By joereal at 2008-03-21

If you don't have available spot on your roof, or the roof is not easily accessible, you can build a roofing over the Mason Bee House and secure it on the west fence. The West fence gets morning sun, and gets shaded in the hot afternoons. That's another ideal place, but would require you to build roofing over the housing especially if you have small cracks in the wood.




By joereal at 2008-03-21

This housing is secured by a metal bracket.

By joereal at 2008-03-21

Here's another sample of a modular housing. You can practically build any housing configuration as long as the hole is 6" deep and the size fits that of your specific Mason Bee species.

By joereal at 2008-03-21

Or you can go natural, using hollowed-out logs too.

Joe,
Great tutorial! Your nest house looks a lot like mine that I made from an old scrap piece of 4x4. The hardest part for me was drilling the holes straight; I do have a small drill press but it doesn't have enough clearance to drill the holes completely through so I ended up also using a hand drill (not as accurate).

I also made one from a W*lmart bird house that was about $8, not as cheap as scrap wood but the drilling part may be easier. I covered the bird house front with a piece of mason () board and drilled holes in the front and back panels (making sure that they lined up as best as possible). Nesting tubes were then inserted. Some of the nesting tubes were cardboard ones that came with my original mason bees, the rest I made from plastic straws. The largest straws I could find were a little undersized (1/4") so I split them to enlarge them and reinforced them with electrical tape. All tubes were then lined with parchment paper. Since the bird house is hollow the parchment paper is probably not strong enough on its own, hence the tubes. Note that the W*lmart nest was so cheap it was put together with staples, so I replaced most of the staples with screws. Also, I bought the bird house before I realized that it was made of cedar and may be insect repellant, but it doesn't seem to keep the mason bees away (they've already started nesting in it), it may have helped that I covered the front with another type of material.

If you look carefully at the second photo you can make out a mason bee entering the hole arrowed, its abdomen coated with pollen. Also there is one hole plugged with dirt, this is a tube from the previous season with bees that haven't hatched yet (I left one nest tube undisturbed and removed the rest of the cocoons from the tubes - some cocoons I stuck the holes like Joe shows and the others I just put inside the bird's nest since it's hollow and has access slots on the sides.




If you don't have a source for the bees, just build some nests and if they are native to your area chances are good that they will come and use them.

Here's a picture of a mason bee resting on my avocado plant. They're blackish with a blue/green metallic tint, perhaps 1/2 inch long, similar in size to a honey bee. If you sit near their nest they will buzz around you and may be bothered enough (or confused enough - they apparently use landmarks to find their nest) to keep from entering, but there is very little chance that they will sting you.

Both of you have done a good job--those are neat looking bee houses. There is another way to make the tunnels that may be easier for those without a drill press.

You can use 1 by material (1x4 or 1x6) and using a router cut parallel grooves lengthwise (with a V or round bit) in the boards, then sandwich the boards together to create tunnels. You can also use a table saw with a dado blade to create parallel grooves. You can then put the parchment tubes in the grooves.

This is great. I'm going to have to give it a try. I have a drill press, but I don't know if it will go as deep as it needs to be. Either way, it sounds fun.

My wife and daughter though are terrified of any type of bug. Those mason bees look like the type of bugs that would terrorize them.

Can mason bee cocoons be shipped any time of year or just during the winter when they're in hibernation?

Phillip

Shipping them before winter means that they are in the larval stage still, eating the stash, and they would be extremely disturbed from all the shaking in transit. I don't know what will happen.

So, it is strongly recommended that they be shipped during the winter time. Late winter shipment are very iffy, as they could hatch in transit.

Hey Joe,
Just checking to see how your bees are doing. We went apple picking last weekend and I struck up a conversation with the orchard owner who happens to processes bees wax on the side. He says the bee colony collapse is the topic of most conversations in the industry. I mentioned mason bees and he said he was considering them for the orchard, but they were $1 per bee.

Phillip

You can order them cheaply from

http://www.homeorchardsociety.org/masonbees/


They cost $1.50 per 9 cocoons (or 9 bees hopefully), or about $0.17 each. Compared to honeybees, these are still pricey.

However, they can't be compared directly, as each female mason bee is a queen in its own right. The queen honeybee on the other hand costs an arm and a leg. The whole beehive is the queen.

My Mason Bee has grown from one cocoon group to 4. This is too slow for me. I would be buying reinforcements from home orchard society.

I might buy $18 worth of mason bees this coming December, that's about 72-108 cocoons, which should fill up the empty nests with plenty to spare to other interested friends here.

I have seen quite a few of the mason bee that is found in this area lately. I have had quite a few bees that used the straws I put up for nest--I just bundled some bunches of a local reeds (phragmites cominalis) cut in 6-8 inch legnths--the bundles offer a variety of sizes and the bees seem to like them more that the drilled holes.