As our spring weather quickly becomes summer weather, it's the perfect temperature for our leaf cutter bee friends to start hanging out in our bee sanctuary and garden. We like to order cocoons from crownbee.com and then watch our little friends emerge into the world and happily buzz around checking things out and getting to work!
Leafcutter bees are solitary bees and are great for pollinating due to their furry bellies that help carry the pollen from plant to plant. Here's a video of Fi observing one of the bees and chatting about why these bees are a great choice for your pollinator paradise.
We used this opportunity to practice our macro photography skills too!
We decided it would "bee" fun to also do an activity to demonstrate how pollinators do their work and move pollen from place to place. All you'll need is pipe cleaner, paper and crayons to draw and color a flower, scissors to cut your flowers out, cheese powder to be your "pollen" and a cup and straw or juice box to act as your flower and nectar.
Fi will demonstrate how it works!
So clearly you can see how easily they do their job while in search of nectar. As Fi mentioned above, one leaf cutter bee can pollinate the same amount as 20 honeybees and they aren't likely to sting you because they are very docile. If you see some of these little guys flying around, don't be scared, just let them go about their day as they've got a LOT of work to do and your garden will definitely benefit from their hard work!