Botanical Bloopers and Bee Boxes
I got into a stupid argument on Facebook (is there any other?) about - of all things - Greater stitchwort, Stellaria holostea. There were lots of people calling it Star of Bethlehem. Which is odd, as the plant I know as Star of Bethlehem, Ornithogalum umbellatum, is similarish but quite easy to tell apart. It's given as an alternative name for Greater stitchwort in Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica, which he says was also known as "snapdragon". There's a snippet about this which seems to have been cut and pasted all over the internet.
It's misleading, and an annoying illustration of the rather haphazard nature of vernacular nomenclature. It's also fairly typical of how facts can be established by the force of repetition - and how prevalent that is in the age of the internet. Was Greater stitchwort ever known as Star of Bethlehem? It certainly is now!
A similar thing has been going on with bee boxes (or "bee hotels"), it turns out. Although we're mostly about plants, bee boxes struck me as being a good thing quite early on in Habitat Aid history, and we've dabbled in them ever since. I've made a few and we've sold a few (not the same ones!). To be clear, by the way, these are solitary bee boxes, not beehives for honeybees or boxes of bumblebees meant for commercial pollination of tomoatoes etc.
They seemed like a good way to help solitary bees, particularly the Red mason bees which are the most common users of them. We've had Blue mason bees and Leafcutter bees in ours too - great fun - and other species are recorded to use them too.
There was a quickly established consensus on where to site the boxes - facing south or southeast, between 1m and 2m off the ground. Then much debate about how deep they should be, and what materials were best. Again, a standard rapidly emerged, with no actual evidence, it turned out.
Although our boxes seemed to be a great success, with sometimes pretty much 100% occupancy, I was always a little wary of them. Surely, if you had a lot of bees in a single site you would also attract a lot of parasites? I loved watching the beautiful but sinister Ruby-tailed wasps around our boxes, but wasn't that a problem? There seemed to be pollen mites in some cells of the nesting tubes, as well as fungal growth. Advice was to reduce the parasite and disease issue by cleaning the tubes and keeping the bee cocoons in a release box. Hmm... things were getting complicated!
I wasn't sure if this all added up to a good idea. People are always keen to sell stuff rather than plants to help wildlife, and it's stuff which often either doesn't work or has unforeseen consequences. My suspicions seemed to be confirmed when a study found that a new product, "bee bricks", didn't really work at all - which, incidentally, was our experience with them. We stopped selling these and also the boxes that did work completely - without any evidence, I wasn't sure about the issues associated with having lots of bees together. The discretionary principle ruled the day.
This was the background to a fascinating webinar about this this a few days ago, hosted by the Indiana Jones of the bee world, Dave Goulson. Dave has formed a thing called the Buzz Club (do join), a citizen science project set up to investigate exactly things like "do bee hotels work?"
The short answer is yes - they do*. Hurrah! And even better, they don't seem to need cleaning out. There's more work needed, but on the face of it some other accepted wisdom seems not to be relevant either.
Solitary bees will nest at almost any height up to 2m, it turns out. I've promptly fixed a box at grandchildren eye level. Box depth over a sensible point doesn't seem to matter, although if necessary it's sensible to stop tubes being pulled out by e.g. woodpeckers by using wire.
I'm pleased. Bee hotels are engaging and educational for humans, so it's nice they actually work too! An unexpected bonus. We're now looking for a new supplier, so if you know anyone please let me know. I won't be advertising for one on Facebook.
*that's the boxes, not the bricks!