What is up everyone? Kevin here from Epic Gardening and I am back with Dave Hunter of Crown Bees.

Now we've been talking a lot about bees this week and specifically we've been talking about the 90% plus of bees

that don't really operate the way that we're used to right because we're used to

honey bees those seven species of honey bees. And so today we're talking

about whole nesting bees. Now we touched on this very briefly at the end of

yesterday's episode, but Dave, do you want to reintroduce the concept and and sort of how these whole nesting bees operate?

Yeah that's awesome, hi Kevin. So out of these 90% of the 4,000 species of bees in North America.

You know, 90% of them are solitary.

And they create some environment where they can gather pollen, lay an egg, and then protect it.

And so three quarters of these bees do that in the ground.

We call them ground nesters.

There's minor bees and digger bees and alkali bees and they all sorts of stuff. They're in the ground.

So about a quarter of them, some on the air, nest in holes, small holes, like a four millimeters is like an eighth of an inch, small bees, medium bees are like a six millimeter leaf cutters we've got, and then eight millimeters about the size of a pencil. That's these bees will go find a broken reed,

they'll go find a hole in the tree, or gosh in your yard, I've seen them in my outlets, I've seen my lawn

furniture, these bees are looking for a hole that kind of protects them from their enemies,

whoever they are.

And so into this hole, the bees,

she knows exactly where her hole is.

She travels in a 30 minute circuit gathering pollen and about maybe 10 to 15 or 20 trips of gathering

pollen.

She's got a pea-sized bit of pollen that's laid into the back of that read.

She backs in, lays an egg.

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