To Grow a Right-Sized Bee, Give It a Right-Sized Nest

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 "Bee size is not inherited and is instead determined by the size of the nesting cavity it hatches and develops in and by the amount of food left by its mother before sealing the cavity shut. Most commercial nesting boxes for bees come with cavities in one size—7 millimeters (mm) in diameter, and 100 mm to 150 mm in length. But what happens if you change the cavity size?


To find out, a group of researchers at North Dakota State University experimented with nesting cavities that ranged from 4 mm to 9 mm in diameter. Their results, published in November in the Journal of Economic Entomology, show that different diameters do indeed produce different size bees and that the ideal bee size depends on what alfalfa farmers and managers want the bees to do."


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