Mason Bees

[mallt]

I finally got round to "harvesting" my mason bees... I only hope they've not gotten too cold in the garage in the interim... we'll see come spring I guess.

Here's the tray with the most in it before I opened it:

& open:

The yellow powder is pollen & the little black specks I'm guessing is bee larva poop!

This is the scoop you use to get the cocoons out:


Next you can see a pollen/nectar pack that wasn't consumed. The reason for this is that for some reason the mama bee built a mud divider without laying an egg in that chamber. The divider that is up on the edge was sitting in the area marked by the blue box with the curved edge up agains the next cocoon:


Here are three girl cocoons & one boy cocoon:

The girls are laid first near the back of the tube & then a boy is laid last at the front. In the spring the boys hatch first & then hang around waiting for the girls. The boy cocoons are smaller than the girls:


Once they've all been removed from the trays, the cocoons are rinsed, they are water resistant.
Here they are all clean:

Altogether I had approximately 40 girls & 20 boys. That's pretty good I think given that I started with a total of 30 bees last spring.
The cocoons are now in the fridge where I need to keep them from 2 - 4 C until hatching time in the spring.

Then I cleaned up the trays, electrical taped them back together:

& them put them back in the house ready for spring:





 

Comments

[jopickles.livejournal.com]

As frightening as I find the whole bee farmer thing to be, I'm absolutely fascinated now.

So you need to keep them in the freezer until the spring, and then? Put them outside somewhere and let them hatch? How does that work? (I mean, I get that they must be triggered to hatch by the warmer weather, but do you have to do anything special with them other than say, putting them in a plastic bowl on the patio table?)

[rocket-ron.livejournal.com]

That's so cool! Well done you and well done mama bee :-)

[mallt.livejournal.com]

I keep them in the fridge, anything less than 2 C & they'd freeze apparently, which is why I was a bit worried about them being in the garage.

Last year to let them hatch waited until the big Mayday tree in the front garden had flowered & then just laid them on top of the trays in the bee house. After a spell of warm weather I took a peek & noticed the small cocoons had hatched, when I looked a week later the bigger ones had started hatching. I think out of the 30 I originally bought only 1 or 2 didn't hatch.

[oblivions.livejournal.com]

So is there one Queen or do a few females reuse the same trays (or place) they hatched from?

Have you seeded other bee colonies with this?

[mallt.livejournal.com]

There's no queen per se... each of the females will go out, mate & then find suitable tubes to nest in. I don't know how many of my original 30 nested in the tubes I provided for them. Some of "my bees" will have gone off & nested elsewhere but because they are solitary bees they wont have actually started a new colony. Providing the cocoons survive I'm hoping that I'll have fuller tubes next fall & if I have enough I could pass some off on to someone else who wants to provide a "house" for them.

Houses can be made from something as simple as drilling holes in a piece of wood, bundling straws or hollow twigs together or, like I have, custom made trays. In Alberta our winters are very cold & our springs come late. To overwinter them & delay their hatching the best thing to do is remove the cocoons & keep them cool. The advantage of the tray is that they can be opened up & the cocoons removed with less chance of them being damaged.