Blog

We love mason bees for many reasons! They're early spring pollinators, a lot of fun to watch, and require very little maintenance compared to honey bees, making them perfect bees for busy gardeners and farmers.Traditionally, spring mason bee care included three simple steps. Step one, Install the mason bee house—step two, release mason bee cocoons. Step three, sit back and relax while these super pollinators do their thing. However, the Houdini Fly, an invasive parasite of the mason bee, has add …

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 t …

As winter settles in with the bees nestled safely in their nesting materials, we wanted to take this time to fill you in on our top 5 highlights from 2021!1. Another Successful Bee Buy Back SeasonA big THANK YOU to all of our Bee Farmers, Bee Buy Back Participants, and Harvesting Volunteers this season! We've harvested, inspected for pests and disease, and cleaned over 300,000 mason bee cocoons from all across the country. That's enough to pollinate over 16,000 gardens in 2022! The bees are now …

First and foremost, a THANK YOU to all of our Bee Farmers, Bee Buy Back Participants, and Harvesting Volunteers this season—we even had a volunteer come all the way from Canada! Thanks to your bee raising efforts, we've received, harvested, cleaned, and stored around 350,000 mason bee cocoons so far this year, and we're still counting! Yes, that's right! Our Bee Buy Back program is still open!You can take pride knowing that your region-specific mason bee cocoons will go to next season' …

Each month our Bee Informed Blog highlights current news, science, and research related to solitary bee conservation, food insecurity, and sustainability.1. Helping trees survive the droughtTrees, both urban and rural, especially our native trees, provide habitats for birds, insects, and other animals. Trees provide food and nesting sites for many of our native bees, the shade that can reduce our energy use during extreme heat and help clean the air of pollutants. And as droughts become more int …