Last spring was our 1st year doing mason bees. I was recently driving by the nursery where I got bees last year, and they had a sign out advertising “Mason bees in stock”. This got us thinking that it is time to take stock of what we have and decide if we are doing it again this year.
As you can imagine, it’s a challenge for us to keep up with all that we have going on, so being experts in mason bees has not been a priority. We knew that we were very late in doing something with the bees that we put out last spring, but we also knew that mason bees live in the wild without human interaction. We finally did some additional homework and realized we should have taken the bees in and protected them last June, not January of 2021…oops! Anyway, here is what we did:
- Brought in the two bee houses
- Pulled out the tubes
- Removed the bee cocoons that were ‘hibernating’
- Rinsed the cocoons with water
- Allowed the cocoons to dry on paper towels
- Stored the cocoons in a plastic container and placed them in a refrigerator
After doing that, we have roughly 140 cocoons, more than we put out last year. Hopefully, they are not all dead from being out in the elements for eight months.
We have new clean paper tubes to put in their houses. Around March – May, when the outside temperatures raise and we get our first blossoms, we will put the refrigerated cocoons out near their bee houses where they will wake up and start pollinating the garden and orchard trees.
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