Bee-utiful Bee Home

         I received an email from a reader asking how our Mason Bees from last year are doing . . . well they're all dead! But that's a good thing. They've completed their life cycle . . . laid tons of eggs and died!! I had you going though didn't I?

         Our Mason Bees did an amazing job this year! We have a huge amount of apples and more then our fair share of pears. I'm giving full credit to our hard working Mason Bees, they took our fruit trees from flowers, to fruit:

         It was really cool to watch them work, I would spend a few minutes everyday on the back porch watching them fly in and fly out. Lee was so curious one day he popped a ladder up there to get a closer look! Mason Bees are solitary so they don't protect their hive and are commonly referred to as the "gentle bee". They do have the ability to sting but rarely do, Lee was right in front of their hive pulling tubes out and replacing them with new ones and he wasn't even close to stung! They just few right by him and into their home.

How Mason Bees help and why we need them:
         Mason Bees pollinate at an amazing rate thanks to their fuzzy bellies. Regular Honey Bees operate at a 10% efficiency rate of spreading pollen . . . Mason Bees efficiency rate of pollination is over 90%! A single female can land on 2000 blossoms a day!
Our tiny little apple tree is overloaded with apples and our pear tree (which produced no pears last year) has well over 30 this year!

        Mason bees have become more important in recent years due to many factors, the main one being something called "Colony Collapse Disorder" a phenomenon in which worker bees from a bee hive or bee colony abruptly disappear. CCD had a dramatic increase in 2006 and has been attributed to everything from mites to pesticides. Without bees to pollinate our crops we'll see a dramatic decrease in food being harvested. For example, Bees are the main pollinator of Almond crops in California.  In 2000 the crop value was at 15 billion, in 2006 (after CCD) the crop value dropped to 1.5 billion.

We Need Bees! 

         Mason Bees are seriously easy to take care of, really they're no work at all . . . once a year you replace the old cardboard tubes with new ones! No bee suits, no smoke! You don't even need the cardboard tubes. You could just drill holes in wood and they can use that, we choose to use inexpensive cardboard tubes ($10 lasts us 3 years) we just replace them each year. Keeping the hive a bit cleaner then a hive with no cardboard tubes.
You get 4-6 weeks of bee activity starting about half way through March and ending around the beginning of May. Then they die and their eggs hatch and come out next spring!

Mason bees are definitely increasing in popularity, in fact they do the best in Suburban communities where there are lots of flowers and fruit trees!

My hope is that one day you'll see mason bee homes 

in yards as frequently as you see bird feeders!