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.

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.