I have an umbrella on my cottage deck. Where the handle turns, there are a number of holes. Last August, I noticed an extremely busy bee, actually, a wasp. It spent the whole day filling up one of the holes with bits of leaf and little round balls of something. It seems like a very small place to build a nest, but is that what it was doing?—Linda Ondrack, Bay Lake, Ont.
Your initial thought was right. “If the insect was collecting leaf material and stuffing it in those small holes, it was likely a bee, not a wasp,” says Rob Currie, a professor in the department of entomology at the University of Manitoba. He thinks you saw a leafcutting bee (family Megachilidae). “There are several species. The bees collect leaf material to line a cell in which they lay an egg,” he explains. “They then provision that cell with nectar and pollen, which the developing bee consumes.” The bee inside the cell overwinters there and, in the spring, chews its way out. Ta-da!
Unlike social bees—honeybees, for example—solitary bees, such as leafcutters, don’t live in hives. Instead, they use natural openings, like tree cavities, or human-made holes (like the ones in your deck umbrella pole) as incubation chambers. Each egg gets its own incubator.
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Don’t worry. Leafcutter bees aren’t harmful; even though they “cut” small semicircles out of leaves, that doesn’t hurt the tree. And they don’t get aggro if you’re close to their nest—er, incubators. Females do have a stinger and will sting if you “handle her roughly.” But the sting is more like what a mosquito would inflict. And why would you handle a bee roughly? Or at all?
If you want to support these bees—and you do, because they’re pollinators—you could give them a dedicated spot to lay their eggs. You can make the Cottage Life bee box project (it’s easy). You’ll help the environment. And hopefully, get your umbrella back.
Got a question for Cottage Q&A? Send it to answers@cottagelife.com.
This article was originally published in the August 2024 issue of Cottage Life.
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