How to Attract Mason Bees to Your Fruit Trees
If you’re planting backyard fruit trees or small orchard, you may have heard that mason bees can help with pollination. Here are 4 simple steps that can help you attract mason bees to your fruit trees. Step 4 includes directions for making your own mason bee house. 
From the genus Osmia, of the family Megachilidae, mason bee is a general term for any bee that collects organic material from the environment to make their nest. Here are a few things to know about them:
—>>>Please visit this article from Backyard Beekeeping to learn about the life cycle of a mason bee.<<<—
This is important to understand because it will effect the timing of when you place your mason bee houses outside in the spring and when you take them in for the winter.
Mason bees eat pollen and nectar, just like other bees. If you want to attract mason bees to your garden and orchard, it’s important to provide them a lot of flowering plants in the early and mid spring when they are most active. The more flowering plants you have in the spring, the less competition for food there will be from other pollinators for the mason bees.
You’ll have earlier flowering fruit tree varieties like apples and cherries that bloom as soon as your weather and soil begin to warm. If you’d like to attract mason bees to your fruit trees as soon as they’re able to fly, you can put other flowering plants around them as a lure.
*Native plants can be observed in fields, meadows and even ditches. Once you identify them, you can grow them from seed in your own garden. There are online and local plant growers who sell native wildflowers and grasses.
—>>>To learn more about how to plant for pollinators, I suggest you read The Bee Friendly Garden
, by Frey and LeBuhn. This book has lists of plants to consider for the garden, including when they bloom and where to plant them.
We discuss this book along with other bee-friendly things you can do in your yard in our Bee Friendly Garden article here. <<<—
You might also consider these —>>>Ground Cover Plants for Pollinators<<<—
Here are some pollination benefits and reasons to attract mason bees to your orchard.
Mason bees are much more willing to pollinate fruit trees in the cool temperatures of early spring than honey bees. Honey bee prefer to stay in their warm hives until the weathers warms up a bit, but mason bees are less fussy about temperature and begin to emerge from their nests once temperatures begin to hit 55F/13C. This means that mason bees can be pollinating your early blooming fruit trees and finish their work for the season as other pollinators are starting to wake up for the year.
Mason bees are quicker and more efficient at pollinating than even honey bees! They move quicker from flower to flower but they also carry the pollen in a way that pollinates efficiently. Honey bees tuck their collected pollen into bags on their legs after mixing it with nectar to wet it down. They end up with pollen on their heads and other places and end up moving pollen around that way. However, mason bees absolutely cover themselves in loose pollen and drop it everywhere as they travel from bloom to bloom. This results in high levels of pollination compared to other insects.
Mason bees are a lot less work than honey bees since they don’t produce honey, so you don’t need to feel compelled to harvest it. Additionally, mason bees will forage pollen in orchard trees like pears that have less sugar (nectar). Honey bees are more interested in high sugar plants because they have all that honey to make. Mason bees, on the other hand, don’t make honey and are willing to slip into any fruit tree bloom you have and pollinate it.
Mason bees nest in reeds, logs and even snail shells if they have to! You can provide them with simple nesting sites (as described in detail below) but you don’t have to provide or maintain hive boxes like you do with honey bees.
Here are 4 steps to attract mason bees to your fruit trees
We already talked about providing them with what they need to eat – lots of pollen and some nectar. Make a plan now to inter-plant your fruit trees with other flowering plants. Especially look for native plants that easily grow in your area because wild bees like masons are very attracted to them.
All insects require water just like you and I and mason bees are not exception. Ponds and creeks will do if they are very close. Mason bees will only travel up to 300 feet/100 metres away from their nesting sites, so keep that in mind.
Sometimes a leaky hose bib or a birdbath will be easier for them. You can also build bee-friendly watering dish. There are several pictures online of fancy ones and simple ones – here’s one of each.
Mason bees nest in wood most often, using holes created by other insects and birds, or even old nail holes; they don’t drill into wood themselves. Filling the holes with mud to make them safe and snug for laying eggs, mason bees will need a small patch of exposed dirt in your yard if you’d like them to nest successfully in your garden.
Sometimes people worry about them causing damage to their homes by nesting in existing holes and cracks but they really cause no damage while they nest.
The bees can forage mud, of course, but providing it for them means they have more time to pollinate your fruit trees. A little patch of mud or clay next to the water source will be sufficient for their needs.
If you’d like mason bees to be present in your garden in the largest numbers possible, the best thing to do is provide as many quality nesting sites as you can. You can do this by building a simple mason bee house.
Providing mason bee houses doesn’t necessarily increase the numbers of mason bees in your area permanently. Being solitary bees, they have no homing instinct that tells them to return back to a colonized hive, like honey bees. This can make them flighty guests in your garden, since they don’t necessarily return to nest in the place they were hatched.
Also, if you disturb their nesting site for any reason in spring while they’re working in it, they’ll simply abandon it and pick another one. So, be sure to place their nests in spring and then leave them undisturbed.
One last thing to remember is that all bees are territorial and you may have some conflict between mason bees, other native bees and honey bees. I find the best solution to this is variety and spacing. Have one or two mason bee houses per ten trees and
However, with proper maintenance, there isn’t sufficient evidence to suggest that providing mason bee houses harms mason bee populations in any way and doing so can increase the population the first and even second (since not all mason bees hatch the first year) years after you place the houses in your garden. It’s important that you remove or thoroughly clean your mason bee houses every two years to avoid pathogen build up and even mold (especially if you live in a humid area).
Hang your mason bee house in a very sunny, southeast facing position, protected from wind as much as possible. If your springs and summers are hot, be sure to provide afternoon shade.
Also, place the mason bee house 3-5 feet off the ground to avoid splash up from the ground when it rains. Be sure to provide some kind of roof, too, to prevent water from getting into the nesting site and causing mold.
(The mason bee house pictured here is under the cover of a porch roof so this one doesn’t have its own covering. The ones we’ve set out on the fence do.)
You will likely want to cover your mason bee house with hardware cloth to protect the larvae from birds. Most birds won’t be able to reach the larvae if you’ve drilled deep enough (at last 5”-6” for best results) but flickers, especially, can be pretty determined. And woodpeckers have very long tongues.
There are really two kinds of wooden block mason bee houses. With either design, you will need to place your mason bee house in the orchard in the early spring as mason bees emerge from their winter nests. Then, if you live where the winters get to freezing or below, you will need to bring the mason bee larvae into a garage or root cellar to protect the babies from freezing. The following spring, you will place the larvae back outside to hatch.
I REPEAT:
With either design, you will need to place your mason bee house in the orchard in the early spring as mason bees emerge from their winter nests. Then, if you live where the winters get to freezing or below, you will need to bring the mason bee larvae into a garage or root cellar to protect the babies from freezing. The following spring, you will place the larvae back outside to hatch.
More details and specifics on that below, but mason bee houses are not like beehives that stay out all year long. You should know that upfront!
The first design, which is nicely detailed in the very fine book Pollination with Mason Bees by Dr. Margriet Dogterom, is really two trays with channels cut out with a table saw for the bees to nest in. One tray is inverted and stacked onto the other so that the channels line up, creating a cozy corridor in which baby mason bees can develop. As Dr. Dogterom points out,
“The biggest advantage of trays is that they can be dismantled and examined….The tray system allows for the removal of predators, and parasites and increases your bee population, higher than is normally observed in nature.”
If you don’t have a table saw, you can make the following block mason bee house with only a drill.
Using the 6-8” block of wood, we drilled holes six inches down inside the block. To make your own mason be drilled-hole house, you can really use any untreated block of wood (except perhaps cedar which naturally repels insects) and a 5/16” drill bit (that seems to be the size hole that mason bees favor most).
You can use a template to evenly space the holes you’ll drill into the wood, if you’d like, but the mason bees really don’t care either way.
You’ll need:
Instructions:
If you didn’t read the article linked above about the life cycle of a mason bee, I suggest you do it now. Along with that, here are some things to know about mason bees throughout the year:
“Decorating the front of the nest makes it easier for bees to find their own nesting tunnel. A nest can be decorated with simple designs and or with one or two colours. Too few or too many markers at the nest will confuse the bees. Bees that are confused by the markers or lack of markers close to their nest can be observed flying in and out of several nesting tunnels or getting thrown out of neighbors’ nesting tunnels.”
Dr. Dogterom suggests using yellow, mauve, pink and blue colors but not to make them too fancy or complex. Simple letter shapes like X, V or O will do nicely.
**As was mentioned in step three, it’s important to keep your drilled-house clean. If you use the straws, follow the instructions in step three. If you don’t, plan to put your whole mason bee house into a lidded bucket or box in the fall with a single hole drilled into it so the bees can escape when they’re hatched. Dr. Dogterom suggests making sure that the box is painted dark because the bees will be less likely to return to it if it’s not brightly lit. After the bees have hatched (which can sometimes take two years to get them all), you can just burn the wood.
The biggest drawback to this block wood mason bee house design is that you really can’t clean them. However, the bees do seem to like them and use them well. We have an abundance of wood where we live, so burning them after two years is an acceptable outcome for me. Plus, these mason bee houses make a wonderful family project. Watching the bees set up during the year and emerge in the spring is truly a joy.
You can purchase mason bees online, however the survival/hatch rate can be unpredictable. The best mason bees for your area are the variety that are native to your area. If possible, try to find a mason bee seller close to you – in your state or at least in your area of the country.
You can also provide a variety of mason bee houses and see how many native bees you can attract. This is usually what I do. I figure, if I build it, they will come – and they usually do. I’m not very scientific about my mason bees simply because my area is blessed with so many and I know they’ll show up if I provide good housing.
If you struggle to identify mason bees in your yard and aren’t sure of their native numbers, go ahead and purchase larvae and see how it goes. Make observations, take notes and do a little better each year.
If you’d like to learn more about mason bees, here are a few links.
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
Homestead Lady is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
How to Attract Mason Bees to Your Fruit Trees
Research & References of How to Attract Mason Bees to Your Fruit Trees|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
Source
0 Comments