Tales from the allotment

My achievements down at the allotment are modest compared with some of the retired enthusiasts who devote many hours to their plots each week. Nevertheless, I get a lot of fun from it, along with abundant fresh fruit and vegetables. Each year there are successes and failures – this year I was so excited to be growing cauliflowers with heads bigger than table tennis balls, but in the last week, the heads seem to be rotting away, all blotchy and grey and brown. Huh! Maybe next year ……

Anyway, I get plenty pleasure with or without the cauliflowers, watching the visitors to the plot. There are always slow worms in the compost heap, and the ornithologists a few plots along point out any unusual birds. And of course there are always plenty bees. We inherited a fine bed of globe artichoke. I like artichokes, but have to admit that it is a lot of work getting the edible bit to the table, and as for the blackfly – quel horreur, mes amis! But the real payback comes with the flowers, which are the most glorious and stately thistle-type purple blooms. They are a magnet for bees. Sometimes you will get ten bumble bees on the same bloom, burrowing deep into the flower head to get their reward, a sight that I look forward to every year.

And as usual, my friend Serendipity injected an extra note of interest this year when the tenancy of an adjacent plot changed. Our new neighbour is Chinese, with interesting ways of gardening and novel plants. For instance, he grows bonsai trees on the allotment – true – and explained in detail the difference in philosophies between Chinese and Japanese bonsai. (I didn’t point out that this year I am specialising in bonsai sweet corn.) I also remarked on a fine bed of evening primrose on his plot, and asked what he used it for. Nothing, was the answer, he just likes growing it. And so do I. It grew more or less wild in our garden for years, and on summer evenings as the sun was going down, I used to wander down the garden to watch the flowers open. The flowers are big and yellow, and during the day are rolled up like little umbrellas. As the evening approaches, one by one the flowers unravel and open in front of your eyes. You can easily watch the whole process in a few minutes. It’s fantastic. Bees will visit it, but it is a moth-pollinated plant, and the pollen is not bee-friendly. It comes off the stamens in sticky hairy strands which the bees really struggle with.

You can see how easily distracted I am. Instead of seriously tackling the bindweed a few days ago, which was my intention, I had more fun with a swarm. I know what you’re thinking – bees again – but no. This wasn’t my bees about to move into a neighbour’s chimney, or someone else’s bees moving into some equipment of mine. These were ants. It was the shimmering that caught my eye. The nest was under the well-trodden pathway where winged males and females were crawling to the surface, having a few minutes crawling in the grass then taking to the air. Unlike bees, this is not a colony moving en masse to a new home, but rather it is the emergence of a sexual generation, a mass mating flight. Successful females will shed their wings and found new colonies; successful males have done their work and will die shortly afterwards. And life on the allotment continues its cycle……….

Next year will be my cauliflower year.

Serendipity

Serendipity (otherwise known as Hayley) sent me an email as I was pondering how to start this bee blog, and provided me with a perfect topic. (Thank you!) ‘What are these bees doing in the windchimes?’ was the query, referring to a couple of attached photos. Well, I muse, how lucky you are to have them in the windchimes. The pictures show a mother solitary bee building a nest for her young, but let’s backtrack a little first.

Mention the word bee and the first thing that comes to mind is honeybees. They live in a family, cooperating over housekeeping, rearing young, building comb, looking after a queen, and collecting pollen and nectar. They produce honey which keeps the whole colony alive over winter.

Alternatively you may think of bumble bees, big, fluffy, colourful creatures. They have a lot in common with honeybees, living communally, supporting a queen who lays all the eggs in the nest. The colony does not survive the winter however. At a certain stage in the summer, new queens are produced, along with some male bees, and the colony declines. Only new queens survive the winter by hibernating. In spring a single queen starts the whole process single-handed.

But by far the great majority of bees are solitary, with very limited if any communal life. The bee in the windchimes is a leafcutter bee – an appropriate name. (The species is probably Megachile centuncularis or Megachile willughbiella – I would need to ask an expert.) This female emerged from the nest maybe a month ago. She mated fairly soon after and searched for a cavity suitable to lay eggs in. The windchime is perfect, but they will use any convenient hole – a beetle boring in a tree, a woodpecker hole, hollow plant stems, and so on. I have seen them fill nail holes, holes in garden furniture, locks, hose pipes and outdoor taps.

She remodels the cavity to her satisfaction. First she cuts discs of leaf from whichever plants the species favours. These discs are pushed to the far end of the cavity, so they form a pad. Next comes a spectacular feat of muscles and dexterity. She precisely cuts long pieces of leaf with her jaws and flies back trailing each piece, which she wrestles into the hole to create a cigar-shaped roll. Inside that she puts pollen and lays an egg. Then she seals the cell with many more round pieces. She repeats the process until the tube of the windchimes has anything up to twenty young. She never sees her young, as they remain in the cells, slowly developing over the next eleven months. Next year the young will bite their way out of the nest, ready to start the cycle again. 

What a bonus to have in the garden. I look forward to reporting on their progress.

Matt Beewatcher