peach pulpeuse

first of all, you can tell the header is an AI-generated image because the bee family this bee is supposedly in is defined by the two submarginal cells in their front wings, and this one has three. here's a real Osmia lignaria wing:

At 7:42 a.m. on a Tuesday last March, the temperature in a small orchard outside Brattleboro, Vermont read 48°F. The honeybees in three painted hives at the edge of the property had not moved in nine days. The colonies were intact — they were simply waiting for the air to warm to 60. In the same orchard, on the same morning, a small dark bee with a metallic blue sheen was working her way through the third row of apple trees. She was visiting roughly 27 blossoms per minute. In an hour, she would touch 1,600 of them. By the time the honeybees finally left their hives nine days later, she would have pollinated more apple blossoms than they would all season.

a) mason bees don't forage that fast, that's almost a flower every two seconds. b) that's an insane claim, that a single mason bee could pollinate more apple blossoms than three hives full of honey bees? hives can have upward of 50,000 workers. the difference is that they're more EFFECTIVE pollinators, and don't store the pollen in a way that keeps it from being spread. stupid

“The honeybee is livestock. The bees actually pollinating most of what you eat — those are wild. And we’ve spent sixty years optimizing our gardens, our suburbs, and our agricultural infrastructure in ways that systematically kill them. ... Most so-called bee hotels sold at garden centers are basically death traps... We’ll come back to why.” Dr. Eli Pendergrass, Pollinator Ecologist, Cornell University

there's no eli pendergrass at cornell

original caption: "The front of a Clayton Dawson hotel. Cedar tunnels at the right diameter. Copper roof above. Two Mason Bees already moving in." that's a honey bee on the right and some ungodly chimera on the left

Clayton is 74. He has worked in this room for 41 years. On the back wall hang the tools he inherited from his father, their handles polished to a soft sheen by decades of use. On the workbench, when I walked in, were six unfinished bee hotels in various stages of completion. He did not look up. “You don’t finish the inside of a tunnel with a power tool,” he said, running his thumb along the inner wall of a cedar block. “You can’t. You’ll leave burrs. Wings catch on burrs. She bleeds out trying to get back to her tunnel.” He sanded the tunnel by hand, slowly, with a strip of fine-grit paper wrapped around a chopstick. He has been doing this, in some form, since 1983.

?????? SHE BLEEDS OUT TRYING TO GET BACK TO HER TUNNEL. the tragic old man hand-sanding his mason bee tunnels....... tell me how does he sand the upper corners of that obviously machine-cut wood with his chopstick

peepaw's doing worse than we thought. with that handwriting he must have had a stroke. or he's professionally trained in shorthand from foreign lands as well as mason bee hotel building

The Shallow Grave: Tunnels drilled three to four inches deep instead of six to eight. Female Mason Bees instinctively lay female eggs at the back of a tunnel and males at the front. In a shallow tunnel, parasitic wasps reach the females. The next generation collapses.

???????? this is how it actually works btw. god however did mason bees reproduce before we had an old man to lovingly hand-sand the mirror-smooth tunnels of his tchotchke bullshit so the bees don't BLEED OUT IN THEIR NESTS

anyway there's even more bullshit, false declarations of urgency (his hands shake too much to build anymore!! his children are urban and rootless and don't love him enough to take up the business!!!! ONLY TWO HUNDRED REMAIN), and when you go to the website another almost identical sob story and tales of detailed craftsmanship rapidly going into decline because the old people just can't do the detail work anymore T_T

"Most commercial bee hotels fail at the same two points: incorrect tube diameters and inadequate weather protection. Bamboo tubes with this wall thickness — combined with a weather-deflecting outer shell — match what we define in research as optimal brood chambers for Osmia lignaria and related native species. The teardrop form isn't an aesthetic choice. It's functional architecture." Dr. Sarah Mitchell, Pollinator Conservation Research · NC State University

there's no sarah mitchell at nc state university. and why is an R1 research university professor opining on commercial bee hotels anyway

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life