Mason Bees

This week Greg is going to tell you about mason bees. This is a new thing at the Ranch that was introduced to us by one of his friends, Dave Novak. All I know is that they don’t produce honey but rather are just pollinators. The bees were placed in the orchard in a dormant state, and we are waiting for them to become active…  Greg, take it away and tell us what they are all about.

I had mason bees years ago at The Compound, but I never followed through with the proper maintenance. When we first bought our current property and started to build the orchard, I inquired with the local nursery about mason bees. Given my time constraints and so much going on, I passed on the project. Fast forward about 5 years, and Dave and I have a conversation about his mason bees. He raises them and offered to come out to the Ranch, set me up and teach me a lot more than I knew before. He built a housed bundle of tubes that we installed on one of the corner posts.

We dug a small hole and placed special clay on the side walls so the bees had something nearby they could use for laying their eggs.

After the last frost, I took the small number of cocoons out of the refrigerator where they had spent all winter and placed them in a small flattened toilet paper tube on top of the bee tubes where they will ultimately lay their eggs this summer.

I have a lot more to learn about mason bees, but in short, they are native fruit tree pollinators. They pollinate earlier than honey bees that generally don’t come out of hibernation until after fruit trees have already bloomed.

Therefore, they are very important to our ecosystem. They obviously live on their own in the wild, but creating an ideal location for them to thrive is something we are trying to do now. As far as the honey bees go, I sold all of our equipment after struggling for years to make it work. I’m hoping that mason bees will do better.

Thanks for sharing Greg, we are all learning about Mason Bees together. If you want to learn more on your own feel free to check out this great article.