Six Essentials for Successfully Raising Mason Bees 

Yeah, I actually couldn't understand a lot of what he said despite replays, so I missed much of the info. Sucks.

I agree. Background noise is irritating, poor video

you can buy mud mix from crownbees.com

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.

@Jake R All my hoetals have bamboo, and every year I have more and more bees! I have only been doing it for 4 years.

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.

and he's wired--I wonder what happened. Sound quality is important!

@@kristenkingsbury2246 I think it's her mic on the camera picking up the noise as she is louder than him.

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.

When there is pollen outdoors. weather.com/maps/health/allergies/treepollen

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.

+VeganMarcella, thank you so much for your explanation. I appreciate your time to educate me. God bless you. :)

+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.

looks like its on their about page .... www.theplantfarm.com/ there ya go :)

checked the link and it didn't work, he may have closed the site? who knows, thanks for your help

He is actually from crownbees.com great site!

weird it was there when i posted now its not :S

Try again, it is fantastic