Mason bees at Brushy Mountain

[Gypsi]

Just got my email flyer from Brushy Mountain, they not only have tubes and woodware for mason bees, they have cocoons.  Kind of wondering who they bought out. I used to get my stuff from Crown.

[apisbees]

Once you have a good population established it is not hard to set up blocks and collect cocoons to give to friends, relatives, and neighbors. By harvesting the cocoons you can incubate them so their hatch out and release will coincide with early plants pollination needs. I don't know why they have never caught on as a commercial crop pollinator. It would be easy for a farmer to release, harvest the cocoons, and cool store till they are needed next year.

[Les]

I saw a study once about Mason bees and the possibility of them taking up the slack of absent Honey Bees.  They sprayed one half of a field with some kind of insecticide and left the other half unsprayed.  Guess which side the Mason Bees avoided?  Yup, the sprayed side. 

[Gypsi]

I have a block, the trouble is getting it in and protected from mason bee predators at the right time, and I hope to do better next year. Lost 7 tubes this year.

[iddee]

Make a cage over it with 1 inch chicken wire. It won't keep the wasps out, but it will the birds.

[Gypsi]

Excellent idea, thank you!  I had the suspension wires coated with that tacky tree stuff to stop the carpenter ants that started the raid. Didn't think of birds

[Perry]

I don't know why they have never caught on as a commercial crop pollinator. It would be easy for a farmer to release, harvest the cocoons, and cool store till they are needed next year.

Aren't there people in the prairies doing this? I wonder how successful it might be?

[apisbees]

The leafcutter bee is used for alfalfa seed production as the honey bee go after the nectar from the sides and in the process do not pollinate the flowers. In the Okanagan the ministry of Agriculture introduced populations of mason bees and did studies on their pollination but few orchardest bothered with them, the interest in them is with the home gardener. There may be some using them for canola pollination but most are still renting hives of bees.
The Alberta government did a study on the use of solely natural wild pollinators for the pollination of canola. They planted the crop and left varying amounts of undisturbed wild areas for the wild pollinators. They tracked the input costs to grow the crops, the yield and yield per acer in relation to the input casts and the %of crop area. In the end they found that 70% of the area should be planted and the other 30% should be left for the wild pollinators to get the highest return for their investment.

[Gypsi]

the only thing for masons I bought was my block. When I got my first hive I had planted a lot of wildflowers for the bees, and I was admiring my bees in the wildflowers in April or May and saw a blue bee. I called the gal I bought the hive from and told her I thought I had a defective bee. She laughed and told me to run a search on blue bees. I have leaf cutters and a lot of small wild bees around here, have not yet had a successful nesting block event, didn't get the block in the refrigerator soon enough in fall of 2014 and found that they had hatched trapped inside the nylon stocking in my garage, just a couple of bees. and then something got my cells last year, hoping to do better in 2016. the woodpecker holes in the woods by the creek and the ones in my elm tree are probably well occupied.