{"id":3634,"date":"2016-09-23T08:00:17","date_gmt":"2016-09-23T15:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seewhatgrows.flywheelsites.com\/?p=3634"},"modified":"2016-09-20T20:16:20","modified_gmt":"2016-09-21T03:16:20","slug":"community-garden-needs-bees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seewhatgrows.org\/us\/community-garden-needs-bees\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Your Community Garden Needs Bees and Wasps"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Beneficial-Bugs-for-the-Garden-Wasps\"<\/p>\n

You can see it on a sunny spring or summer day in practically any\u00a0community garden. Visitors\u00a0arrive to enjoy the scene, but a few are turned away by the buzzing of bees and wasps. There’s no doubt that these insects have caught a bad rap over the millennia. However, there are some interesting facts<\/a> that can dispel these concerns.<\/p>\n

Bees stings are in fact not that common and allergic reactions are far more rare. Half of the population, male drones, don’t even have stingers. Bumble bees, the most intimidating of the lot due to their size, are far less likely to sting than their cousins. Wasps are considered by many to be even more threatening, but this is often because of their less obvious appearance. Wasps\u00a0tend to be better concealed in hedges, lawns and home exterior undergrowth, so they are accidently disturbed far more often.<\/p>\n

Simply put, in a community garden environment, bees and wasps are not the threat some\u00a0may think they are. Instead, these insects are beneficial bugs<\/a> that are not only welcome, but are essential to the health of your community garden.<\/p>\n

Why You Want to Invite Bees and Wasps into Your Community Garden Environment<\/h2>\n

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Crop Pollination<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everyone knows that bees make honey. But this sweet commodity is only one portion of their annual crop production. In Canada, recent Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada data shows that the\u00a0total estimate<\/a> for the annual contribution of honey bees of $4.39 billion<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Most crops grown for vegetables,\u00a0including (but not exclusive to) squash, cucumber, tomato, nuts, and seeds require pollination by insects. Complementary crops such as fiber (i.e. cotton) and hay (to feed livestock) require the same. Bees and wasps are expert pollinators. This is because they dedicate most of their life to\u00a0collecting pollen. Pollen is a source of protein that bees\u00a0and wasps feed to their offspring. When they\u00a0carry pollen back to their nest it is also distributed to the crops they passover. Since an individual bee often\u00a0focuses on one species of\u00a0plant at a time, it is more likely that pollen from one plant\u00a0will be transferred to another of the same species. This is known as cross-pollination, a process that is\u00a0required by crops\u00a0to produce viable seeds.<\/p>\n

Without bees (and wasps), agricultural production would be devastated and the world as we know it would forever change. Consider your own community garden as a sustainable world of its own (it is!) and imagine the implications if there were no bees, or wasps, present.<\/p>\n

Controls the Population of Harmful\u00a0Bugs<\/strong><\/p>\n

While primarily known as pollinators, bees and wasps are also predators. Wasps, not as heralded as bees when it comes to pollination (but are in fact great pollinators) are especially effective in this capacity. They are garden-friendly soldiers that will have\u00a0crop-destroying insects run for the hills.<\/p>\n

Wasps feed on a wide variety of harmful pests. They\u00a0consume\u00a0small insects and scavenge dead bugs and larvae from the soil. But the cutworm (a\u00a0moth caterpillar that resides\u00a0in the upper layers of the soil and eats through the stems of young plants at ground level) is one of their favorite meals. And that is a good thing for agricultural producers. Cutworms in a farming environment, \u00a0are a major threat to the health of grain and canola crops. To the rescue, is one of the smallest species of wasp, the\u00a0tiny parasitic wasp known as the copidosoma\u00a0<\/em>bakeri,\u00a0<\/i>which devours cutworms by the hoard, and is considered a hero to agricultural producers<\/a> in Canada.<\/p>\n

At a community garden level, wasps can be just as beneficial as bees for their simple fact that they are great gate keepers that keep bad bugs away.<\/p>\n

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Living Harmoniously with Bees and Wasps<\/strong><\/p>\n

You can see that these beneficial insects are most certainly essential to the health of your community garden and urban farming project. So, how do we coexist with them? The following tips will help:<\/p>\n