Insects galore in my garden

I live in a cottage in a garden that used to belong to a bee-keeper, which means there are plenty of plants around which flower in succession for a variety of insect life, especially bees. This year, however, I feel more than ever that I am just incidental to the other life here – it has taken over!

First the bees swarmed round a chimney, and strayed into the sitting-room. I looked up the Beekeeper’s Association on the internet and found that there was a beekeeper who dealt with swarms of bees allocated to each postcode in my county. Lucky me! Mine had to travel some distance, and was very friendly and reassuring. He strode into the sitting-room, opened the window, and said, “Off you go, ladies!” I had to tape newspaper to the outside of the non-opening windows then they all flew straight out of the open one. He couldn’t remove the bees, as they’d already gone down the chimney, but he taped up the underside of my stove’s chimney, as bees can get through quarter-inch gaps, and told me how to get rid of the bees if I needed to. I haven’t needed to so far – they are nesting in an old flue, blocked up, and haven’t paid me a visit since then, though they can be seen flying round the chimney during the day. Because of varroa eroding a bee’s resistance, they will apparently be dead within 18 months, so I hope they live well till then.

I spoke to the beekeeper about my other problem – the wasps nesting under the back porch. Theoretically this shouldn’t be happening, as they have nested there before and been poisoned there too, but these have come back and built new cones onto the nest – a real wasp ‘des res’ with extensions! He said I could get rid of them, but that it might not be worth it, as by September they’d be dead anyway. And I’d watched a ‘Springwatch’ programme which enthused about wasps being natural pest preventers and much maligned.. so they’ve stayed as well, and haven’t been a problem so far. I do avoid eating jammy scones outside the porch though…

Then as if all this insect action wasn’t enough, I took a seedling out of its pot in the greenhouse and all these green leaf capsules fell out. I was a bit horrified at first, thought ‘mullein moth’ and put them in the bin. But that evening, another thought, ‘leafcutter bee’, (see right) came to me and I looked that up on the internet and found to my horror that a bee had carefully constructed those capsules and laid an egg in a sac of nectar inside each one. The capsules were each lidded with beautifully-cut round leaf lids.

Next morning I took the capsules out of the bin and planted them ‘in a south-facing frost-free place’ as advised, near a large ornamental grass, which I hope will protect it. I tried to bury them in twos, one on top of the other, as per the diagram I looked up on http://crawford.tardigrade.net/bugs/BugofMonth23.html
That I thought was that – until I saw the leafcutter bee herself, come back to a ‘south-facing, frost-free’ environment – my greenhouse! She spent a lot of time burrowing in the seed modules underneath various precious seedlings (She's in the module on the right in the righthand photo). Then she left – last seen frantically gathering nectar and pollen on a scabious. I look for her every day. Her energy and industry inspires me. If she comes back I will sacrifice the seedlings she's burrowed under!