide use as much as possible. The bees visit a couple of times a day and they unfortunately like to pollinate my orchids and cucumbers. I usually grow Suyo long because most people here would rather have Japanese cucumbers rather than American although Diva is really good too. When parthenocarpic fruits get pollinated it actually causes the fruit to grow looking like a fusiform bomb. The flower end is fatter than the stem end and the seeds which usually are undeveloped get pollinated and they get large. It sometimes takes multiple bee visits to completely pollinate some plants and often it works better if you have more than one plant so there will be more flowers for the bees to gather pollen from.

[ButterflyLady29]

I've had more sweat bees than honey bees in my cucumbers.

But I have noticed that bean and cucumber beetles will eat the inside parts of the flowers preventing pollination. So if you had a lot of beetles that would explain why you didn't have any fruit.

[jal_ut]

You can take a two by four about 30 inches long and drill a whole bunch of 7/32 inch holes in it. Don't go all the way through but drill about 1.14 inches deep. Then hang this out under the eaves of an outbuilding. The little solitary bees come and lay eggs in these.

[imafan26]

Trellis the cucumbers up. You will get straighter fruit. Plant alyssum at the base. It blooms in six weeks from seed and bees love it. Plant a variety pollen and nectar plants to attract all beneficial insects. They also need water and resting places. A shallow tray with pebbles and a 1/4 inch of water is all they need. Most can't swim so they land on the pebbles to lap up the water. Shrubs and trees provide shade and refuge. Bees also love sunflowers, corn tassels (pollen), alyssum, carrot family (in bloom), citrus trees in bloom, actually most plants in bloom. I let my basil go to seed, and I grow fennel, and alyssum because of their long bloom period. Sunflowers are nice but they take a long time to grow and they are only good for 10 days or so unless you get multiheaded ones. You want to have a variety of plants since it isn't healthy for bees to have only one kind of food and you want something in bloom all of the time so the supply will be constant. It is also important to avoid using pesticides. Even some of the organic pesticides can be toxic to bees like pyrethroids and neem. Neem does not hurt the adult bees but if the neem is on the pollen they feed to the larvae, they may not be able to hatch. If you must spray, take all the flowers and buds off the plants first and wait a few day for the bees to find another source. Bees are funny that way, once they find a source they will return to it repeatedly until it is exhausted or it disappears. They will return a few times even after it is gone out of habit and then move on to another source. I have to trim my shaggy African basil but I have not because the bees are on it constantly everyday for most of the day. There are other flowers now, so I will start trimming it back soon. October-January there are fewer flowers in bloom so I cannot trim the basil which is always in bloom. The orchard has flowers now and they really like citrus, mango and avocado flowers. We also have bamboo tubes tied in a bundle hanging from trees for the carpenter bees and a beed house for leaf cutter bees in the herb garden. We have 4 hives at the garden. They do need to be cared for. We inspect them twice a month and have to treat them for varoa mites and hive beetles every three months or so. We can harvest honey every 2-3 months. We have lost hives and the hives have swarmed. We were lucky once and the hive swarmed just as we got there to inspect it so we were able to capture the swarm and put it in an empty super until we could get a deep for them. There were an extimated 15,000 bees in the swarm. We have a hive that we can hopefully split soon, it has good brood, but we could not get queens earlier. All our bee equipment has to be purchased from the mainland, there are no local suppliers and we get queens from the Big Island. Our advisor said that most of the wild bees are from managed hives that swarmed, but without management most of those will succcumb to disease , mites or hive beetles. We have not seen the native yellow faced bee that used to forage with the honey bees for a few years.

[jal_ut]

I am a beekeeper. Not a big beekeeper, but have had from 1 to 35 colonies. Bees come and go. Last winter all my bees died. Right now I have 31 colonies out in the back yard. It is a good thing to have bees to pollinate the fruit and garden crops. It is also nice to get some honey. The bees are another job and do take some time, but I do enjoy working with them. The rewards are good.

You may want to get a book or two on the subject of beekeeping and do some reading? If you do any scouting "Boy Scouts of America" has a little merit badge beekeeping book that has the basics.

The Hive and the Honey Bee by Dadant is an excellent large book on the subject.

Also ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture by Root

[imafan26]

I help take care of bees at the garden. We have 4 hives, one is a swarm that we recaptured from one of our own hives. We lost a hive a couple of years ago and we are hoping to be able to split the strong one soon. The swarm hive we captured is not doing very well and is weak but queen cells were seen so we are hoping it is trying to requeen.

We have to treat the hives every three months or so with MAQs for small hive beetles and varoa mites. We are hoping to have a harvest soon a couple of the hives are making a lot of honey and are ready to be robbed.

The bees really like the nectar from the fruit orchard and the pollen from the corn tassels. They are on the basil flowers just about everyday. We also have set up hives in the herb garden for leaf cutter bees and bamboo bundles in the trees for carpenter bees. The carpenter bees favor the long purple spikes of the lavender and verbena but they all like the sunflowers and basil and occasionally the fennel when it blooms. Actually they like almost anything that blooms onions, Russian sage, sunflowers, blue daze, allyssum, achillea, basil, oregano and marjoram flowers . The like the honeysuckle vines and passion fruit. They are not particularly fond of the vegetable flowers but they do visit. Our bee instructor says bees that are rented to farms where they are trucked in to polinate pecans for instance suffer for it because there is only one food source. Most of the beekeepers cannot use the honey because of what was sprayed on the orchard and they are lucky to get 1/3 of their hives back alive at the end of the season.
31 hives are a lot. Scott, our instructor, has about 40 hives at the research station that he takes care of. There are about 8 at our garden but only 4 are the ones we take care of. We are not fast it takes us and hour and a half to go through them all. It would probably take us all day to go through 30.

[jal_ut]

Yes, you can spend some money getting set up to keep a few bees. I figure it takes about $300 per colony if you are going to keep them in double body hives and have a super, top and bottom board and the bees them selves. The bees come and go but the equipment lasts a long time.

[imafan26]

$300 may be your cost but a suit, hive body, a couple of supers, frames, hive tool, smoker, bottom board, oil traps and maqs cost about $900 for us because none of it is sourced locally and has to be shipped in from the mainland. Add more for the harvesting equipment. People have built their own top bar hives and that saves a lot on the cost, they are just harder to harvest and you have to be careful lifting out the bar because of the free form comb. We get queens for abut $20 from Hawaii Queens.

The biggest problem we have is that this garden is open to the public and volunteers and you know when bees take off in the morning they like to take off in the same direction. We have had to requeen aggressive queens because they attacked volunteers in the nursery and the orchard. It doesn't help that not everyone knows how to act around bees.

People call us when they have unwanted swarms and there is a number to call where people who want to capture swarms can go out and try to collect the swarm. It has to be collected while they are in a transitional place, it is hard to collect them once they have become established. Collecting swarms are not always that easy, sometimes they just don't like that they did not choose the location and they take off. We were lucky, we saw our hive getting ready to swarm and we saw them swarm to the mulberry bush 25 ft away. We only had supers available so we left the supers in front of the bush for an hour to see if they would go in by themselves. The branch the bees were on was cut and placed near the entrance. It took some coaxing, but once the queen went in the rest followed and we gave them a couple of honey frames from another hive to get them started. There was an estimated 15000 bees in the swarm.

The other hives we have are for solitary bees who don't make honey but can still polinate flowers. We also have a butterfly garden with milkweeds and the butterflies also polinate plants in the gardens. I get fiery skippers in the herb garden all of the time. Midges polinate the cacao tree.
Honey bees will polinate cucurbits but the squash bee is a specialist and it is a solitary bee that prefers squash.
https://www.ars.usda.gov/Research/docs.htm?docid=16595