Leafcutter Bees Are Good for Your Vegetable Garden
How an animal I didn’t even know existed brought me hope for the future.
My Inauspicious Introduction to Leafcutter Bees
For all that it has taken away, pandemic life has generously supplied me with a steady stream of gardening webinars. When I was forced to work from home, the only place I was able to feasibly set up a home office was my kitchen table, which turns out to be a great place to learn new things while making dinner or washing dishes. When the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District hosted a webinar in conjunction with Bee and Bloom about “Bees in Your Backyard,” I was all in. The webinar covered every type of bee that you might encounter in your yard, and there are many. I first found myself stunned by my own ignorance about bees, and then eventually charmed by these little creatures and and hungry to learn more.
Just a few things I didn’t know about bees before this webinar:
- 90% of bees are solitary bees, not the social, hive-forming bees, like honeybees, that we typically think about when we hear the word “bee.”
- Honeybees are not native to North America — they were introduced from Europe in the 1600s. When people talk about the importance of bees and the dangers they are facing, they mean all of these different kinds of bees, not just honeybees.
- Solitary bees are typically gentle, and do not usually sting in self-defense.
I found myself exceptionally taken with tales of the leafcutter bee, which I had never heard of before. Leafcutter bees make their nests in tunnels, such as those left in trees by woodpeckers and boring beetles. Because they are solitary bees, each female bee has her own tunnel where she lays her eggs. She cuts and transports little pieces of leaves to separate the egg chambers so that each egg gets a cell that looks like a tiny cocoon within the tunnel to protect it until hatching time.
Although the leafcutter bees sometimes cut away pieces of garden vegetable leaves, they are actually good for your garden because of the help they provide with pollination. Active in the summer time, unlike the more commonly-known mason bees which are active in the spring, leafcutter bees do a great job pollinating summer vegetables such as cucumbers, melons, squash, and peas. And better pollination means more produce. As someone whose love of vegetable gardening had been given a recent boost by the pandemic and a subsequent desire to stay out of grocery stores as much as possible, I tucked all this away for a future time when I might think about garden “luxuries” like bee houses and plantings of ornamentals with staggered bloom times to support my native bees year-round. There were more immediate concerns, like planting potatoes and kale.
Love at First Sight
The next morning, I was sitting on my porch swing with my sweetheart eating cereal and watching a little bee buzzing around my deck furniture. It dawned on me slowly that I had been marginally aware of this bee behavior for a few days now. The bee was methodically buzzing around the perimeter of a metal cafe table like she was trying to gain entrance. I hopped off the swing and crept over for closer inspection. And that’s when I saw that THE BEE HAD A LITTLE PIECE OF LEAF CLUTCHED BETWEEN HER FRONT PAWS! (I know arthropod legs are not paws, but I challenge you not to think of them that way next time you see a winsome little leafcutter bee trying to have babies inside your cafe table). Then I noticed that there were several other little pinky-nail-sized semicircles of leaf that had fallen onto the deck below the table. I completely lost my mind. It was total pandemonium for a few minutes and my sweetheart had no idea what was happening. I was IN LOVE.
I finally calmed down and stopped fangirling just long enough to march inside and impulse buy a bee house I could not afford, along with trays with spaces for cocoons, so that my darling bee would have someplace more suitable to lay her eggs.
Paying Attention
Since that day, it has become a habit to pay attention to the bees in my yard. I have noticed that leafcutters are making great use of my new bee house and trays. It has been fun to watch them carrying their leaves in and out of the tunnels like the bees in this video:
I have also noticed that buying the bee house probably wasn’t actually necessary; the leafcutters seem perfectly happy to continue laying eggs inside my cafe table. I am glad I bought it, though. Now that I am paying attention, the bee house will allow me to monitor how the bee populations are doing in my yard. The bee house contains a stack of planks with ridges that create tubes for nesting. The cocoons are dormant for the winter and can be brought into a cool space for protection. They can then be easily inspected before setting them out for hatching in the spring.
One day, I was out weeding a vegetable plot and watching the bees buzzing around my pea plants. As I watched, one of them cut a half circle out of the edge of a pea leaf. It didn’t take two seconds for this bee to cut a piece of leaf bigger than its own body and carry it away. It was a miraculous and beautiful thing to witness.
When they use their large jaws to cut the leaves, the action reminds me of one of those old-fashioned can-openers. This video I found online might give you the general idea:
Hope
I understand now that these bees are important to me because they give me hope. I didn’t choose to develop a leafcutter bee obsession right now. The bees chose my home as their home, and I had the good fortune to be sufficiently still for long enough to notice them. I didn’t realize, in the midst of the relentless bad news, fear, and worry, that what I really needed was something to love and nurture that would make the world a better place. And that I needed to tell you about it.
My journey has just begun. My children think my fascination with native bees is cute. I think it is medicine that will sustain my spirit during these tough times. The more I learn, the more I want to learn. Would you like to join me? Here are some resources to get you started:
Webinars:
Education Resources:
Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District- lots of bee-related content on their Facebook page
Bee and Bloom Blog — diverse collection of helpful posts
Planet Bee Foundation — this San Francisco-based organization has a great list of resources including a summer reading list
Beekeeping Supplies:
Crown Bees — WA-based purveyor of native beekeeping products, including leafcutter bee cocoons. They have a lot of educational resources on their site, and will actually pay you to raise native bees for them.
