Chevonne Reynolds was sitting at home during the first lockdown of the pandemic when she had the idea to set up a research programme using solitary bees.
During a visit to her local nursery, Reynolds, senior lecturer at the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences at Wits University, saw a “bee hotel” for sale.
She bought it and put it up in the garden and, come spring, was thrilled to see bees arrive and start building nests in the hotel.
The hotels are made of pine and are mounted out of the sun in a dry place. As soon as the female bee has chosen her new home she busies herself collecting pollen and nectar, which will be the larder for her young to survive on.
“It was something I had never experienced before and there it was right in front of me,” said Reynolds. She wondered if solitary bees might be studied to determine the health of urban ecosystems.
The result is the Jozi Bee Hotel project, a programme set to start in September, by which time some 400 “bee hotels” will be established in gardens across Johannesburg. The purpose of the study is to track biodiversity in Gauteng’s urban landscapes.
Bee diversity is an indicator of the diversity of plants, which in turn indicates the health and functioning of an ecosystem.
Reynolds said it is tricky to determine this in an urban context because of its manipulated ecosystems, but the bees will indicate how much green space is available.
The hope is that, by measuring how solitary bee diversity and abundance change across the city, the researchers will establish which areas are most in need of interventions to improve biodiversity and ecosystem services for people.
The hotels will be home to the solitary bees that account for about 90% of SA’s bee population. Reynolds hopes that studying them may help develop programmes that support environmental justice.
“A lot of people recognise that bees are inherently important in systems,” she said. “So if we can measure bee diversity in cities then we could get a really nice handle on what’s happening in ecosystems.”
Many think bees live in hives, make honey, serve a queen and carry a painful sting, but the reality is that most bees are solitary and mostly harmless creatures, said Peter Webb, who, along with his wife Laurie, runs Tutus Loco, SA’s leading bee hotel supplier, which is providing the hotels for Reynolds’s project. “There are about 1,200 species of bees in SA alone,” he said.
About 50% of those nest in the ground, the other 50% nest in branches, logs, dry plant stems or reeds.
“They are always looking for a place to nest,” Webb said. “When you put up a bee hotel you are presenting 30 nice clean holes for them to nest in.”
“They build a pantry in the back, lay the eggs and then seal the hole.”
Different bee species use the hotels at different times. Right now, Reynolds’s bee hotel is home to just one species, but others will move in.
“They’re very happy to share. It just depends on when in the season it is and who gets there first,” she said.
For now the project is limited to Johannesburg’s metropolitan areas in an attempt to reduce the effect other external factors may have on the data. Other municipalities might have different priorities, which would skew the research, she said.
“Because we are trying to look at a landscape effect we want to take out as much of the factors that might influence what’s happening across the landscape. If the landscape is managed by one municipality, we kind of have a standardised template.”
The project has 250 participants so far, mostly in the city’s wealthier green suburbs.
“We have plans to use more targeted approaches to reach people in other areas,” said Reynolds.
This would include WhatsApp groups, she said.
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