Master Builder

Britain has one species of honeybee, roughly 24 species (depends who you ask) of bumble bee - social species, that create colonies, which last just the summer season, leaving just queens to hibernate alone over-winter - and about 250 species of solitary bee - solitary because they do not create colonies with nests

This is one of the common species of solitary bee, a red mason bee, on a 'bee hotel' in our daughter's garden. 'Red' because of the ginger hairs on her body; 'mason' because she builds walls (not because she burrows into walls, this species do not burrow at all, they just use pre-existing holes)

Adults emerge and mate in spring. The queen then searches for suitable holes in which she creates a linear set of chammbers, each chamber containing an egg, along with some pollen and nectar that she leaves to feed the larva that hatches from the egg. The walls dividing the chambers are made of mud that she collects and moulds to seal in each egg, like a walled-up hermit

The egg hatches, the larva develops and spins a cocoon over the summer. I'm not quite sure when the larva actually metamorphoses into adult form (probably autumn), but the imago (adult) does not emerge from the cocoon until the following spring, then has to break down its mud wall to fly out into the world and restart the cycle. Note that this life-cycle means that no mason bee ever meets its children

The fact that the cells lie one behind another in a tunnel means that the last-layed egg must exit first, followed by the last-but-one, and so on. Like honeybees, the queen can contol if she lays a male or female egg, and generally lays female eggs in the deeper cells and male ones nearer the tunnel mouth, so that males emerge first and prepare for mating

About ten years ago, we lived in a fairly new, brick house in Stratford-upon-Avon. The method of construction had left a lot of plastic tubes protruding slightly from the walls above every door and window lintel - not sure why. These turned out to be exactly the right size for mason bees to lay in, so the whole estate was a gigantic bee hotel! I wonder if anyone has studied the effect on the local population

We once put a lot of these tubes in containers attached to some of the trees in our orchard. The mason bees took to them, but the local woodpeckers soon worked out what they were and pulled out all the tubes and threw them on the ground, trying to get at the tasty larvae