"Chris Hogg" wrote...
"Mortimer" wrote:

I've been helping my girlfriend dig her garden, and we've noticed that we
are being plagued by bees which are attracted to the freshly-dug earth.
Can
anyone suggest why they are attracted, and how to discourage them?

The ground is about 12 inches of non-clay topsoil, on top of large slabs
of
sandstone and sand. Because of the need to remove all these stones,
firstly
so there is enough depth for vegetables to grow and secondly so the stones
can be used for crazy paving, we are digging each row and temporarily
leaving a "cliff-face", until the next row is dug, with the rest of the
soil
dug forward into the hole left by a previous trench.

It is the cliff-face that the bees are attracted to. They land on the
earth
or the sand (more often the sand), sometimes crawling into crevices, but
never staying in one place for more than a couple of seconds. They seem to
ignore the loose earth that has already been removed. The bees are small
honey bees, not large bumble bees. We noticed it the last couple of
weekends
when the weather has been very hot and sunny; previously there were no
bees.

How do you know they're honey bees and not mining bees? It's quite
possible that they're mining bees. These are solitary bees and don't
live in colonies, but make short tunnels in sandy soil which they
stock with appropriate food for individual grubs and in which they lay
one egg. The egg hatches, the grub eats the food and then pupates, but
the parent bee has no involvement other than stocking and laying the
egg. You've probably dug up the tunnels and they're confused. They're
harmless, BTW.

Failing that, they're after moisture in the soil, but my bet is on
them being mining bees.

Funny enough we have a lot of honey bees coming to our pond and landing on
the very damp soil in the pots of bog plants where they stay for a short
while before flying off. It's not just one or two but a constant stream of
bees and I have never seen it before even though the ponds been in for 30+
years.

--
Regards
Bob Hobden
just W. of London