Garden Tips & Tricks

Those neat round holes in your leaves aren't a disease. A bee is carrying the pieces away to line the nursery for her young. 🌿

You might spot them on a rose, a wisteria, a lilac. Semicircles, ovals, almost perfect cut-outs along the leaf edge. And the first reaction is often immediate: the leaves are sick, a pest has moved in, better treat it before everything's ruined.

But a caterpillar doesn't cut a leaf as if with scissors. The plant isn't under attack. It's simply supplying building paper to a bee.

It's a leafcutter bee, a Megachile. A solitary bee — no queen to defend, no colony. Just a few weeks of adult life and a whole motherhood to prepare entirely alone.

The female lands on the leaf, chooses a soft section, and her jaws begin to cut, following a smooth curve into a circle or an oval. Then she tucks the piece beneath her body and flies off. She doesn't eat it. She carries it to a cavity — a hole in wood, a hollow stem, a crack in a wall — a small space most people would never notice.

There she builds, laying the leaf pieces against the walls, curving and overlapping them until a little green cell takes shape. Then she returns to the flowers, trip after trip, packing pollen and nectar into the cell. Not for herself, but for a larva that doesn't yet exist. When the store is enough, she lays an egg and seals the chamber with more leaf cuttings.

The cut-outs look far more dramatic than they are. The leafcutter takes only a few pieces. It doesn't devour roots or drain sap, and while it borrows a little leaf, it visits the flowers and pollinates them too.

So don't spray the notched leaves. Leave a few dry stems, a piece of drilled wood and some sheltered cavities in the quiet corners. Accept that some leaves won't be perfectly whole — because those round holes were never a disease 🐝