About this time last year we put up some bee houses in the hopes of attracting some Orchard Mason Bees to our cherry trees (see Bee Condos below). There was some immediate success as the native bees did come to nest in the bee houses and I felt the pollination rate of our trees was better than in past years. By mid-summer nearly all the holes in the bee houses were packed with mud, an indication that the mason bees had deposited egg chambers in the holes.

The results this spring have been great. The cherry trees began to blossom last week and at exactly the same time I noticed that all the mud-packed holes in the bee houses had tiny openings in them. Every cherry tree in the yard now has hundreds of mason bees buzzing around from early in the morning to late afternoon when the shadows of the woods behind the barn begin to creep into the yard. The Compact Stella trees are already showing signs of swelling at the base of their blossoms as the petals begin to wilt and blow away in the breeze. The Stark Gold, Emperor Francis and Dwarf North Star trees are about a week behind the Stellas which is fine because there’s still a high probability that we’ll get another frost.

Now if we can just fight off the birds long enough to actually get a harvest….

To all the Rhubarbarians out there, as well as their friends and fans (you know who you are), I’ve set up a special page (see the link in the left sidebar) with pictures of the 20th Anniversary Dance from March 20. Enjoy the memories and feel free to pass them along.

We were blessed with a beautiful snowfall the day after Christmas followed by a wet lake-effect covering the morning of New Year’s Eve. The trees in the back yard are candy-coated. Happy New Year!

The summer blew by and the updates to this blog have been nonexistent. Just to bring you up to date on the previous post, this was about the best blackberry season ever. They came on slowly but steadily and we were still picking a few the first week of September. I don’t think I’ve ever seen blackberries past the end of July. I guess the weather was just perfect for them.

There’s an old folk tune titled Blackberry Blossom that I think about this time of year. The thousands of blackberry bushes that line the edge of our forest bloom in early June and are now full of little green multi-faceted berries that will soon begin to turn a dark purple and then a deep black color which can only mean that breakfast will be more interesting and more enjoyable for a couple of weeks. We do have to compete with the birds and, interestingly, with our collies to get our share. Luckily there are always plenty to go around.

For the past couple of years I’ve been toying with the idea of keeping bees. I’ve ultimately decided against putting honey bee hives in the yard because of the expense of setting up new hives and the complexities of dealing with the many bee diseases that have become so prevalent in recent years. Many of the problems associated with keeping honey bees are not well understood at this point and it seems rather risky to invest in a project that is very likely to become a major headache with very little return.

So, this year I began researching bees native to North America such as the Orchard Mason bee. These bees don’t live in hives and can’t be managed the way we can the European honey bee. They also don’t produce honey, but on the up-side they don’t sting either. What they do is pollinate flowers—and that they do to the extreme. Mason bees are thought to be up to thirty times as effective as honey bees in pollinating crops—especially orchard crops such as apples, cherries, plums, etc.. This is what I needed to improve the yield from our cherry trees which generally begin to blossom up to two weeks before any of the local honey bees discover our yard in the spring. A bee that is such an effective pollinator and would live right in the yard might get the jump on the honey bees that live a half-mile away and have plenty to do closer to home that early in the season.

After doing all this research over the winter, I thought I was being very forward-looking by searching for a source to buy mason bees in mid-February. Not so. It turns out that the demand for mason bees is so high (precisely due to the problems associated with keeping honey bees) that you need to get your order in by November of the previous year, after which all suppliers in the country (and Canada) will be sold out.

Not to be deterred, I decided to put up some mason bee houses and see if they would attract a few local mason bees to set up housekeeping. I had seen a few of these bees in the yard last year and several web sites had some tips on attracting the bees and coaxing them to make a home in your yard. You can also buy bee houses from several sources, but they are so simple to construct, I decided to make my own.

The houses themselves are 16-inch pieces of 4X4 untreated lumber with rows of 3/8-inch holes drilled on 3/4-inch centers. This provides the ideal spacing between the holes as the mason bees like to live near one another (but not too near). The holes are drilled 3-3/8 inches deep, just so they don’t go quite all the way through the wood. If you drill all the way through, you need to make some sort of backing to close off the holes using tape or paper or whatever. It gets pretty complicated as the bees may not like your choice of backing material. So I just avoided drilling all the way through. It is recommended that you make the holes as deep as possible, up to about six inches. The bees will produce a higher ratio of female offspring in deeper nest holes, and as we all know, the female of any species is more productive and just superior overall. So, if you want to buy 4X6 or 6X6 lumber to make deeper holes, go for it. But the cost will be significantly higher and the job of making the nest blocks will require more work, not to mention a very large saw to cut the blocks to length.

The sixteen inch 4X4’s gave me room to drill three rows of fourteen holes each which results in 42 nest holes per block—the perfect number. Why is 42 holes the perfect number? Because 42, as you will recall, is the answer to the ultimate question, the meaning of life, the universe and everything! —Of course!

Once all the nest blocks were made, I made a housing out of some scrap plywood and cedar siding. The housing holds three nest blocks which will be easily removed in the winter to be stored in the barn where they’ll be more protected from moisture and extreme temperatures. Early next spring the nest blocks will go back into the housing attached to the barn wall. By mid April, newly hatched bees will go to work pollinating cherry blossoms and producing another generation of bees for the following year.

So far this seems to have been reasonably successful. The bee houses began attracting the attention of the local mason bee population within a few days. The cherry trees are producing far more fruit than last year and the mason bees have already filled several of the nest holes with eggs and sealed the holes with mud. For detailed information about native North American bees and how to attract them to your yard, check out these web sites.

http://sare.org/publications/bob.htm

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/ent/notes/Other/note109/note109.html

http://gardening.wsu.edu/library/inse006/inse006.htm

http://www.willowcreekapiary.com/

http://www.pollinatorparadise.com/Solitary_Bees/mudholes.htm

Attaching the housing to the barn wall: This should be located where it will get the morning sunlight and be high enough off the ground to be safe from cats, racoons and other thieves of the night.

The individual nest blocks just slip into the housing from either side and are held in place by the slope of the roof.

Bee condos ready for occupancy!