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  • Author Author: ralphjy
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Mason Bees Spring 2025

ralphjy

It's been couple of years since the Save the Bees Design Challenge but that challenge inspired me to support native pollinators in our area (mason bees and leafcutter bees).

The Finisher's Prize was a Insect Hotel that I put out in the yard when I received it in July in hopes of getting leafcutter bees to nest.  Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful getting any types of bees or other insects to populate the hotel.

Insect Hotel 2023

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The next year I tried with a different Mason Bee House that I put out in early March.  I had done some research and Mason Bees like nesting tubes that are 8 mm in diameter and 150 mm long.  The Insect Hotel had shorter 100 mm tubes and many were larger and smaller than 8 mm in diameter.  Leafcutters are smaller bees but they also line their nests with leaf fragments so the 8 mm tubes should work for them also.  A friend gave me 20 Mason Bee cocoons as a starter so I put them in a paper box attached under the bee house.  Had success with bees emerging from 16 of the cocoons.

Had less success with getting the bees to nest and only got 4 of the tubes filled.  I took the picture below about midway through the spring season and only had 2 tubes at that point.  I think part of my problem getting Mason Bees to nest was that I did not  provide them with a nearby source of wet clay-rich mud.  I'll do that this year.  And I again had no success with Leafcutters nesting later in the summer even though I pretty sure I saw some in the garden.

Mason Bee House 2024

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Mason Bee Cocoons

Here are some of the 2 dozen cocoons that I harvested from the tubes in the fall.  The larger ones are the females and the little round disks are the spacers between the cocoons in the tube.

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I put out a different Mason Bee house this year.  I have white paper inserts in some of the tubes to reduce the diameter slightly to hopefully make them more attractive to Leafcutters.  I also added a cocoon incubator that I built.  The incubator uses a thin wall 1 1/2" PVC tube that I cut to length and added 3D printed endcaps.  Last year the paper box that I put the cocoons in barely survived the rain.

Mason Bee House 2025

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It has been a cold and wet end of winter and start of spring so I've delayed putting out the cocoons.  You're supposed to wait until the daytime temperature is consistently above 13 C.  Finally had a couple of sunny warmer days at the beginning of this week.  I put the cocoons out on Monday and by Wednesday we had bees buzzing around the Camelia bush in the backyard.  The bees were so active that I couldn't manage to get a picture of one on a flower, so I did the next best thing and took a video of them buzzing around.  The video has been slowed down to 0.1 x speed.

Unfortunately the Camelias in our yard are a couple of weeks past their peak bloom and the Hellebores also.  The Daffodils are in full bloom but the bees don't seem attracted to them.  We have a couple of Azalea bushes just starting blossom and a Lilac tree that's full of buds, so hopefully we can keep the bees happy.  The solitary bees tend to have a very small foraging range (~100 m) and will nest elsewhere if there isn't a sufficient source of food and clay-rich mud for constructing their nests.

Azalea

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Clay-rich Mud

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My wife got our yard certified in the Backyard Habitat program and we have been using more native plants and wildlife friendly gardening practices.  We did "leave the leaves" this year to enhance bumblebee nesting and while the yard looked like a mess I've noticed more bumblebees this spring.  We just started planting Trilliums last year which are bee friendly but ours have not started to bloom yet.  We noticed lots of them this week when walking the dogs in a nearby wilderness park, so it's possible that ours won't bloom this year.

Trillium

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I'd like to put up a camera so that I can record nesting activity but don't know if I'll have time to get that done.

  • in reply to genebren

    Hi  ,

    Nice that you are also embracing the return to native habitat.  I sometimes wonder with the severity of climate change if anything will be sustainable.  

    I did take some bee courses (both native and honeybee) back when I was doing the design challenge but real life execution is what counts.  I did account for the things that you mentioned but may not have done what was appropriate for my particular circumstances.  That being said, I do notice that some people are very successful without that much thought.

    Hope you have success with the bees for the gardening program!

    Read your post where you mentioned your solar power water feature.  Looks like a neat project.  I liked the pole mounted solar panel system.  Sounds like you're having fun with it.  I'm getting to old to do anything of that scale.  Certainly not anything that requires heavy lifting...

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    Apologies, that pic is just one from the internet that looks like the cat mint that we have.  I cut back the cat mint in the winter and there's not much to look at now.  We have a 3' x 12' strip along the house that also has a couple of rose bushes.  I don't recall how many plants we started with (probably 2-3) but that area has filled in with cat mint.  It's hard to distinguish individual plants anymore.  I should probably thin them.  My wife thinks you should grow them in containers to limit the spread.  We had a similar problem with fireweed (native plant but the name is appropriate).  Beautiful plant and bee friendly but definitely self-propagating through root spreading and it quickly got everywhere and was choking out other plants and started to overgrow our stone patio.  I had to dig it out and give it all away.  Definitely a plant to enjoy in a wilderness area Laughing.  I didn't think cat mint spread that way but it seems like it does..

  • Hey  !

    We have tried a couple of times to attach and house the Mason Bees, but alas, no success there.

    My wife runs a vegetable gardening program for home-school kids at one of the local parks.  One of the volunteers, has taken some classes in Mason Bee habitat management and housing.  She had me hang a couple of simple houses (tin cans with bamboo tubes).  The requirements on diameter and length of the tubs are pretty specific, but there are also a lot of other requirements including the direction of the opening, height from the ground and even the presence (or absence) of certain vibrations.  I have not looked to see if we have had any success with attracting any bees, but I will try and remember to check this week.

    We have been doing a lot of work to provide habitat for butterflies and bees in our yard. We have a good-sized organic vegetable garden, along with a pollinator garden with both nectar and host plants.  We have removed more than half of the lawn area with Texas native plants and see are converting the remaining lawn area with native grass mixes.  We have had a lot of guests the past couple of years, but we seem to be slowing down lately as we are in an extended drought.

    Keep up the good work and hopefully you will get a lot of enjoyment for your efforts! 

  • in reply to ralphjy

    Roughly how many plants is that, or is it hard to tell ? 

    Looks like you could have 20 cats hiding in there and you wouldn't even know !

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    I really don't have a clue about cats but cat mint is pretty robust (at least the variety we have).

    Looks like this

     image

    Ours grow to about 3 feet and are fairly dense so I wouldn't think that cats would roll on top of it but again I don't know cats.  I have to cut them back constantly in the summer because they will overhang the lawn and I'll get a face full of bees if I disturb them when mowing the lawn.