The Fighting Moose Podcast

So I saw this on Facebook last night. I did t have a chance to check the hive last night so tonight, I went out and checked it. I still have 2 bees hanging in there. Hopefully they will lay some more eggs and help produce another healthy generation next year.

Found this guy (or girl) sitting outside the give tonight when I went and checked on them. I think it was a bit too cold for him and he just stayed there because he couldn't make it into the hive.  The temperature was about 54 degrees farenheit which is at the lower end of what is optimal for them. I helped him out though and put him in a safe spot in there so he didn't become bird food. Also, the species of bees I have are Japanese Orchard Bees.

Went out checked my hive today, I have 20 capped tubes and 2 that appear to be half full. Assuming that all the bees in the tubes are healthy and the estimate of 3 to 5 cocoons per tube is correct, I should have anywhere between 60 and 100 bees for next year. That's pretty good I think since I started with about 37 cocoons. Preliminary stats say this experiment is a success!

Did you know, that with mason bees, each female is it's own queen?  With the solitary bees, which us what a mason bee is, each female is it's own queen. So with my hive setup, I can have a bunch of queens sharing the hive.  In comparison, social bees, like honeybees, have one queen each hive.  At the moment of this photo, there are 8.5 tubes filled in the hive. Here's a picture of what I believe is a queen, laying eggs in a tube. 

Checked the hive today, I now have 6 filled tubes with one being freshly capped!

Went out and checked my bee hive today.  When I got there, I saw two full tubes, at least, and a third one in progress.  It's so exciting, I was beginning to think they were never going to come back and lay some eggs. We will see when cocoon harvest time comes to see how many cocoons I get. If I get as many cocoons or more than what I started with, I will count this as a success!

Here is my journey with raising mason bees. I've never raised bees before and it seems like they are somewhat simple to raise from what I have read. I found the plans for my give here .  Here is the final product: I think ordered my bees from Crown Bees . When they were delivered, they came in a box which was attached to a tray and I just slid the tray onto my top shelf like in the above picture. After moving my bees from the fridge to outside, I found two had hatched! After more bees had hatched, I put in some more straws that I had ordered from Crown Bees and some that I had made myself from sheets of paper. Today, I saw two bees propagating the bee population today so hopefully soon, they will start filling some straws with cocoons!