Hey Farmgal, looking forward to what you’re going to put in here. I’m far from being a knowledgeable horticulturist so will happily take in tips to bring in more polineators to my gardens!

Is building Mason bee habitat worth the effort?

Hi Scrounger. Maybe?

Do you have fruit tree's or early cropping fruit crops like strawberries or honey Berry's etc.

If you are a smaller backyard with regular garden and flower pots, honestly.. NO..

But if you have fruit tree-yes, if you have soft fruit that flowers in the spring- yes.

However please buy a house that will do the job properly, most of the "marketed" Mason Bee houses are to short in length (mason bee's lay the females at the back of the tube and the males at the front, the females are the big pollinaters and so the shorter tubes create more males and less females.

I have plans to increase my own Mason bee's on the farm and I am suppling housing and starting bee's at 2 community gardens and 2 private gardens with the understanding that I will get the extra coons from them and only supply back the standard amount to them next spring.

One of the reason you ideally want to overwinter them in the proper box in the fridge is so that you can control when they come out in the spring, meaning that you can stagger their hatching times and so forth.

I have plans to talk about this in a lot more detail including how to build box's that will meet their needs and talking about needing to either create a bare open ground area or giving them a clay pan and a water source to create their nests.

They are a very short season bee, they are only one gen per year and they are the early spring, you need to work on the leaf cutter and the flower flies and the squash bee and ideally bumble bee for garden pollinators .

Yesterday I ordered in my new Mason and Leaf cutter bee's ( I want to increase the genetic pool) on my farm and on the places that I am "guesting this year"

I have decided to go with good enough cheaper tubes for the community gardens as I do not want to put a costly box and the clamped layered nest boxes in higher theft risk area's. The odds of them going after a PCV pipe piece with tubes is very poor.. going after a nice Cedar house with the wooded nest box's.. its a toss up.

I also got a viewing box so that I can take lots of short video's and photos, it has different sizes and depths for different bee's so I am hopeful that I might get some good stuff out of it, and it will be a huge bonus to show certain things when I am doing a chat on them!