[Pollinator] Plastic Tote Makes Ideal Bee Nursery

[nancy lee adamson]

STORY LEAD:
Need Wild Bees? Plastic Totes Make A Superb Bee "Nursery"
___________________________________________

ARS News Service
Agricultural Research Service, USDA
Marcia Wood, (301) 504-1662, marcia.wood at ars.usda.gov
March 20, 2009
--View this report online, plus photos and related stories, at
www.ars.usda.gov/is/pr
___________________________________________

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Corporate collaborator Quiedan Co., of Salinas, Calif., helped design and
now sells the support frame and mounting plate unit.

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.

ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture.
___________________________________________

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__________________________________________
ARS News Service, Information Staff, Agricultural Research Service
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