By George! - A Blog!

This is the season for a lot of creatures waking up out of a winter snooze. Lizards, ground squirrels, even snakes and certainly a lot of insects.

 Bees come out of hiding as soon as warm temperatures and rains set weed plants a-flowering. They want nectar for energy and pollen for food for their young.  In the process of collecting they pollinate flowers, probally without realizing it but the flowers turn into seeds and that keeps the plants from extinction.

There are thousands of species of bees, some are solitary, digging little nests in the ground or finding a hole in woodwork or creating a colony in trees’ branches or on our porches. We have Bumble Bees,Carpenter bees that excavate for a nest in house trim, Leafcutter Bees that neatly cut out semi-circles on rose leaves, and others, to carry to a little tube (sometimes a keyhole) that they fill with eggs and the leaves for food for their young.

The social bees and wasps actually build and care for communal nests.  Paper wasps attach their home to our home by glueing their papermade cluster to anything handy to them, but not for us.  Wasps have a fierce sting and they attack suddenly.  You don’t want a hanging basket near the front door where wasps will build, for example.  Using a long stick you need to poke off the nest before it gets large  and be sure to break off the attaching “pedestal” or stalk because they’ll come back and use it to build a replacement nest.  Dead, drooping palm fronds are a favorite place for these wasps to build nests.

Wasps may not do much pollinating but they are active predators, eating up aphids and mealy bugs and any pest that is soft and nutritious. They are a valuable non-chemical pest control  because of this and they won’t bother you while you are tending to your bedding plants or vegetables.  But don’t irritate them by swatting at them.

 This warning applies to bees and wasps  and flies that get into the house. Simply open a window or a door and they’ll go out on their own because they are reaching for the sunshine.

Everyone loves honey bees, or they should, until they read alarmist journalists writing about “Killer bees”.  However, it’s true that Africanized bees are a dangerous threat to our peace of mind. By this time practically all of our local bees are tainted with this condition, though it’s taken ten years or so for it to reach us from South America.

Any day now you may see a black cluster of bees hanging on a tree branch or even a porch rafter.  Simply stay away for a day or two and they’ll be gone.  Actually they are so full of stored food that they can’t bend to sting you (so the entomologists say) and they are simply waiting for their scouts to come back with a message that they have found a suitable place to build a permanent home.

Besides, Africanized bees only become aggressive after they have built a nest. They excercise their instincts by meeting any attack by defending it. They respond to a barking dog, lawn mowers, noisy leaf blowers, hammering, any unusual racket, and even the smell of horses and some people, by “going after them”.

After you’ve found out where their nest is, stay away and call a pest exterminator who takes the risk of being stung and knows what to do.  If you see bees going through a hole in the wall and into your structure, don’t try anything yourself. Call the pest exterminator.

While you are doing garden chores among the bees while they are collecting pollen or nectar there’s no need to get anxious.  They are too busy “doing their thing” to worry about you, unless you try to wave them away.  If you are more nervous than they are, simply go away and do something else.

If you like good honey and want to keep bees you’ll need to find a queen and a packet of bees from an area where there are no Africanized feral bees.  It can be done and its a rewarding hobby.