Columbia Gorge bee habitat

Driving home from Corbett along the Columbia Gorge on Saturday I was struck by what great Osmia lignaria habitat there is along the highway. Big leaf maple was in full bloom - the lime green trees in the photo on the left. O. lignaria loves it. It has tons of pollen in small light green flowers in long racemes. I think it also has some nectar, but I'm not sure.

Plus there were periodic wild cherry or plum trees scattered along the side of the road all the way from Corbett to Hood River. Bees are probably nest limited in this area. I'll bet a transect of bee nests along the highway would yield lots of bees, if anyone has a few cocoons to seed the area wants to take the time and the mileage to set them up and take them down.

That reminds me; any of our readers from western Oregon, Northern California, and western Washington can be on the lookout for O. aglaia during cane fruit bloom. They are smaller than the blue orchard bee, and come in metallic blue, green and bronze colors. Hopefully we'll have good photos later this season. So far we haven't any proof that this species is present in Washington, so we will be very interested if anyone can prove that they are there. Good photos will help, but ultimately we'll need either adults collected from the flowers or cocoons from nests with good location records. We know they visit Himalayan Blackberry, so that's a good place to look for them during bloom.

Placing trap nests

In addition to placing our main bee shelter in the field this past Saturday, we also placed small trap-nest Binderboard around the periphery of the fields to see if we can attract Osmia aglaia or other cane fruit pollinators to manageable nests. The bees that use our trap nests will be added to our main managed population next year.

The first place that we visited was a neighbor's barn on the south side of the Sturm's field. We had a few Binderboard there in 2007, and we attracted Osmia lignaria to nest, plus some other species. It's a great place for O. lignaria because south of the barn is a small grove of wild cherry or plum trees, in full bloom last Saturday. Plus, the barn is just the sort of environment where twig nesting bees look for tunnels in wood. This time we introduced some additional O. lignaria cocoons, as well as one 98-hole Osmia Binderboard and one 63-hole Binderboard facing the blooming trees. With any luck, the bees will emerge soon and forage on the cherry, then move over to the raspberry field when it comes into bloom. The photo shows the east side of the barn. We put two small Binderboard, one 14-hole Osmia Binderboard for O. lignaria and one 39-hole leafcutter Binderboard for O. aglaia, on the top left corner of the pile of wood. Click on the photo to see it full resolution., You can just make out the angle of the metal roofs of the Binderboard. They are far enough from the released bees that we can hope they will be used by the native bee population.

Next we drove around the west side of the farm, and left a few small Binderboard on fence posts near large patches of Himalayan Blackberry just outside the farm boundary. That's Rosie in the red plaid jacket putting hooks into a rotting tree stump. Tree trunks are often a good place for trap nests, because beetles attack the tree in the first few years after it dies. However, this tree trunk was in a more advanced stage of decomposition; perhaps too decomposed to attract nesting bees. We'll see.
Joyce Mills (in blue jacket) helped place a Binderboard on a fence post. We put 39-hole leafcutter Binderboard at all of the sites where we stopped, 6 in all. We also put a 14-hole Osmia Binderboard on the tree trunk above and on one of the fence posts near a flowering cherry tree (last photo - flowering tree in the middle right of the frame).

We left the Sturms with 6 more 39-hole and 2 more 14-hole Binderboard to take to their farm in Nahalem. Rosie put most of them out on Sunday. Thanks, Rosie!

Our Project Begins!

We visited Sturm Berry Farm on Saturday, April 25, 2009, to choose a location for our main bee shelter where we will introduce the O. aglaia that were collected last year. We were joined by Mike Carter (left in the photo) who has volunteered to help us set up a webcam to observe the bee shelter and bloom so that those of us who are not in Corbett can advise the Sturms about managing the bees, and others who are interested can also watch. Mike has a company appropriately called "Beeline Services", and he has experience with security cameras, IT systems, and photography, as well as an interest in bee keeping. It's the perfect combination of skills for our project. Mike is hoping to put together a system involving a solar-powered wireless net cam.

At Rosie Sturm's suggestion, we set up our bee shelter under one of the powerlines that runs through the middle of the farm. The shelter faces south, and Mike plans to attach the netcam to a post just south of the shelter, looking north.
In the photo left you can see the white roof of the Sturm's barn about 400 ft away to the northeast. The Sturms have a computer and router in an office in the barn. Mike plans to install a "rubber duck" on the top of an electric pole just outside the barn which will pick up wireless signals from the webcam.

We left 4 large Binderboard nests inside the shelter, ready for introduction of Osmia aglaia.
The bees are warming up in the Sturm's home, where they will experience higher night temperatures than in the field. This should speed their emergence. If the raspberry is in bloom when the bees are ready to emerge, Rosie will move them to the bee shelter. If the bees start to emerge before bloom, she will put the cocoons back in the refrigerator to delay emergence for a few days .