Rant From The Past: The Bee Geek Learns a Lesson

This is kinda funny.  It’s a post I wrote a year and a half ago, but I never published.  Sounds like I’d had a lot of coffee that day.

This weekend, my son’s most excellent elementary school had their annual Harvest Festival.  This year, I was asked to MC the booth on mason bees.  Actually, I think I was asked to do more than that, but I wasn’t paying attention.  In any case, we managed to pull together the requisite chunks of wood, drill bits, The ACTUAL Handout, and, most importantly, volunteers.

As you may have figured out by now, I have an opinion.  On everything.  What’s more, I am convinced that you want to hear every excruciating detail of my opinion and the research that went into forming it.  You do, right?  Just say something if you don’t.  I’ll wait…  OK.  That settles it.

Have you noticed how mason bee houses, mine included, typically have two characteristics: vertical orientation (i.e., taller than wide) and very regular spacing of holes (i.e., a grid pattern)?  To add insult to injury, they are usually not decorated.  And let us not forget obsessing about hole size.  Perfect, smooth, 9/32″ holes.  Anything else, and you’re committing apian genocide.

My impression from my experience with the little buggers, though, implies:

• The bees tend to nest in the holes closest to the overhang.  Makes sense… under the overhang gives them protection from rain and predators.  So, it seems like it would make sense to construct a bee house that’s much wider than it is tall, no?  So all the holes are near the overhang?
• The bees get lost.  That is… the females spend a remarkable amount of time going into the wrong holes, backing out, trying another…  I can only surmise that they can orient themselves to the block easy enough, but once they get close to the face, it’s a regularly spaced grid of identical holes and so pretty tough to navigate.  Strikes me that an irregular pattern of holes– maybe decorated with high-contrast markings– would help out in that regard.
• Holes… well… I’m no woodworker.  As a result, my holes have been all kinds of bad in terms of size and smoothness.  And you know what?  They don’t care much.  I don’t see any strong correlation between adherence to 9/32″, neat holes, and occupancy.  They sorta pick a hole for whatever reason and work it out.  That’s not to say that one should make splintery 1/2″ holes and call it good.  Just that obsessing about it is probably a waste of time.

You know what else?  Those unlined wood blocks are not a great idea in the first place.  They get all gunked up, infested with parasites, etc.  So, you have to clean them out.  The problem is that the bees are moving in about the same time they’re moving out.  There’s always someone living in the them.  So… to clean them out, you pretty much have to drill out the holes… with… the little bees, uh… yeah…

You should really use liners.

Annnnyway, there I am… at this booth… dozens of people coming and going… many of them about eight years old… and I start ranting about all this minutia.  They all look at me like, ‘hey, dork, just hand me a drill… I wanna make my birdhouse…‘  For you see, not only did they not want to hear my raving about the details, roughly a third of them wondered why people were drilling such tiny holes in their birdhouses.  A few people explained that they couldn’t have these in their yard because they were “allergic to yellowjackets and stuff”.

I must learn to remember that just because I’m obsessed with a topic doesn’t mean that everyone else is.

From now on:

“Hi.  This is a mason bee.  It won’t sting you and doesn’t make honey.  They pollinate fruit trees mostly.  Here’s your birdhouse.  Have a nice day.”