[Vision2020] Bees

[Don Coombs]

Good post, Ellen (about making people's yards
bee-friendly).

With all the bad news about honey bees, it's comforting
to remember that things did get pollinated in North
America before the traditional honey bees were imported
from Europe. Most of that was done by native bees like
the "mason bee," called that because it "mortars up"
individual eggs in chambers with a store of pollen.

Mason bees either don't have stingers or don't ever use
them. They aren't social insects, or at least not
socialistic, and because they have no hive to defend
they are either slow or impossible to anger.

The bad news about mason bees is that they don't
produce honey. The good news is that they are much
better pollinators than regular bees, because they are
fuzzier and visit more blossoms.

If you have some fruit trees that don't produce well --
especially oriental plums -- some mason bees could help
a lot. I keep some in the refrigerator and put them out
just before my plum trees blossom.

You can make your yard "mason bee friendly" just by
putting out paper tubes with a 9/32 inch inner
diameter, or drilling 9/32 holes in old wood or dead
trees. Or putting shingles on outside walls and leaving
a 9/32 gap between shingles. Mason bees will find the
nesting sites. If a Moscow location is sheltered from
the weather, the bees will overwinter outside.

Without people with electric drills, mason bees have to
make-do with open stems of dead plants and misc.
crannies -- which limits population. Mason bees will
nest in larger holes than 9/32, but that demands more
mortaring to seal up the cells, and limits population.
They will nest in smaller holes, but then the split
between male and female bees tips toward male, and the
males are useless except for the one thing they do in
the spring, when they first come out.

I only tell you these things because they are true.

Don Coombs