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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.

Parents

  • Nice update. Also great to see how an e14 Design Challenge has inspired you in this way.

    My Hellebores arrived this afternoon and have survived the road trip intact.

    I think the Meteorological Office misread the instructions though as the 'watering' is occurring before planting so currently I now have 'houseplants' until the heavy rain stops.

    I also found some more guides on bee-friendly plants:

    RHS plants for pollinators

    RHS Help grow a million bumblebee miles

    Interesting to see Wild Oregano and Cat Mint on the list.

    In the meantime I've put another 1,000 bulbs into the ground and added a trellis mesh to the garden wall to provide better support for them in the wind. I collected seeds and cuttings from last year's Salvia flowers and seeded them over winter and kept them indoors and one has started to flower this week. They can be planted with the Hellebores to hopefully give Winter/Spring and then Summer/Autumn flowering.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    I can vouch for the cat mint.  We have some growing amongst the roses in the backyard and I used to try to clear them out until I saw how many bees they attracted in the summer.  My wife makes me leave the dandelions alone too.

  • in reply to ralphjy

    Does the cat mint actually attract cats as well, or do the dogs tend to prevent that ?

    I put a new climbing rose in here over winter to accompany the first two and it has started to produce new shoots. Their flowering schedule are supposed to be slightly different so hoping to extend the flowering duration. The first two have done quite well in their first year, despite my ham-fisted attempts to train them, along with a sawfly infestation.

    image

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    The two dogs are granddogs, so mostly here only 4 days a week.  I’ve never seen cats in the yard so possibly the scent of the dogs deters them.  Or the coyotes get them before they get here.

    We encounter coyotes frequently on our walks and also come across many carcasses and missing cat posters.

    image

  • in reply to ralphjy

    I have a bit of a cat highway thing going on through the back garden between the two neighbourhoods, so not quite sure how it would work out.

  • in reply to beacon_dave

    Our neighbors have two cats that visit our yard regularly.  They have completely eradicated the voles and have kept the mice in check.  We are good with them.  The timid one likes the catnip we grow to deter mosquitoes.  It's hilarious when he's stoned out of his gourd and notices us through the patio door.  He stands up but then forgets what he's doing.  He's walked straight into the pot before.  We just watch and let him be.  The other, bipolar one never touches the stuff.

  • in reply to kmikemoo

    From what I've read, Cat Mint doesn't get them doped up like Cat Nip does but they do tend to roll around in it flattening it and anything nearby. I may therefore need to either protect them with a mesh perimeter or have them in raised pots, so as they can sniff and rub against but prevent them from rolling around on top of them and nearby plants.

    Wild Oregano may be a safer bet and I can use it on pizza Slight smile

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  • in reply to kmikemoo

    From what I've read, Cat Mint doesn't get them doped up like Cat Nip does but they do tend to roll around in it flattening it and anything nearby. I may therefore need to either protect them with a mesh perimeter or have them in raised pots, so as they can sniff and rub against but prevent them from rolling around on top of them and nearby plants.

    Wild Oregano may be a safer bet and I can use it on pizza Slight smile

Children
  • 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.

  • 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

    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..