Bees Can't Swim

When a new neighbor moved his bee hives in across the canyon, we noticed that the bees were soon drowning in our birdbath, so last year I created a bee landing platform out of cedar boards with holes drilled through them for the bees that was supposed to alleviate the problem.  See: Water For Bees

It worked...sort of.  The bucket we initially had the platform in turned out to be much too deep; it was a pain to fill and the platform got stuck in the bucket as the water level sank.  So Cindy found a shallower bowl to put inside the bucket and that worked for a while.

Eventually, though, the cedar platform became so water logged that it sank below the water level and became even more of a hazard to the bees than the birdbath was, so Cindy took it out and we forgot about it for a while.

Since we've been having unseasonably warm weather lately, though, we've both been fishing drowning bees out of the birdbath again, so we've filled the bowl back up and the bees seem to be re-discovering it.

Bees On The Edge

We're hoping it works better this time.  We want all our critter friends--both avian and apian-- to be happy and safe.

Leafcutter Bees

We were out in the front yard the other evening talking to a neighbor, when I noticed that some of the rose bushes had circles or semi-circles cut out of the leaves.

Cut Leaves

I told Cindy that I thought we had a grasshopper at work chewing up the leaves again, but she identified the distinctive circles as the work of Leafcutter Bees, (Megachile).

Leafcutter bees don't eat the leaves; they cut these circles for material to line their nests for their eggs.  They seem to be pretty active right now, probably because they're raising a new generation of Leafcutters.

The damage they do to the leaves is minimal, since they're only taking what they need for the nests and not actually eating the leaves, so there's no need to do any kind of pest control.  In fact, as pollinators, they are important contributors to the overall health of the garden.

Chicken Lobbying

Don't think that I don't know what Cindy and Dominick were up to with those beautiful eggs he gave us the other day;  Cindy still wants to have her own chickens.

On January 31st, the San Diego City Council voted to allow backyard chickens, bees and goats.  Unfortunately, this pretty much cuts the ground from under my strongest argument against having chickens in our yard.  Under the previous city ordinance, a coop in our yard would have been too close to the neighbor's house, but those regulations have now been relaxed to permit up to five chickens, but no roosters, and up to 2 bee hives.

The chickens must have a coop that is predator proof, watertight, ventilated, easily accessed and cleaned, with a minimum of 6 square feet per chicken.

That first requirement, "predator proof", would be essential for us because of the coyotes that occasionally sweep through the canyon behind our house.  They've killed several neighborhood cats and I'm sure they would love a nice chicken dinner.  We also have raccoons, skunks, opossums, hawks, snakes and who knows what other critters that also love chickens.

The only ones who would not be likely to get a chicken dinner out of our chickens would be Cindy and me; neither of us would ever be able to kill one of our chickens or even let somebody else do it.  We both grew up with Midwestern grandparents who raised and regularly ate their own chickens, but we couldn't do it.  We'd end up having to wait until some of the chickens died of old age before we could replace them.

Judging by how carefully she takes care of her worms, Cindy would probably be knitting them little hats and sweaters to keep them nice and warm in the winter.

Pollinator Partnership

Cindy found a great website, Pollinator Partnership, that promotes protection of pollinators through education and conservation.  There's a lot of good information on the website.

I've always thought of bees as pollinators, but hadn't given much thought to others such as butterflies, birds, bats, moths, ants, flies, beetles, wasps, small mammals and wind as pollinators.  That's quite a list.  One problem we've had is that some of the pollinators in our yard, such as the Scrub Jays, like to eat other pollinators, such as the Monarch butterfly larvae.  We keep hoping that the resident Red Shoulder Hawk will take out the ground squirrels, but so far the squirrels are just getting fatter and fatter on the bird seek we put out for the other birds.

The Pollinator Partnership website also has a handy pollinator friendly planting guide for each specific ecoregion.  Our ecoregion is the California Coastal Chaparral and we certainly have plenty of chaparral out in our canyon.  I noticed that various forms of Asclepia appear on their list for our region.  The Monarch butterflies will be happy about that.

Monarch Chrysalis

Cindy has planted the Asclepia plants we bought.  We decided to put them in the front yard to keep them away from the bird feeders in the back yard (Duh). The plants are recovering nicely from the havoc wrecked by the caterpillars a few weeks ago; they had stripped each plant down to the stems.  Most of the plants are starting to leaf out again and we're hoping they will have recovered by the time our three Monarch chrysalises hatch out and the new butterflies start laying eggs again.  There's been no change in the chrysalises, although I check them every day.  I continue to be amazed at how beautiful each chrysalis is; they look like jewels hanging from the fence and Bougainvillea branches.