My mason bee house investment was a bust this year: not a single bee created any masonry or left any cocoons. I dutifully opened all of the paper straws just to be certain, hoping maybe I’d find at least a few bees to protect over winter and set out in the spring.
Instead what had moved in to the hotel were earwigs. Ew. Harmless critters, but a little offensive in the way they scuttle around. They had not laid any eggs either, just left a lot of microscopic poop in the paper straws.
And, when I took the house off of the tree, there were leopard slugs wedged between it and the trunk, causing me to startle greatly (slugs are my one hard-wired, full blown phobia). Egads. Since when do slugs climb trees??
Now that I look at pictures of mason bees again, I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of the blue-brown looking bees around here. And supposedly they don’t travel far from their nest sites. So maybe we don’t have a native population on our property. This fall I’m going to try to buy some to jump-start the population.
October 9, 2011 at 10:01 pm
So now you’re doing hymenoptera, too? 2011 was my second year dabbling in Osmia lignaria. My first year was decidedly a crop failure.This year I added one more block, put out last year’s cocoon harvest (plus a dozen more), and had high hopes. I may have put my cocoons out too early (mid-March, I believe) and either the cold did them in or they emerged and there was nothing out there for forage. This was even a worse year weather-wise than last year for the masons. I noticed some activity–a couple of males–perched on the blocks and two or three weeks later three or four females working the tubes. Then the activity stopped abruptly before any tubes were filled, and I stopped watching. I wandered by them one day in August and was surprised to see two tubes sealed in last year’s block and one in the new block. I harvested this year’s “bumper” crop and will send a pix via email of 2011’s results. I wrote a post for my blog about my first year’s harvest (“Strange Harvest in the Valley…”, Nov. 11, 2010). TMJ