Editor's note: This article was originally published years ago and has been updated for Recommended for ages 4—8. Get the best of ParentMap delivered right to your inbox.
Sections x. Safe Sleep Practices for Babies. When to Take Your Baby to the Dentist. Keeping Mason Bees: 10 Expert Beekeeping Tips for Families Help the environment with this inexpensive and educational project for kids. Published on: March 02, Top 10 Mason Beekeeping Tips for Families. Here are some fun things that kids can observe about their small and industrious new friends: Note pollen on the female as she returns to the nest.
A clean belly means that she has mud to take home. Using a flashlight at night or in the early morning, you can see the bees at rest in the front of their holes, with their eyes looking out at you. Watch your mason bees as they work on blossoms in the yard, and notice which plants they like to frequent. Look for the antennae that distinguish them from flies. Find more fun facts and resources for teaching kids about mason bees on the Rent Mason Bees website. Read Next.
Related Topics Gardening. Outdoor Fun. Print Stories. Share this article with your friends! Leave a Comment. You have to play it by ear in regions where winter can drag on. Simply keep an eye out for flowers and early insects.
Remember that these are not honeybees. They are solitary, not colony-forming insects. Only the females frequent the nesting site.
They gather enough pollen and nectar to form a food supply for one larva, then they lay one egg and seal the cell with mud. Each of the tubes in your nesting site will hold about six cells. The deepest cells farthest from the entrance will harbour larvae that will grow up to be adult female bees. The ones nearest the entrance are males.
By the end of June, the nesting period is over, and the female adults die. Store it with the entrance holes facing up — this will ensure that the emerging larvae are in contact with their food stores inside each cell. Give the lavae time to mature. By late October or early November, the larvae will have pupated, having spun silken cocoons in which they will lie dormant over the winter months.
This is the time to gently remove them from the nest and clean them, removing any parasitic pollen mites and discarding any diseased or dead cocoons. The ideal flower for mason bees is actually that of a fruit tree like cherry, plum, or apple.
These flowers are shallow and numerous, and they appear in spring and early summer. However, all pollinators including your mason bees benefit from a wide variety of flowers blooming over a long period. If you have room to plant a bed of wildflowers, you will be rewarded by the presence of all kinds of pollinators throughout the growing months, from bumblebees to hummingbirds and butterflies. Planting flowers with wild pollinators in mind is a simple step we can all take to enhance pollinator vitality in our neighbourhoods.
Choose a wildflower blend to suit your particular planting needs. Product has been added to your wishlist. You can view your wishlist by creating or login account.
But they do pack a punch with their pollination skills, making it possible for plants to set seed and reproduce, for fruit trees and berry canes to increase their yield, and for flower landscapes to burst with color. They are extraordinary pollinators — just females can pollinate an entire acre of apples or cherries — and are often touted as being more efficient than honey bees.
Of the roughly mason bee types in North America, most are native. With a few supplies and some knowledge in hand, you could easily start propagating your own population of these native pollinators. Two mason bee types — the Horn-faced bee left and Blue Orchard Bee — are currently used commercially for their super pollination skills.
Photo courtesy of Crown Bees. They are non-aggressive and rarely sting. These bees lay their eggs inside existing tunnels, such as those left by wood-boring beetles or the hollow stems of pithy plants. Luckily, mason bees also nest in man-made tunnels — if the tunnel meets certain criteria more on that later.
Mason bees will use hollow reeds as nests. This tunnel has been plugged with mud to protect against predators. Photo by Mace Vaughan. Early spring mason bees emerge from hibernation when temperatures reach about 55 degrees some types of mason bees emerge in late spring or summer under different conditions, but in general they are spring pollinators. Finally, she backs into the tunnel and deposits an egg on top of the food source. Once the egg is laid, the female bee collects more mud and uses it to build a wall that seals off the egg inside its own chamber.
She repeats this process until the tunnel is filled with well-provisioned eggs, each tucked inside its own cell partition. Then she closes the tunnel with a mud plug to protect her offspring from predators. This pollen-gathering and egg-laying work is done during the early spring months — when spring flowers, bushes, and fruit trees are in bloom. In the US, this typically occurs between February and May, depending on where you live.
A mason bee will fill as many nesting tunnels as she can during her roughly 4-week life span — pollinating flowers profusely as she forages for food to supply her nest. Then she dies. Inside the nesting chambers, eggs begin their transformation to adult bees.
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