Mason Bees Vs. Honey Bees

When you’re the typical bee that most people recognise, a honey bee, a night on the town can be very expensive. A typical colony can contain anywhere of up to 60,000 bees so you can imagine the bar tab. Mason bees are a bit more shy and enjoy bee-ing by themselves, making for more manageable drink bills.

    If mason bees live alone, why would they want to nest in the bee boxes? Well, Dr. Margriet Dogterom’s book Pollination With Mason Bees, uses a very easy to understand analogy. She says to think of them like renters. Now most of us have rented in some point in our lives, or know someone who rents. A typical apartment building can house lots of people, and these renters may never interact. Mason bees are very much like this. Just because they live in the same building doesn’t mean they live together.

A Blue Orchard Mason Bee
Source - http://www.agf.gov.bc.ca 

    If you’ve just moved into an apartment building or are visiting a friend, it can sometimes be hard to find the right door. Mason bees have some trouble with this too! A mason bee house like the one in Tanya’s past post or like the ones we will be building ideally should be marked with colours at the entrance so bees can easily find their’s. It is suggested that grouped together houses have a simple design across the whole face of the box. For example a big blue X or a V can be helpful. It is even helpful to paint each tunnel with colour. The key is simplicity. One or two colours per house.

Just like our homes, each ‘apartment’ of a mason bee house is home to several bees from the same mother. This is where the depth of the tunnels comes into play. Mason bees lay their eggs in a particular way: females at the back and males near the front. A shorter tunnel means that there will be less female eggs laid, resulting in an abundance of males from that family.

   Once the bees lay their eggs, they seal up the opening of the tunnel with a mud mixture. The baby mason bees then begin the process of developing into fully-grown bees for next spring.

    It is over this time of development that we will be helping the bees along. We'll detail this in future blog posts as well as in a printable booklet to keep handy!



References

Dogterom, D. (2009). Pollination with mason bees: A gardener’s guide to managing mason bees for fruit production. Coquitlam, BC: Beediverse publishing of CPC Ltd.

Building a Mason Bee Haus

Finding your own space is hard when you’re a city bee. And it’s not the cost of living in Vancouver that’s the problem.

By building mason bee homes for bees we create a safe space that brings the bees closer to a food source (because commuting long distances is tiring for insects too), and it helps decrease the potential threat of pests (less break-ins).

This is a standard mason bee house. 

The house design is meant to mimic what bees look for in nature. The roof of course is shelter from the rain, but more detailed things are key for bees, like a good landing pad. By making the length of the frame bigger than the trays (you see them stacked in the house) you give the bees a place to land where they can take a breather before climbing into their holes.

Each tray has a row of channels that from the outside look like rows of holes when the trays are stacked. The channels are generally 5-6 inches deep; this gives the mason bees space to lay their eggs. Every website we came across about mason bee house design said to make the diameter of the holes 5/16 of an inch… I’m not sure how they figured this number out (picturing mason bees with little tape measures going from tree to tree).

Here is a video for a mason bee retailer that makes pretty spiffy houses. She gives a great visual breakdown on what a good mason bee house looks like.

Stay tuned for pictures of the mason bee house design chosen for the event!

For the Love of Bees

Hello!

Vancouver gardens were looking spectacular once again this year! And we can credit in part those “green thumbed” folks, but we can’t forget the bees. Not just the fuzzy little bumblebee, or the sweet little honeybee, we also have to credit the native pollinator, the mason bee.

Mason bee homes seem to be growing in numbers around the city, in parks and community gardens, but for those interested in getting into mason bee care, those little wooden boxes can pretty expensive to buy or seem a little hard to make.

Well lucky you for finding us. You can build your own mason bee home for free!

Bee the Future is a community workshop funded by a Vancouver Greenest City Grant.

Saturday, September 8th from 12-2:30pm at Kiwassa Neighbourhood House.

Look for the registration link in the sidebar! (Space is limited)