"Jock" writes:
The small native bees like it warmer. In winter, they basically shut down,
their entrance is gummed up with propolis / tree sap & stuff and they reopen
once the weather warms up again. They do open up if you have a warm spell in
the cooler months too. The thing is with these bees they are subsistence
only so there is no practical or real harvesting of their honey. Even if
you tried, the structure of their nests do not lend themselves to easy
access. They just lump together the comb in sacs in no real given order so

Thanks for that info, Jock. It sounds like native bees' dislike of cold
weather is the reason that many of our native plants have come to rely on
bats or birds to carry out their pollination. A big advantage of keeping
native bees would seem to be that not only are they stingless, but they
would go unnoticed in the city---whereas keeping a hive of European bees
would be an invitation to trouble from neighbours unless you had a cliff
edge location or the penthouse suite in some high rise. I've seen a health
food shop with a hive of bees kept indoors for public exhibition; the bees
entered the building via a tiny hole and crawled through a transparent
plastic pipe fixed to the wall to reach their hive.

| I have heard Tasmanian farmers say that a big advantage of the Euro bumble
| bee is that it continues to work even in dull showery weather, weather
| that sees the introduced honeybee down tools. I haven't noticed whether
| the blue-and-black-striped bee is an all-weather worker, have you? Also,
| have you got more than just one or two of them nesting in your mortar?

The antics of the Euro bumble bee are captivating.
--
John Savage (news address invalid; keep news replies in newsgroup)