Our friend Liesl came by this evening and helped us harvest our mason bee tubes. It was fascinating to see the process of unwrapping the tubes. There were quite a few pests that had invaded the tubes, but we still had a good number of cocoons for next year. We think we started with 75 cocoons this past spring and we ended up with 182 good ones for next year.
I'm hoping to make at least one more bee house for the front yard by next spring. We have so much scrap wood, we should be able to make at least one more.
Jeff installed the new shed step this weekend.
I finally finished sifting all our hardware and fasteners and the bins have moved out to the garage wall, at least temporarily until we build a better storage rack.
Productive weekend! I'd love to hear more about the mason bees!
ReplyDeleteThe bees have been wonderful. I'm sure we had a much bigger apple harvest because we put the bee house in. We only had blossoms for about a week before we got rain and our tree was full off apples. I really recommend putting in mason bee houses, especially with your vast gardens. I'm sure it would be worth the effort. And it seems you could build up the bee population gradually, which would keep down the startup cost. Crownbees.com is a good place to start for informational videos.
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