All these things at the same time : digging up the roots, cutting off the flowering tops, spraying with vinegar, create shade or competition between plant, let animals eat them up. Do not stop. You will win.
Very good, my place has only sand no clay type of soil. I would never thought I should prepare soil for them if you didn’t mentioned it! Great idea! Thank you!
These are butterfly attractors more than humming birds. Penstemon Agastash Salvias and fuscia as well as trumpet vine and honeysuckle are what they love.
I'd like to start with these bees but I live on the beach. I have gardens with a good bit of flowers but I don't think the soil is right. What would you recommend I put out as a possible supply for them to use as building material? Something I could buy or mix myself.
I guess I'm not understanding why we would want to interfere and "harvest" them. For what? Some have answered below and said to protect them from mites. Doesn't nature do this? Do we want genetically inferior bees mating and producing offspring that won't be able to live up to what nature has for them? I'm confused what you do with them after you've "harvested" them. Could someone please explain? THANK YOU! :)
The mites and parasitic wasps kill them, it has nothing to genetics. They die because the parasites eat their food or eat them while they are developing. It's like saying a tarantula should be able to withstand a tarantula hawk. I can sit at the nest block and kill little wasps all day. There are so many of them that I lost about 25% of my cocoons to these things even with me trying to kill them. After you harvest them in around October, you wash them in a water/bleach solution to clean them. You then dry them and then keep them in the fridge until you are ready to put them out the following spring with new empty tube for them to lay their eggs in.. I started with 12 and just yesterday put out 220 hopefully viable cocoons yesterday, 3 years later.
Just like with honey bees, mites are killing off the mason bees, the only way to protect your pollinators for the next spring's garden or fruit trees is to wash them off as described before the mites kill them. If hobby and small farm mason and honey bee keepers did not step in and help protect their small amount of bees by harvesting them, and protecting them over the winter in the refrigerator, or honey bee keepers killing mites in the hives, we wouldn't have many left. There are very little left in the wild.
+Michael Levine Thank you kindly for your thorough explanation. I appreciate all the efforts you took to educate me. May God bless you richly, Michael, and draw you close to Him. :)
You are really looking to see how healthy your bees are. If they are 80% overrun by mites and wasps, then you are doing something wrong. If there is 1% loss to these then you probably do not need to "harvest them" at all. If there is a mite cell near the end of the tube, all bees emerging from that tube will get mites as they pass through that cell. Then these mites will get in the next generation cells and kill those bees (or technically starve those bees since pollen mites eat the pollen supply). If you harvest them, you can save the next 7 bees down in the tube from getting infected with pollen mites as they emerge and prevent the death/starvation of the next generation. Think of it as bed bugs. Having bed bugs in the bed does not make us more genetically superior than people without bed bugs (I guess nature has that saved up for us). Having a clean bed without bed bugs is just a good thing. If your tubes are too close together or too thin walled and parasitic wasps gets them all or they are not removed early enough, then you really not helping the bees but helping the parasitic wasps. Just depends if you really want to help the pollinator or other species like mites and wasps and whether you have the proper moisture control and other strategies to help the mason bee thrive.
Really enjoy your videos! But you have that annoying hum or swishing sound. You need an external mic otherwise you can get that from the camera's motor. And make sure you turn off any pumps of stuff that can create background noise. Hope this helps??
I am wanting to build my own bee houses and get my first cocoons out this spring. Can I use a datoo blade on my table saw and rip grooves the length of the boards? I can then stack the boards on top of each other and this would leave square 'tubes' rather than round tubes from using a drill bit. At the end of the season I can then separate each board giving access to the grooves to remove the cocoons. And the diameter of the grooves is best being 5/16"? I would end up having square 5/16" grooves by say 5 1/2" long. Best wood to use? Fir, cedar? Thanks.
Do not use wood with strong smells like cedar. Remember bees are basically a flying nose. Smell matters to them. This is how they recognize their tubes and how they forage. A bee's olfactory sense is so acute-as much as 100 times more sensitive than a human's nose-that it can even sniff out the scent of a cancer tumor to help give early diagnoses. Make the holes at least 6 inches deep to get a decent amount of females in your population. Also, the mason bees must plug the entrance with mud for each cell. The easier that job is, the more bees you have. A square hole may be more surface area to cover with mud than a round one but if you use liners (and you should if you plan on reusing these next year), then the shape of the hole is less relevant. I would avoid putting round paper liners in a square hole because that space is just right for some wasp to crawl down into and oviposit their eggs into each mason bee larvae in the entire length of the tube.
What kind of wood works best for making Mason Bee Homes? I was thinking cedar would work well since it doesn't decay very fast in the outdoors, but I was concerned since cedar is known to be a natural bug repellent in it. Wasn't sure if it would hurt the Mason Bees or discourage them to enter
For the main part I was going to use marine plywood and either varnish it or paint it. I need a really big hotel as I currently have 5 smaller ones and they are over flowing! I want to make a new case and put the old hotels in it and then fill in the gaps with bamboo and pieces of drilled wood.
Don't forget that the bees will need flowering plants to forage on. Blue orchard mason bees are active for about six weeks in the spring. Fruit tree flowers are ideal.
ROCKIN40 Just from watching a few videos around, its to clean them off(from mites) and store them until you're sure the last frost has hit. Nature would probably do fine, but if you have a week of heat then a sudden cold snap, you might lose bees. Letting nature run its course means some might die from mites as well. depending on how many you have, you may not need them all, but you could probably stagger the release as well, allowing for longer pollination time.
That was really good information. However, one point about keeping the lawn high is that it makes it more resistant to weeds. The thicker more healthy a lawn is, then the more resistant it will be naturally to weed infestations. Good post.
Why does it look like Mary is wearing a lavalier mic. but it still sounds like audio is coming from the camera mic.? Hide the wire also. Why is Mary's head cut off at the start and why is the camera not on a tripod?
