Establishing Squash Bees in Your Garden

By the time honeybees get their lazy striped butts out of the hive and start their daily commute to my garden, squash bees have been at work for a couple of hours pollinating my squash.  There is so little pollen left that the honey bees seldom bother to visit the blossoms.

Squash Bee with pollen-covered legs

Squash Bee with distinctive narrow-striped abdomen

How do they do it?  Squash bees live where they work, and turn the blooms into a singles bar. The male bees hang around in the blossoms, waiting for unfertilized females to show up.  Towards noon the males and any unfertilized females enter a male blossom and let it close around them.  At dawn, when the next blossoms are opening, the bees chew through the walls of their overnight hostel and continue their search for a mate.

Withered male flowers are overnight refuges

Instead of a long commute back to a hive with the pollen, a fertilized female squash bee digs a nest close to the squash plants.  She stuffs one of the chambers with pollen, lays one egg on the pollen and seals that chamber.

Squash Bee with pollen-covered legs

The fertilized females spend the afternoons digging nest chambers to fill with pollen the next day. They live in a nest until the chambers are all complete, then make a new one.

Squash bee nest hole

So how do you attract these wonderful creatures to your garden?  Plant squash, of course, and have some bare, untilled dirt next to the squash for the nests.  Read more!

Flowers! And Bugs!

Enough of construction and problem solving!  I have flowers to brag about ... Russian sage, hollyhocks, penstemons and gaillardia blooming between my patio and the fence in a gaudy mess.  
This is the traditional New Mexico style flower garden, where you plant a lot of things and let them fight for room. My long term plan is to extend this planting along the fence to the right, as time and available compost permit.

The Russian sage has dozens of bees, and an occasional butterfly.  These cream or white ones with spots are common.  An orange sherbet colored one taunts me and dodges the camera.

 

And on another wall, Zebra hollyhocks (Malva sylvestris) in a small planting area between patio and barbecue grill. There are also gaura and salvia for the hummingbirds.
 

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Gimme Shelter! Queen's Wreath (Antigonon leptopus)

We needed shade for the west wall of the house to keep the electric bills down, so we built an arbor. Then came the discussion of what to grow on it.

• We wanted pretty flowers, if possible.
• We wanted native plants if possible.
• We needed a thornless vine
• We needed heat loving vines that would cover the arbor for the summer.
• We wanted a perennial vine to come back every year.
• We needed a drought tolerant vine in case we slacked on the watering.

TAH DAH!!!!  The winner was Queen's Wreath Vine (Antigonon leptopus), an  incredibly hardy, fast-growing, flamboyantly blooming native from the lower parts of the Sonoran desert.

Unlike the "other native", Cat's Claw (Macfadyena unguis-cati), Queens wreath is frost-tender and dies back to the ground every winter.  It's a less aggressive grower and can be controlled with occasional pruning.

Except for the trees ... It goes from the arbor to the old orange tree and covers it like a hat. This doesn't appear to harm the tree, and the oranges ripen under the vine.  We pull the vine out when the oranges are ripe.

Queen's Wreath Covering Orange Tree
(the tree is the mound at the left)

Are Bees a Problem?

Queen's Wreath attracts bees, dozens of honey bees and wild alkali bees - it's a great way to attract pollinators to your garden all summer long. 

Because it's growing on an arbor, the flowers are all "up there" and so are the bees. You can sit under the arbor and listen to the bees, but they stay with the flowers.

Self-Seeding

This is a prolific seed-producer. The quail and other seed-eating birds forage under the arbor most of the year, gorging on seeds.  They don't find them all, and those that land in a moist spot will germinate.

They pop up all over the yard, but they are easy to recognize and pull up.

Volunteer Queen's Wreath Seedlings
(after a summer of unusually heavy rains)

Removing the Dead Vines

We need to remove the vines every year or they build up a heavy, ugly dead mess on the arbor. The stems tend to lie on top of an arbor instead of twining through the mesh. We left space between the top of the vertical mesh and the side of the top mesh to make vine removing easier, and there is a foot or so between the top mesh and the wall of the house.

Removing the old vines in early winter is easy. Don't let them get dry and brittle.

1. Trim off all dangling vines at the top and edges of the trellis or arbor.
2. Roll up any mat of vines that is on top of an arbor and toss it in the compost heap. A rake works well to get the mat going.
   You may need to clip a few stems, but Queen's Wreath is more of a sprawler than a clinging vine on a horizontal lattice or mesh.
3. If you have room, get behind the trellis and cut the stems that you can find passing behind the trellis.
4. If the trellis is large, cut the stems to divide the growth into vertical sections 3 or 4 feet wide.
5. Start pulling the vines down from the sunny side.  I use a rake and pull from the top down, rolling the vines as I pull.  This removes most of the growth. 
6. Cut the stems close to the roots.
7. That's it until next year.

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Apian Orgies! Bees Shamelessly Wallowing in Pollen

Wild Pollinators

In honor of May Day: One of the local bees wallowing in my cactus flowers. It's a leaf-cutter bee, the ones that leave your roses and bougainvillia in tatters.

Watch the bee's hind legs as she stands on her head to gather the pollen. They do not have pollen baskets like the European honey bees, so they pack pollen onto the hairs on their abdomens. The front legs hold onto the filament at the base of the stamen and the back legs scrape pollen off the anthers.

It's the same clip, run at normal speed, slow-motion and slow + zoom.

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