Native Bee Blog

Community gathers to harvest bee cocoons, increasing local pollination and food production.

Every year, Crown Bees opens their office and warehouse doors to the public. We invite local mason bee raisers to come to learn how to harvest their mason bee cocoons. This year's party will be on Saturday, October 12, 2019 from 10 am to 2 pm.

Dave Hunter of Crown Bees filming at Oxbow Farm and Conservation Center in Washington State for a program by One Tree Planted about the important role bees play in supporting tree propagation.

Learn how to naturally deter social wasps from building a nest near your home. You may begin to notice and worry about social wasp nests in the late summer. Social wasps like paper wasps, yellow jackets, and hornets have similar life cycles and their nests become large enough to notice in the summer. Social wasps look for a protective overhang like a tree branch or unfortunately, your house's eave.

Crown Bees Provides a Fun Educational Way to Increase Food Sources and Save the World

In a study we published earlier this year, we found that feral honey bees (managed honey bees gone wild) are preferentially removing food resources from the plant species that support the highest diversity and abundance of native pollinators.

Of the 20,000+ bee species on Earth, only about a dozen are used by farmers in commercial agriculture, and these crucial populations of managed bees have been declining at an alarming rate. Several factors, including increased use of pesticides, habitat fragmentation, emerging diseases, and reduced genetic diversity may be responsible for such bee losses. In response to this pollinator crisis, recent conservation efforts have led to stricter regulations on insecticide use. However, other agrochemicals such as herbicides and fungicides that do not directly target insects (such as bees) continue to be applied to in-bloom crops without much scrutiny. Curiously, past research shows that while certain fungicides may pose a lower risk for adult honeybees, they appear to be quite harmful for larval bees. Such findings were somewhat unexpected, and we at the Steffan lab wanted to find out why.

You want to keep your mason bee cocoons safe when it's time to release them in your bee house. For first-time mason bee raisers, all you need to do is slightly open their cocoon shipping box and set the box on top of your nesting materials and towards the back of the bee house. If you've been raising mason bees for a few years you need a protective container while they emerge from their cocoons.

How many bee species are there around the world? - answer

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. 

Native hole-nesting bees, just like any creature, have their own set of diseases and pests that, when left unchecked, can harm or kill them.

Nesting holes should be opened once a year to remove diseases like chalkbrood (a deadly fungal infection) and pests like pollen mites (they eat the pollen loaf before the larvae can). At the very least, fresh nesting holes should be provided every year.

Sometimes, spring mason bees wake up before your fruit trees and berry plants start blooming. Don't worry, you can provide bees who emerged early inside of your HumidiBee with a couple of options.

Setting up your bee house for spring mason bees is easy and only takes a few minutes.

Here are our expert tips for setting up your bee house in a location that mason bees will love!