Bees, Garden

NZ Gardeners are the key to success!

Keeping food on the table – Raise Amazing Pollinating Leafcutter Bees and increase Bumble Bee numbers.

Garden Harvest

 Bees are vital to our food supply!

Honey bees pollinate 1/3 of our food supply, and another third of the food sources for our meat products. Sole reliance on the troubled honey bee threatens our ability to pollinate fruits and vegetables to feed a growing population. Creative Woodcraft has a simple, but bold solution to help keep food on the table.

And gardeners are the key to success!

Our goal is huge, but doable

  • We will help supplement the honey bee with the overlooked, but superior leafcutter bee pollinator. But we need more of these gentle-natured bees. Our BeeGAP (Gardeners Adding Pollinators) program enlists gardeners to increase awareness, raise leafcutter bees successfully, and pass on excess bees for re-homing to other gardeners.
  • We want to introduce and attract more bumble bees into our gardens. Not only do you get great pollination, your community wins with additional pollinators as they spread each season.

How You Can Help

Gardeners are early adapters to healthy and better gardening practices. We offer lots of ways for how you can make a difference, and change the way we all pollinate our food.

Get involved and help us increase our leafcutter bee and bumble bee numbers.
It’s easy to sign up for “Bee-Mail”



Bees

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Bumble Bees-Buy with confidence! We sell bumblebee hives to pollinate Gardens!

Bumble-A-Bode occupied

Healthy Bumble Bees.

  • Perfect for garden, fruit and vegetable pollination.
  • Mild-mannered large earth bumblebee, Bombus terrestris are raised for gardeners and commercial growers.

Your bumble bee hive includes:

  • Approximately 80 worker bees and one healthy queen.
  • Plastic ventilated container with a removable roof.
  • You will need to add a protective housing that is weather resistant. Consider a Bumble-A-Bode from Creative Woodcraft.
  • Instructions for setting up and raising your bumble bees.

Bumble Bee Features:

  • Available all year round for outdoor pollination and greenhouse use. Our suppliers are able to produce and provide hives any week of the year, which is especially important for the glasshouse grower, and means the gardener gets great quality fruits and vegetables all year round!
  • Super pollinator for fruit trees, tomato hot houses, vegetable gardens and flowers.

Lifespan:

  • If conditions are right they may pollinate for 8 weeks or more! perfect for most garden pollination needs.
  • Efficient pollinator that gathers pollen from nearby plants, but can forage for kilometres if needed.

As the queen nears the end of her life, she produces multiple queens, 20 to 30 on average who set up their own hives elsewhere. Not only do you get great pollination, your community wins with additional pollinators as they spread each season. “So consider adding a few extra bumble bee nesting boxes to provide suitable additional habitat for the newly emerging queens”

Research:

  • Evidence has shown that new queens that emerge from man-made hives may indeed be attracted to other similar man-made hives within which to start their own nests.

Shipping:

  • Hives are 100% self-contained, with no need for any ongoing maintenance. The bumble bees are provided with sufficient sugar solution to last the life of the hive, which is pre-packaged at the base of the hive box. Hives are delivered to your door by courier service (shipped overnight)
  • Shipped in specially designed box to ensure healthy bees.

Since the cardboard box is not weatherproof, we suggest you purchase a Bumble-A-Bode, perfectly sized to accommodate the specially designed cardboard box. “And looks just great in your garden!” It is built to last and can be used over and over again!!

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Bees, Garden

The bee kingdom has both social and solitary bees

The bee kingdom has two different types of bees; social (honey bees, bumble bees), and solitary (where every female is a queen and they assume all duties.)

The bee kingdom lives in three types of environments; hives they create (honey bees, paper wasps), holes in the ground (bumble bees, miner bees) and holes in trees & reeds (mason bees, leaf cutters).  There are Thousands of species of bees, hornets, and wasps throughout the world!

In general, social bees, hornets, and wasps work in a community where each has their own job.  Where we get in trouble is with the hive defenders.  “Protect the queen & our babies” is their rallying cry!  And stinging occurs…

The solitary bee, on the other hand, has no workers and little to defend.  If she guarded her nest, she wouldn’t be able to gather pollen.  As a result, it’s EXTREMELY hard to get stung by a solitary bee!  When your hand or head gets in the way of her hole, she simply SONY DSChovers, goes around you, or flies away to find her hole later.

At Creative Woodcraft we offer a range of Pollination solutions for the home gardener and owners of small holdings that are fun, affordable and will increase your garden harvest and benefit your flower gardens!

Bees, Garden, Media

The lucerne leafcutting bee in New Zealand

The lucerne leafcutting bee Megachile rotundata was introduced to New Zealand from North America by me beginning in 1971 for management as a specialist pollinator of lucerne flowers for production of seed. A specialist pollinating bee was needed because although honey bees readily visit lucerne flowers, they collect mainly nectar and avoid `tripping’ a spring-loaded reproductive column which can deliver a debilitating punch to the soft-bodied bees. Consequently the flowers are not pollinated. The short-tongued bumble bee Bombus terrestris which has a more resistant body will readily trip the flowers, but there are rarely sufficient bumble bees to pollinate most of the flowers. Female lucerne leafcutting bees are more strongly built than honey bees, and will trip more than 10 flowers a minute as they collect pollen (and nectar) for their larvae.

Lucerne leafcutting bees were imported as overwintering prepupae (the mature larval form in cells), and adult bees were hatched in quarantine so all foreign insect enemies could be removed. Consequently our bees are free of all the pests that reduce their numbers in other parts of the world. However, and unfortunately for us, one native parasitic insect which normally attacks tube-nesting mason wasps and sometimes tube-nesting native bees will also attack leafcutting bees, but it can be controlled by storing the bee nests in a fridge right after nesting ceases by about early April, until placement back in the field by about early November.

The introduced leafcutting bees thrived through the 1980s and where we had sufficient numbers on flowering lucerne, large increases in seed yield resulted. However the disestablishment of the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in mid 1992 caused the collapse of our project, and without scientific and management support the leafcutting bee population collapsed. Additionally, grapes for wine began to take over former lucerne seed crops, and seed began to be imported, so the demand for pollinating bees fell.

Several years ago interest in leafcutting bees (and other species of bees) began increasing again because of the threats facing honey bees, and so efforts are being made to increase the numbers of leafcutting bees for wide distribution. Leafcutting bees can be valuable pollinators of a range of flowers, and because the females are not aggressive and the bees can be easily managed, they can be readily utilized by home gardeners and owners of small holdings for interest and fun.

Barry Donovan

Donovan Scientific Insect Research

Canterbury Agriculture and Science Centre

Lincoln.

18 September 2014.

Bees, Garden

The Gentle and Garden-Pollinating Leafcutting Bees

Link

The lucerne leafcutting  bee became a hero in New Zealand after being introduced from North America in 1971 to help pollinate the lucerne flowers for the production of seed.

Its gentle nature and efficient pollination make it ideal for late summer vegetables and flowers. The leafcutter bee is solitary and gregarious. This means the females will nest very close together, one of the main characteristics for managed pollinators. This busy, small bee is a great summer garden addition.

The leafcutter bee is a productive pollinator for summer gardens and flowers.

The female carries pollen on the underside of her hairy abdomen, and then scrapes the pollen off within her nesting hole. Because the pollen is carried dry on her hair, it falls off easily as she moves among flowers. This results in significantly more pollinated flowers than her cousin, the honey bee, who wets the pollen so it sticks to the legs during transport to the hive.

To Learn more about this important pollinator…                                               The lucerne leafcutting bee in New Zealand. By Barry Donovan (Donovan Scientific Insect Research)