Mason Bees, Part… oh, I don’t know… 65?

Happy Valentine’s Day, if you’re into that kind of thing.

As my three faithful readers may know, I am obsessed with mason bees (Osmia lignaria).  Honey bees and bumble bees are also quite awesome, but the mason bee I find particularly interesting because:

1. It’s native.  Whoo-hoo!  There’s something native to somewhere still!
2. They don’t sting.  I don’t know, that just seems nice.
3. They’re tiny, and tiny is cute.
4. They come out early, and are therefore the perfect fruit tree pollinator (that’s really kind of #1, but still, it’s my blog, so it gets its own line item).
5. They haven’t succumbed quite as badly to mites as other types.
6. They’re awesome.  My blog.  Awesome gets a line.
7. They have a crazy-assed life cycle in which one can become personally involved.

Whatever, they’re cool.

If you’re not familiar, mason bees work like this.  In the early spring, they come out of their cocoons, fly around, collect pollen by the bucketful, and build nests (one at a time) where they drop an egg, some pollen, and cork it with mud.  Then, they do that again… and again… until they die in early summer.  Those eggs hatch, eat the pollen, grow into adults, and by late summer, they’ve wrapped themselves into a cocoon to sleep for the winter… and the beautiful circle of life continues.  THE CIRCLE OF LLLLLIIIIIIFFFFFFFEEEEEEE!!!

It gets weirder than that, but most importantly, there’s all sorts of human-male-friendly noodling with equipment, measurements, supplies, and such that keeps my interest.

As it turns out, there are all kinds of complications, too.  For instance, while they haven’t succumbed to varroa mites like honey bees, they have their own predators– mites, wasps, gross stuff, slime, cooties, what not.  The best control for that is to open the little tubes up and clean the little buggers off before they wake up.  I did that today. I peeled open all the tubes, washed them in weak bleach water, rinsed, and repeated.  I tossed everything that didn’t look right; I lost about half to predators of one sort or another.

I was going to photo-document, but… did not.  I did get the final product:

Now, I will put those guys out into the yard in March, and hopefully, they will all pop out and be fruitful and multiply.

The issue that I run into every year, though, is what is the best nesting system.  Tubes or no tubes?  Blocks with grooves that stack or blocks with holes?  What kind of tube?  Paper, parchment, or plastic coated?  Where to get ‘em?

It seems that anyone that knows anything about mason bees is determined to make some money off of them.  Even the Home Orchard Society charges $6 for 27 tubes, and for all I know, they’re not making anything off them.  That’s nearly a quarter per tube.  I’ve got a whole bunch of blocks out there– probably a couple hundred tubes (I have high hopes).

This year, I’m torn between trying a system in which I drill all the way through a block, insert home-made parchment paper tubes, and then screw on a back panel to secure them and one for which you make a box that holds grooved plates that stack up to effectively make a “block”.  In the first, the parchment’s cheap, easy to unroll, and a pain in the butt to make all the rolls.  In the second, there are no tubes to fart with, but I’m a little concerned about the square notches, and there’s more “building” involved.  Hmm… maybe that’s a positive.

The plastic coated tubes (ala, the Home Orchard Society) do well for protecting the cocoons from parasitic wasps and mold, but they’re a pain to unroll and expensive.

The regular paper tubes just suck all around.  They get moldy and fall apart when they get damp.  They’re also quite expensive when bought from a company that makes its livelihood off of something that doesn’t require much in the way of equipment.

Um.  The end.