Like many wild bees, sand bees are endangered or even threatened with extinction.
They like to settle in abandoned gravel pits, grasslands or wasteland.
Until recently, the sand bee found heavenly conditions on the grounds of the Würmtal riding club in Graefelfing.
Graefelfing
- The jumping arena, which is lower than the rest of the club area, can only be used in very dry weather.
When it rains, the water collects there like in a bathtub and only runs off with a delay - bad for the riders, but good for the sand bees, who are largely left alone in the little-used space.
But the club needs space for additional paddocks and a new manure disposal facility and is therefore redesigning its grounds.
Countless sand bees were in danger of losing their homes.
In order not to simply leave the insects to their fate, the local beekeeping association took action.
Uschi Grünenwald, a member of both the riding club and the Graefelfing beekeeping club, activated around 20 young beekeepers as moving helpers before the excavators were supposed to move in.
The start of the work was planned for a very inopportune time.
“We would have needed three more weeks,” regrets the committed beekeeper.
To catch live bees, it was too early to sift the larvae out of the earth, too wet.
"So we dug and filled buckets with as much sand as possible, hopefully with bee larvae or pupae," says Grünenwald and hopes that part of "this huge colony survived the intervention."
At their new “home”, the apiary on Graefelfinger Rudolfstrasse, the survivors are not threatened with any comparable action for the time being.
The beekeeper hopes for the continued existence of the sand bees that even more garden and property owners will free up a place for the animals in the future.
Tips for a bee-friendly garden can be found on the association's homepage (www.imkerverein-graefelfing.de/bienengarten).
Margot Deny
