If you’re looking for a real alternative crop, take advantage of one you might already have – leafcutter bees. You may not know it, but if your peonies, lilacs or roses show missing half-moons in their leaves or if you have woodpeckers demolishing your shingled outbuildings, you probably are being visited by leafcutters, and may be sitting on a million dollars (give or take a buck).

Leafcutter bees are relatively unknown since they are inconspicuous creatures, black with white stripes and smaller than a housefly. And they only sting when cornered (i.e., inside your clothes), their sting (in 30 years I have only suffered four or five) less painful than a deerfly bite.

They are used primarily as pollinators by alfalfa seed producers in Nevada and Idaho, since honeybees are discouraged by the structure of alfalfa blooms. The male flower part springs out with such remarkable force when touched that it stuns a honeybee in the head. Try it sometime – just stick a matchstick deep into the alfalfa bloom and you’ll have a parlor trick that impresses most anyone. Leafcutter bees, being smaller, don’t suffer the Mike Tyson-like blow and consequently pollinate three times as efficiently.

Leafcutter bees differ from honeybees, not making honey or hives. Instead, they gather pollen and nectar to feed their larvae, which they wrap in leaves cut from available plants. Not making honey, they require fewer blooms to survive, and a fenceline of weeds can support a surprising number of bees. Seed growers may place a half million bees to an acre. A naturalized bee from Europe, they can be found in much of the U.S. now, laying their eggs in cracks and crevices in buildings, trees, radiator hoses and – my favorite – electrical outlets.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, a full leafcutter bee “board” (a 6 foot by six inch by 4 inch pine board drilled with 2000 holes) with 8,000 bee larvae sold for over one hundred dollars, while an empty, new board cost just 4 dollars. That was a pretty good profit margin, one which has since shrunk considerably. Prices in the last decade have fluctuated between 15 and 60 dollars, while a new bee board costs about $6.

Leafcutters don’t hatch until the temperature hits the eighties (late June and early July here) for at least a couple weeks, and don’t like working at temperatures over one hundred degrees or under eighty. If your daytime temperature range falls inside those parameters, even for a few hours, as they do in much of the U.S., you may be a likely candidate to raise leafcutter bees. You can often find them nesting together overnight on sunflower or zinnia blooms, too sluggish to rise in cool temperatures.

Though you can buy gallons of bees from Canada, where they have turned the business into a science, your best bet as a beginner is to trap what existing bees you have. You can make your own boards, using a 3/16 or 7/32 inch wood bit to drill the holes, or buy pre-made boards from the source listed below. Having done both, I suggest the latter, unless you have an extraordinary amount of time and money to replace burned-out drills.

Find wooden outbuildings in your area, and nail or hang the boards on the east facing wall, under the eaves, with the open holes away from the wall. This gives the bees early morning sun to wake them early, and protection from too-hot afternoon sun and rain. You can place them elsewhere, but remember that wet weather and too much heat will lessen your chances of trapping existing bees.

It won’t be long, if bees are present, before you notice them hovering at the board. They will bring bits of leaf all day long, until they’ve laid their eggs and filled the holes. All you do is wait, now, until frost comes and the bees die. Then, take the board down and store the larvae in a cool, protected place, so that woodpeckers don’t destroy your board and eat your bees.
A single old building can generate as many as 10 to 15 full boards, but remember, if you harvest and sell them all, the next year’s take will be smaller. You also need to remember that you can’t keep the boards too long, for there is always a percentage of bees which die in the board, and the more bees in the board that are dead, the less saleable is the board. Three years is about the maximum holding time. Normally, a leafcutter bee colony will at least double, so you should be able to maintain a stable population after your initial collection.

Marketing the bees, as in any farm business, is the most important part of the enterprise. Watch the Canadian weather. If it’s a cool summer, prices will be higher. Growers import most of their bees from Canada, where they punch the larvae out of styrofoam boards, test the eggs for diseases and predators, and store them in gallon containers. If you can, find out what alfalfa seed prices are. If they’re high, growers will pay a little more than they will on years of low prices. You can find a list of buyers, as well as a plethora of related links, at the nation’s foremost pollination laboratory website: loganbeelabusu.edu/source.htm. If you’re a good marketer, you can try selling directly to the farmer via classified ads in either the Boise, Idaho newspaper, The Idaho Statesman, or The Capital Press, an agricultural newspaper that serves the Northwest.

American leafcutters can’t be exported to Canada, primarily because our regulations are less stringent (read, nonexistent), and the Canadians don’t want their bees contaminated with the fungus chalkbrood and predators like sapyga wasps which infect American bees. Chalkbrood turns leafcutter larvae into crumbled masses, and sapyga eggs act as parasites, living off the larvae and eventually killing them. Other parasites, like flour beetles, moths, and chalcids, also can cause problems, which are alleviated best by storing at cool temperatures and by not keeping bee boards too long.

Many bee buyers have established “traplines” of thousands of boards throughout the Midwest and Northwest. Each fall they collect the summer’s harvest and put up new boards for the coming year. Other “growers” – like myself – establish stations of 50-200 boards near appropriate bee habitat – weeds and trees and perhaps a little water. These stations are simple to build out of a few sheets of plywood and posts. They keep the bees sheltered from weather and off the ground.

Even if you don’t go into the leafcutter business, you will find the bee’s carpenter-like work fascinating. And if you are lucky enough to actually see one cut a leaf, you’ll be left with amazement at its speed, for it can remove a half-moon of leaf in less time than you might. If you want to get rid of existing bees because of their destructive habit, you can still trap them in the boards, then remove the boards in the evening to a place at least three hundred yards away – leafcutter bees won’ t travel far from their nest.

So eye your outbuildings for woodpecker damage, look under your shingles for the quarter inch, leaf-covered cells of larvae – you may be sitting on another source of income.

Resources
Leafcutter bee boards can be purchased at USTICK BEE BOARDS in Boise, ID 208-322-7778. Boards are normally sold in pallets of 100.