Now every tree can be a birdfeeder. No other food attracts more birds than
Jim's Birdacious Bark Butter.
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Insects play an important role in our ecosystem. Many insect species are beneficial to our gardens. Usually insects will find their own homes in our yards and gardens, but we can also help and encourage some of them by providing additional nesting material and sites and by creating backyard habitats.
Honey Bees are very common backyard flying insects. Because Honey Bees are facing problems such as lack of habitat and mites that are reducing their numbers, it is important to provide habitat for them. Honey Bees are colonial insects and live in hives, hollow trees, under eaves and in man made commercial hives.
They visit bird baths, hummingbird feeders and birdseed feeders if there is cornmeal dust present. They cannot be "kept" from feeders, though they can be discouraged with a feeder that does not allow access into the feeder.
Trying several feeders or moving the feeder may help. Planting wild flowers away from the feeders can provide a natural source of nectar for the bees.
An Orchard Mason Bee is a small black bee native to the United States and Canada west of the Rocky Mountains. The eastern Orchard Mason Bee is similar except that the horns of the Eastern species point downward. It is about two-thirds the size of a Honey Bees. Orchard Mason Bees were pollinating flower and fruits long before Honey Bees were introduced by the colonists. Orchard Mason Bees differ from Honey Bees in that they do not make their own holes and are dependent on others for a nest site.
The bees fill a hole in the home with food and the female deposits one egg into the hole. The hole is then plugged with mud collected by the female. Egg laying goes on from spring until June when the adults die. The egg hatches into a larva, eats the food, spins a cocoon that transfers into a pupa and, by the end of the summer, is an adult. The adult stays inside the chamber until next spring when it emerges to complete the cycle again
