Diavolicchio
Contemplation Leave
Osmia cornifrons / Japanese Hornfaced Bee
Our young orchard is a number of years away from needing swarms of bees, however it's a day I'm happily anticipating. Being a big honey fan, I've often relished the thought of being able to produce my own, even more so after discovering Ames Farm Single Source Honey in MN a couple years ago. Surprisingly though, I dont think the Eastern honey bee is the route the orchard is going to go. One concern is the susceptibility that honey bees now have to both Tracheal and Varroa mites and the strong likelihood that my own honey bees eventually would have to contend with these problems, too. The primary reason however has to do with pollination.
In an apple orchard, an Eastern honey bee on an average day will pollinate around 50 flowers. The Japanese hornfaced bee (Osmia cornifrons), which falls into the classification of mason bee (genus Osmia), can visit 15 flowers a minute, pollinating as many as 2,450 apples a day. It's a solitary bee commonly used for commercial apple pollination in Japan and is at least 50 times more effective than the honey bee when it comes to pollinating apples (as well as most other tree fruits.) It was successfully introduced into the US in the 1970's by USDA bee expert Dr. Suzanne Batra.
We've decided that instead of using the Eastern honey bee, we'll be giving the Japanese hornfaced bee a test drive as the primary pollinators in our orchard. There are some key differences to note between the two. Unlike the honey bee, which live in large colonies with one reproductive queen, the hornfaced bee lives alone and all of the females will attempt to reproduce. Another significant difference, and one I'm growing to accept, is that these bees do not live in hives and therefore do not produce honey.
In their native habitat, Osmia cornifrons typically live and lay their eggs in hollow reeds, grasses, logs or pithy stems. In a commercial orchard setting, a bee condominium of sorts is provided which most often consists of large wooden blocks drilled with a series of holes, into which paper straws are inserted for the bees to set up house. At the end of the pollination season, the straws, which contain the dormant eggs for next years bees, are removed from their wooden blocks and stored in a cool, protected environment for ten months until they're returned to the orchard and awoken by the warmth of a new Spring to begin the cycle all over again.
A less expensive and reputedly as effective an option is to provide a makeshift bee condo using a number of cardboard boxes that are filled with as many empty upright cardboard bee tubes as can fit. This is the route I'll be going. I've ordered a case of 6" x 5/16" cardboard tubes with one end sealed and will be placing as many of these tubes into the orchard as I've got female bees to accommodate them. One female per tube. Once pollination is over for the season (usually by June 1st of a given year), these tubes are removed from the orchard and stored for 10 months just like straws previously described in the wooden blocks. Each year new clean tubes are put out for the next cycle of bees and the previous tubes discarded once the dormant bees have woken up and emerged. Here's a diagram of one of these bees shelters. And here are photos of a bee box using actual dried reeds (Phragmites australis) instead of cardboard tubes, one female per hollow reed.
When I first read about this fascinating little pollinator, I almost immediately dismissed them because of the no-honey/no-beeswax factor. But looking at things from the standpoint of simplicity, efficiency and effectiveness, these bees seem to be the obvious choice. They're also immune from Tracheal and Varroa mite attack. And as an added bonus, they're non-aggressive, suprisingly gregarious for solitary bees, and rarely sting.
Ill just continue to get my honey from Ames Farm.
