I was removing the dirt from a failed strawberry pot and out came all these little flower-tubes. At first because of the bright colors I thought they were old fake flowers that found their way into the potting mix somehow, but then I looked closer and saw they were little bee nests made of bougainvillea. Out here in Phoenix, our native bees are solitary bees that build little tubes out of cut up leaves and flower petals and put them into small cracks or holes. For whatever reason a bunch of them thought my strawberry pot was a good location. I'm making a bee house (a chunk of wood with holes drilled into it) and I'm going to transfer these and hopefully attract more.
You can see from the pictures that they make a perfectly shaped tube with the bottom sealed off and then it's sealed off above where the eggs are as well. It's hard to believe that a little bee made this. I'm impressed.
The baby chicks should be here in less than a week!
6 comments:
Hunh. Didn't know our bees did that. What crazy little buggers.
Wow...very interesting pictures. Those are just amazing little houses they make. And colorful, too!
How beautiful! Smart little bees. Martha Stewart would surely envy that perfection and color scheme!
That's so cool!
that's amazing! i found a similar bouganvilla tube which had made its way to my front door. I had no idea what it was and had never seen anything like this before so i gently pulled it apart only to find some sort of white paste inside. At first i thought this was some kind of holistic snack someone had dropped on the floor! It was so well made so i decided to save it and tuck it in a drawer to ask a friend of mine if she knew what it could be. When i reached for it a week later it had bursted open and 3 little dead bees were laying next to it :( If i had known this was a nest i would have left it alone. Now i know, and these little bees have sure taught me a lesson about their beautiful craft :)
For years I have wittnessed bees toting fluroscent colored items about (I've seen pink, green, blue and yellow). I often wondered what the heck they were doing! I knew they were solitary bees and figured they might be building nests, but had no idea what the material was. Now I know. How cool!
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