Q: I have an umbrella on my cottage deck. Where the handle turns, there are a number of holes. Last August, I noticed an extremely busy bee, actually, a wasp. It spent the whole day filling up one of the holes with bits of leaf and little round balls of something. It seems like a very small place to build a nest, but is that what it was doing?—Linda Ondrack, Bay Lake, Ont.
Your initial thought was right. “If the insect was collecting leaf material and stuffing it in those small holes, it was likely a bee, not a wasp,” says Rob Currie, a professor in the department of entomology at the University of Manitoba. He thinks you saw a leafcutting bee (family ). “There are several species. The bees collect leaf material to line a cell in which they lay an egg,” he explains. “They then provision that cell with nectar and pollen, which the developing bee consumes.” The bee inside the cell overwinters there and, in the spring, chews its way out. Ta-da!
