News — Solitary Bees

The solitary bee industry is taking off, which attracts companies with the sole purpose of making money. We helped start the industry back in 2008 and see both good and bad practices abound! Your success is honestly important to us, and we want to give you the tools to make informed decisions. A growing industry, while popular, can often breed problems. Perhaps the biggest problem facing the solitary bee industry is the boom of uninformed people/companies selling bees and products. Did you know that certain bee rearing practices or a poorly designed bee house can wind up doing more harm...

When we talk about our commitment to environmental sustainability at Crown Bees, we refer to the mindfulness of our effect on our environment and natural resources. As a company and as individuals, we make a conscious effort to reduce our environmental impact as much as possible to protect future generations of people (and bees). We recognized that becoming truly sustainable will be a challenge as a small company. The path to reaching our future goals of becoming a B Corp certified business, moving into a LEED-certified building, and completing a full life-cycle analysis of our products, will take a considerable...

Each month our Bee Informed Blog highlights current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability. 1. In a New Study, Spring Forest Bees Get Their Due Temperate forests in the eastern United States come to life in April and May with colorful blankets of wildflowers, birds singing from newly leafing tree branches, and plenty of insect activity. That includes one greatly understudied group of native insects: the forest-living bees. A new study, however, is shedding much-needed light on the ecology of these often small but busy bees that do much of the spring pollination work in...

First and foremost, a THANK YOU to all of our Bee Farmers and Bee Buy Back Participants this season!  You can take pride knowing that your region-specific mason bee cocoons will go to next season's bee raisers and help increase pollination and food production across the country! We also wanted to take this opportunity to alert you to a few emerging issues that we noticed during this harvesting season and give you a few tips to reduce the incidences of bee loss next year. What we want to see! A healthy mason bee cocoon (below) will appear dark grey or brown, ovular...