Bethany Clay

Well I am doing it.  I have a spale style hive I built myself because it seemed really natural and a warré roof because I liked it for some good reason.. I think humidity but it’s been a minute since I did all the reading.  I mostly didn’t want to get attached to any method before trying to let the bees alone and see how they did.
I caught a swarm and hived them and the only time I opened them up was to take the branch out.  They were someone’s bees raised with foundation so I’ve been watching them resize themselves and just started seeing the new generations.  I’ve had them since mid April and am just in that stage of watching them endlessly and being mesmerized.  I don’t have any plans to harvest honey this year but they seem to be doing really really well so I’ve been thinking I should give them another box.
I have no real helpful info as I’m not technically a beekeeper yet.  I’m just a bee watcher 😂
I’ll keep you posted if anyone’s interested.

Another solution you could try for cheap is to string fishing line back and forth and crissy crossy between all the posts and stakes and kind of make a confusing invisible net over the top.  I’ve seen this done to keep hawks out of chicken runs, but I bet it works to keep chickens in too.  They tend not to leap where they don’t have confidence they can land and if they try a time or two and get confronted by an invisible string they may just give it up.  I’ve done this (sort of) with some shorter sections of fence my birds were flying up onto and just criss crossed some string above it loosely.  They disliked that they couldn’t be sure of landing on the top of the fence wire and gave up hopping over that spot.

You’ve probably already solved your problem though.  What worked??

I have grown bronze fennel for six years now.  Similar to others’ experiences after my soil improved I had a nice supply of volunteers from seed to share with friends.  I am pretty sure every transplant has made it after it wilts completely and looks completely dead and everyone is disappointed.  Sure enough, they pull through.  We eat from ours every day of the year.  Although we’ve never made pesto (I WILL try that!) we eat it straight in the garden in tremendous amounts and of course anytime anyone has a bellyache.

I do feel like I grow it purposefully for the butterflies.  We get hundreds on our established plants and select a few to watch in our terrarium every year just for fun.  I always make a mental note of the week of the year we first see swallowtail larvae on it and interestingly enough it varies by quite a few weeks every year!

It’s a gorgeous plant.  It’s a delicious plant.  It’s very reliable and an amazing pollinator attractor.  

I mostly came here to say it’s also an Acid/Base indicator!  If you brew a tea of bronze fennel it will be purple!  What a surprise!  Adding some lemon or orange juice will turn it a lovely pink and I highly recommend you try a fennel/citrus tea this summer!  Absolutely delicious!

In defense of carpenter bees,

The swarming and stinging and disturbing a nest does sounds like misidentification.  None of those behaviors are characteristic of carpenter bees.  I do know someone who swears they were stung several times by carpenter bees but I’ve ‘literally’ (up to squashing them in my hand) done everything possible to get a carpenter bee to sting me and never been successful.

They are very easy to tell apart between male and female, and the males can be gently caught in your hand and held and they won’t and can’t sting.

I am very much on the page on build them something out of garbage 2x4s and let them go to town.  I absolutely love them and love watching them pollinate my blueberries in early spring when nothing else is out and about.  They surely must do 90% of the pollinating of my blueberries.

It’s also very easy to prevent them boring into wood.  A light dusting with a propane flame thrower on whatever wood you’d like to protect will do the trick.  They don’t like the taste of the burn and will leave it alone.

However, when carpenter bees leave a structure alone, they don’t protect it from other nesting stinging wasps and hornets.  So in my mind you get to pick between carpenter bees and hornets that’ll sting you when you open the door to the outdoor facility that you didn’t shou shugi ban. 😂
I’d rather have carpenter bees.  Word on the street is they reuse the same holes and mostly only eat the soft wood anyway. (is that true?? I can’t remember)

Anyway, I like em and I advocate for not swatting them.  We’ve all got better things to do.  Like eat the blueberries!  And make more gorgeous shou shugi ban!