dirt / By Amy Stewart

All That for a Bee?

As attractive as an elevated, cookie sheet and brick-covered bee house sounds, I think I’ll pass. Anyone who has ever met a raccoon or skunk knows that simply elevating a food source off the ground won’t deter them. Besides, don’t bumblebees have to deal with rain and predators anyway? I don’t coddle my plants; I’m not going to coddle the bugs. On to the next option.

Method 2 : Capture the queen. Sit out in the garden in spring and look for a bumblebee that doesn’t have pollen on its legs. That’s likely to be a queen looking for a colony. Sweep her up into a jar, and put her in the fridge for a few minutes to slow down her metabolism so that she’ll be sluggish when you put her in prison. Then dump her into the bee house, give her a little dish of half honey and half water to eat, plug up the hole and leave her there for 36 hours. Hopefully she’ll like her new house so much that she’ll decide to stay and make babies.

Okay, I can’t even find my car keys. There’s no way I’m going to find a queen bee in the garden. Next?

Method 3 : This, the instructions promise, is the exciting way. Don one of those fabulous mesh hats that beekeepers wear and go looking for an active colony. Follow a few bees home or dig around in your compost pile or some other undisturbed area in hopes of exposing the comb. Act quickly to stuff it into your bee house. “Now you are in control,” the instructions say reassuringly.

But you can’t move the colony to its new home yet. Leave it sitting right where it is, unplug the entrance hole and let the worker bees buzz around and find out where their queen has gone. Wait until late at night, when they’re all asleep, and then plug up the entrance hole and put the bee colony in its new location.

If you can’t wait until nightfall, there’s another procedure that involves capturing individual bees, placing them in empty 35mm film canisters, and putting the bees on ice so that they fall into a “cold induced torpor.” You are warned to chill them but not freeze them. The chilled bees can then be tossed into their house, and by the time they wake up, they won’t care where it’s located.

Film canisters? Ice cubes? And besides, if the bees already have a place to live, why am I relocating them at all?

I know why. This is not really a toy for the bees. It’s a toy for me. Now that I realize that, I’m taking it outside and putting it in whatever location appeals to me. It’s a charming little ornament for the garden, and I hope it gets used for its intended purpose, but really, the bees are going to have to figure this one out on their own. I can’t do everything for them. All this time spent tending to the needs of bees makes me wonder if it wouldn’t just be easier to go outside and pollinate the flowers myself.

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