Remember how I wrote that many of our native bees nest in old beetle burrows in dead trees, stumps, and branches?  I'd never noticed these holes before, but now that I've read about them, I see them everywhere.

The stumps we lazily left strewn throughout the yard and garden are clearly one of the sources of our huge native bee population.  This is a representative sample of just a few inches of one of our stumps.

Come to think of it, a couple of years ago, I saw a strange-looking wasp visit this stump for an unknown reason --- I guess I know what she was doing now!

Since our stumps are slowly being ripped out of the ground and turned into hugelkultur mounds, I guess it's a good thing I'm making the bees replacement homes.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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