VAL BOURNE’S GARDEN WILDLIFE
Val explains the importance of the red mason bee
WE grow three apple varieties and this year we’ve had a brilliant crop. The varieties are the aromatic D’Arcy Spice (Essex – pre-1818), a golden russet evocatively named ‘Pitmaston Pine Apple’ (Worcestershire – 1785) and the cooker-eater ‘Blenheim Orange’ (Oxfordshire – 1818). We didn’t go for heritage deliberately. I just loved the flavour of these varieties and, as they all keep well, I gave them a go.
My trees are 12 years old now, but I nearly took the ‘Blenheim Orange’ out because it hadn’t produced a crop in the ten years it’s been in the garden. It must have heard me muttering, for this year it was so loaded it broke a branch. I’ve found out since that ‘Blenhiem Orange’ is very slow to produce its first crop. This, and the fact that it’s thin-skinned, makes it unsuitable for commercial purposes.
All three varieties need to be crosspollinated and they are all in Group D, so they flower more or less at the same time. The bees must have done their work this year to produce such a crop, and one of the best pollinators of apples and pears is the red mason bee (Osmia bicornis). I am a red mason bee Guardian and every spring I’m sent cocoons from MasonBees UK (see offer on page 12). These hatch into bees and I have a special house on the southfacing wall. The idea is that the bees produce new cocoons and hopefully fill the bee tubes. Once they are full, the bees cap them with mud, and I send them back in September.
My normal tally of full tubes is about a dozen, although some cocoons are usually parasitised so on average I raise 40-50 viable cocoons. This year I only had four full tubes, possibly due to the dry weather making it hard for the bees to find damp mud. I got excited because some of the other tubes had been stuffed with foliage and I thought leaf-cutter bees might have moved in. Unfortunately, there were no cocoons among the foliage. Perhaps the hot summer and very little mud led to improvisation.
The red mason bee is a native solitary bee found naturally in lowland England and Wales. Like many solitary bees it doesn’t have any pollen sacs, so most of the sticky pollen is deposited on the furry underside of the body, suspended like a yellow carpet. Whenever these swiftly moving bees enter a flower, pollen is transferred to the next and so on, in the blink of an eye. Consequently, the red mason bee is calculated to be between 120 and 200 times more efficient at pollinating than the honey bee. These reddish-looking bees don’t sting and they’re the only bees allowed on allotments.
“The red mason bee is a native solitary bee”