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STORY LEAD:<br>
Need Wild Bees? Plastic Totes Make A Superb Bee "Nursery"<br>
___________________________________________<br><br>
ARS News Service<br>
Agricultural Research Service, USDA<br>
Marcia Wood, (301) 504-1662,
<a href="mailto:marcia.wood@ars.usda.gov">marcia.wood@ars.usda.gov</a><br>
March 20, 2009<br>
--View this report online, plus photos and related stories, at
<a href="http://www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr">www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr</a><br>
___________________________________________<br><br>
Corrugated plastic bins like the kind sold for handling mail and packages
can be quickly and easily converted into a durable "nursery"
for wild bees, according to an Agricultural Research Service (ARS)
research entomologist.<br><br>
James H. Cane, with the agency's Pollinating Insects Biology, Management
and Systematics Research Unit in Logan, Utah, says that female wild bees
will readily use a properly placed, suitably furnished tote as a shelter
for their nests. Turned on their long side, the totes can be held firmly
in place on a wooden or metal post by means of a lightweight steel chain
and a customized metal support frame.<br><br>
Cane came up with the idea of using corrugated plastic totes--available
from suppliers of mail and package handling equipment--as nesting
shelters, and has tested them during spring and summer in California,
Oregon, Wyoming and Utah. His experiments show that the lightweight,
rectangular bins, each 23-1/2 inches long by 15-1/2 inches wide by 15-1/2
inches high, serve as a sturdy, inexpensive and reusable shelter for
protecting bee nests against wind and rain.<br><br>
Growers, professional and hobbyist beekeepers, and backyard gardeners who
want wild bees to live near and work in their fields, orchards, vineyards
or home gardens can use the totes to house nesting materials, such as
five-sixteenths-inch diameter paper drinking straws enclosed in cardboard
tubes and stuffed inside empty cardboard milk cartons. Wild female bees
such as the blue orchard bee, Osmia lignaria, can use the straws as homes
for a new generation of pollinators.<br><br>
Wild bees are needed now, perhaps more than ever, to help with jobs
usually handled by America's premier pollinator, the European honey bee,
Apis mellifera. Many of the nation's honey bee colonies have been
decimated by the puzzling colony collapse disorder or weakened by varroa
and tracheal mites or the microbes that cause diseases such as chalkbrood
and foulbrood.<br><br>
A single corrugated plastic tote can accommodate as many as 3,000 young,
enough to pollinate one-half to one-acre of orchard. And, unlike bulky or
stationary shelters, the tote houses can easily be moved from one site to
the next.<br><br>
Corporate collaborator Quiedan Co., of Salinas, Calif., helped design and
now sells the support frame and mounting plate unit.<br><br>
Cane published the shelter research for the first time in a July 2006
article in American Bee Journal. The totes are now being used in
California and for Cane's own research in Oregon.<br><br>
ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.<br>
___________________________________________<br><br>
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__________________________________________<br>
<font color="#888888">ARS News Service, Information Staff, Agricultural
Research Service<br>
5601 Sunnyside Ave., Room 1-2251, Beltsville MD 20705-5128<br>
<a href="mailto:NewsService@ars.usda.gov">NewsService@ars.usda.gov</a> |
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