2020 Winter RVC Insights - Flipbook - Page 8
POLLINATORS
As the prairie grew larger and larger,
Kathy decided to add a bee hotel
for even more entertainment. After
a while, low and behold, there was
something in the hotel. She wasn’t
quite sure what it was and did a little
investigating. There were long tubes
inside the hotel and the outside and
the fronts were capped with what
appeared to be clay soil. Through
her research, Kathy found that the
new residents of the bee hotel were
in fact mason bees. Kathy remarked,
“Honestly, I thought there were three
kinds of bees; a honeybee, a sweat
bee, and a bumblebee.” Laughing, she said, “My biology teacher
wouldn’t be happy with me right
now.” Kathy soon learned there are
actually over 400 species of native
bees just in the state of Illinois alone.
Kathy explained how the mason
bees fill their nest tubes with bee
bread, which is pollen and nectar,
then an egg, and then a partition.
They keep doing this until they fill
up the tube. The first couple eggs
are going to be fertilized and will be
females. The other eggs, which will
be males, are unfertilized. They’ll stay
outside all winter long, whether it’s in
a tube, a stick, a cavity, or down in the
ground, and in the spring the bees
will start to come out.
Kathy stated, “There are several
reasons that the boys are on the
outside and the girls on the inside. If
there is predation, it’s the boys that
are going to be sacrificed. When the
bees start coming out in the spring,
the boys come out first and stay right
there waiting for the girls so they can
do their thing. After that they don’t
live much longer, that’s pretty much
it for them, that’s their only purpose.
The female is basically like a single
mother, taking care of all of them. It’s
been kind of intriguing learning about
all of this and it’s been a lot fun.”
From the time Kathy started Restabit
to when she put out the first native
seeds was about three years. She said
it took that long to learn and research
about starting a prairie. “If you don’t
prep it right to start with, you’re going
to have a problem that will continue
on forever.”
She was particularly concerned
about the hillside in the prairie because it is a lot of clay. “As agricultural
producers, clay is not our best type
of soil.” What she found was native
plants actually like clay soil and
can break it up with their deep root
systems. During her research, Kathy
also learned she was going to have to
keep the area dead for two summers
where she wanted to plant the prairie.
There are different philosophies on
that, but at the time that’s what was
recommended.
For the first two years they used
Roundup® and in the fall went in and
just kind of scuffed the surface a bit.
Kathy stated, “If you go too deep it
will awaken an existing weed bank,
one that had been there for years,
and it will all come to the surface,
which isn’t good.”
Once the waiting was finally over,
she seeded everything by hand as it
was only about a half an acre in that
particular spot. She quartered the
spot off and then quartered the seed
off so they wouldn’t get halfway done
and realize that they didn’t have any
seed left. Once seeded, they rolled
it and over the next couple of years
mowed it at about 10 to 12 inches.
This basically took the weed seed
heads off. “The third year, the prairie
just exploded with approximately
25 to 30 types of plants between the
grasses and the forbs (flowers)”, Kathy
exclaimed. “The prairie is pretty well
diversified, but mostly a short prairie. I
didn’t want the really tall big blue and
Indian grasses, I prefer the shorter
grasses and a lot more flowers.”
“The third year, the prairie just exploded with approximately 25 to 30 types of
plants between the grasses and the forbs (flowers),” Kathy exclaimed
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