Author Gary Taylor ◦
Still in BeeTown, the Meroglossa rubricata population just keeps growing… So, running out of room to add new apartments without blocking out existing ones… gotta respect your existing tenants 😃…imagine finding your dream home, the perfect sized cottage in a quiet little country town with magnificent views, protected from the elements, cool and shaded from the heat of the day but facing East to capture the morning rays… (“Which way should I face my bee hotel?”, righto, keep in mind that native bees, like me and a lot of other insects, don’t like getting out of bed on cold mornings to go to work. We can’t help it, it’s a metabolic thing… For a bee, starting the day with the energy giving life force of the sun on your face is the best start you could ask for 🙂), then some w⚓️ goes and puts an apartment block up right in front of your house… Not happy Jan… 😆.
So a little while back I added a small chunk of Jam wood (a type of acacia) that I’d drilled a bunch of holes in and stuffed bamboo, 9 vertical tubes in all. Not too imposing… Now every one has a gorgeous little face poking out of it (as in the first 2 pics, 3rd, she’s just stretching her legs, getting out for a bit…), but 9 little faces in 9 new homes, it’s sooo cute… 😄
Ok, so some of you will be simply taking this on board, bees finding their forever home, others will be thinking “Don’t they just cap off their nests and die? 4 week life span…?” And this brings me to the point… Yeah, nah… I mean yeah usually but nah not in this case… 4th pic, that hole in the top right corner was the first nesting site used by a Meroglossa rubricata in my BeeTown over 4 years ago… I was so stoked 😅
But come winter she was still in her hole, hadn’t capped off any nests, hadn’t moved and at one point I thought she must have just died… Was actually about to see if I could cut a small barb on a piece of thin grass with my pocketknife to drag her out… 😁 But thankfully before I did, I tried a simple hard flick with a fingernail right on the side of her house and she damn near shat 😂 She was clearly very much alive and I apologized profusely… 😅 But come spring, she emerged, and behind her, four new Meroglossa… three moved in to nearby holes (the one in the bottom left of pic, one just below that but out of shot in this pic, one moved into a nearby bamboo tube, and one seemed to stay home… Four years on, not once have I ever seen one “cap off” a nest, that same first nesting site seen here and all those since have never once ever (ever! all year round including winter!) not had a Centurian guarding it… I now have about 50 nesting sites each containing at least one (from what I can tell many/most have two or more) Ruby girls, and never seen one cap a nest… Intriguing…
And the fifth pic, more Meroglossa in a pine block, is actually more of a handy tip (from a carpenter) for when it comes to drilling holes for a bee hotel… If you look close, next to the holes you’ll see little shallow drill marks, no that’s not clumsy (whoops, missed again 😆), that’s to clear the flutes on the drill bit…
When you start to drill your hole you’ll feel the drill bit biting in, you don’t even need to push… But it only goes a little way and then stops… that’s ‘cos the flutes (grooves) are clogged… keep the drill spinning but just take the bit out of the hole and give it a gentle poke against the block, it’ll all fall out and your drill bit will work like magic again…
Don’t ever force the drill, if you have to push it it means it’s clogged and forcing it is a pointless (and dangerous) waste of time and money. The hotter that drill bit gets the softer it gets, starting with the once sharp cutting edges… If it’s smokin’ chuck it out… Saw a post months ago of a heat blackened, very bent drill bit that had been used to make bee hotel nests, and apart from wondering whether bees would use a hole that reeked of burnt wood, I saw that drill bit bent, and immediately thought of a mate on the building site that had a 3mm drill bit bend like that, damn near 90 degrees, as he tried to force one more hole out of it, and as it bent he slipped… and the still spinning bent drill bit landed in the crook of his left arm ripping it open and then got all wound up with tendons pulling his hand into a tight little ball… 🤢
Photographs © Gary Taylor
Check out the Gary’s other blogs about the Meroglossa rubricata:
an awesome “Commando roll” | Ruby… bubbling | Ruby and the wasp | Party at the nest | red is the weakest, the first to fade in low light | A white bubble | multicrystaline polyinverted refractionism… | suddenly something bigger came torpedoing out of the nest… | running out of room to add new apartments… | She lives on in her chosen nest protecting the family she’s raising | the young emerge | Changing the rules again…
See our Fauna section on Bees for more info on our gorgeous Meroglossa rubricata.
Footnote & References
- Blogs by Gary Taylor, Images © Gary Taylor