chriscoli
Administrator
The day before the BFD, a few items I ordered for taking care of solitary bees arrived at my house....but, it sat on the kitchen table until today.
I got a bunch of cardboard tubes to try to use instead of the plastic nesting block I had been previously using for attracting Mason Bees.
I found that the product I was previously using didn't really attract mason bees (but I did get other types of solitary bees, so I'm ok with that). Primarily, though, was hard to protect against predation of the developing bee larvae during the late summer, which is why I decided to try a new product...and they were a pita to clean between seasons. The new cardboard tubes I'm trying should make things a lot easier.
For those that aren't familiar with solitary bees....they tend not to sting (yea, they will if you accidentally squish them) since they're not guarding a community nest, and they can pollinate many times more flowers than honeybees. They nest in tubes, canes, stems found in nature. They create chambers in the tube made out of mud (or leaves), pack in a wad of pollen, and lay an egg. That chamber gets sealed, and the next one filled.
Here's the products I'm going to try this year....they also have a lot of great info on their page.
http://crownbees.com/
Anyone else doing this?
I got a bunch of cardboard tubes to try to use instead of the plastic nesting block I had been previously using for attracting Mason Bees.
I found that the product I was previously using didn't really attract mason bees (but I did get other types of solitary bees, so I'm ok with that). Primarily, though, was hard to protect against predation of the developing bee larvae during the late summer, which is why I decided to try a new product...and they were a pita to clean between seasons. The new cardboard tubes I'm trying should make things a lot easier.
For those that aren't familiar with solitary bees....they tend not to sting (yea, they will if you accidentally squish them) since they're not guarding a community nest, and they can pollinate many times more flowers than honeybees. They nest in tubes, canes, stems found in nature. They create chambers in the tube made out of mud (or leaves), pack in a wad of pollen, and lay an egg. That chamber gets sealed, and the next one filled.
Here's the products I'm going to try this year....they also have a lot of great info on their page.
http://crownbees.com/
Anyone else doing this?