News — Mason Bees

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...

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 drought Trees, 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 intense and frequent, the trees are hurting.Learn what you can do to help our trees (and bees) in times of drought in this article published...

Global climate change already has observable effects on the environment. Glaciers have melted, extreme weather is more frequent and intense, plant and animal ranges have shifted, and plants are blooming earlier. Figuring out how something as complex as climate change affects bee populations is challenging but not impossible. Recent research has found that climate change affects our pollinators on a physiological level and alters phenology. Since animal pollinators, especially bees, are crucial to our global food supply, we wanted to use this post to explain the connection between climate change and bee declines in a bit more detail. A Crash Course on...

The continuous blooming of native plants to provide pollen and nectar - check! Mud-rich clay source and deciduous leaves nearby for building nests - check! Bee-safe nesting materials - check! Bee hotel installed - check! If you build it, they will come, right? Well, not necessarily. "Why aren't my bees nesting?" is one of the most common questions we receive from our bee raisers. We understand how frustrating it can be to take the time to create safe nesting habitats for solitary bees only to have them struggle to reproduce or to fly off in search of more desirable nesting...