summer is acomin' in...

[twoeleven]

...but it's still early spring here. so, while the mason bees are starting to look for action because it's freakishly warm, only crocuses are blooming. and i don't have more nesting tubes for the bees' little house besides; they're on their way. so, the bees are still in a tray in the garage, or were.

the bees that wouldn't sit still long enough for me to put them on ice (well, a cold pack over the empty house where their pupae and now active adults are) were summarily dumped carefully placed in the garden. their odds there are pretty slim, but thems way better odds than the ones they'd have gotten roaming around in the garage.

until more flowers open, i can feed them sugar-water. the recommended route involves cotton balls, but since we don't have any of those, but do have raw wool yarn that dïe überblønde never got around to spinning, i'm gonna try that.

curiously, some of the nesting cells were filled with tiny wasps, all dead. this suggests parasitism, but dying with one's host doesn't seem especially selective. i wonder if they were parasites of some other kind of bee, and didn't realize that the larvae they'd laid eggs in would be sealed up in mud-walled cells.

Comments

[corvi]

Huh, interesting.