You can reuse your spring mason bee house to raise summer leafcutter bees.

Summer Leafcutter Bee Benefits:

Super pollinators of your summer blooming fruits and vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, squash, melons, and peas - just about any flower.

How well do you know Native Bees? Take our World Bee Day Quiz and find out!

Don't worry about your grade, everyone gets a "B"

Download our free mobile device background and wallpapers of native bees by photographer, Karl Alexander.

Today's download: Spring Mason Bee nesting

One of the many stressors that today's bees face is a loss of flowering habitat.

An easy way to increase and improve habitat is to convert our grass lawns, which to a bee is a food desert, to flowering bee lawns. A bee lawn will attract and feed bees while it saves us time, money, and effort.

Raising spring mason bees is a growing trend among backyards across the country.

Recently, local news station King 5 visited Crown Bees headquarters to learn about our mason bees and how they are a part of a novel garden to farm to table movement. 

Seattle's most unique P-Patch, UpGarden is a community garden at the top of the Mercer St parking garage at the Seattle Center. Learn why bee diversity is vital to a rooftop garden.

Chances are, your bee hotel or bee house will attract a hole-nesting wild bee.

You might be surprised to find strange cocoons during your mason bee harvest in the fall or leafcutter bee harvest in the spring. We want to help your local bee population thrive - here are our expert tips that can help you understand your bee house guests.

Blue orchard mason bees (Osmia lignaria) are native bees that are active in the spring and are the perfect pollinators for blueberry fields.

Emerging from their cocoons in the spring, they fly in cooler and wetter weather than honey bees. Instead of living in a hive, mason bees live in pre-made holes and every female bee takes care of her own nest.

The spring is the best time to harvest leafcutter cocoons and harvesting leafcutter bee cocoons will reduce chalkbrood disease and Pteromalus, a very small parasitic wasp.

Adult leafcutter bees will emerge from the harvested cocoons and because they were allowed to emerge from loose cocoons they will not spread chalkbrood to their nesting materials. Leafcutter bees need the warmth of summer to develop into adult bees and this step is called incubation. Read our tips for harvesting and incubating summer leafcutter bee cocoons.