Our 1st Mason Bee house season wrapped up in early June. The tubes were collected and counted.
Was it a success?

We think so! Although we admittedly just "broke even" on the cocoons we will harvest compared to what we started with.

We initially placed around 75 cocoons in the nesting area to hatch. Typically, about 20% of those bee's that hatch will be males, the rest will be queens. The males mate and die in just a few days. We believe about 60% of the queens will have mated and will begin nesting in the tubes. Of these remaining fertile queens, we assume that another 20% of those will die as a result of several factors, some of which are due to pesticide exposure (we don't use any, by the way!), and some are due to becoming tasty morsels to certain birds and insects. So we expect on the pessimistic side that of those 75 cocoons, we will have about 30 - 40 queens that will successfully nest and double or triple the following years population.

Now our bee's at Valentown were a serious test of "survival of the fittest". First of all, they only range about 300 feet from the nest, so in their range area almost 30% of it was hostile ecological grounds consisting of high traffic roads and parking lots.

Secondly, Valentown is consistently breezy, and often actually downright windy. Mason bee's don't like to be active in the wind, and even small breezes make their work flying to and from the nest a bit more difficult.

And then third, we weren't expecting such a record breaking wet, cold and late spring! Ouch. We waited as long as we could to put the bee's out to hatch. Keeping them much longer from hatching would have caused starvation and weakness so that they wouldn't have the strength to hatch and would have perished in their cocoons. So, even though there was very little blooming foliage for them to gather pollen from, we let them out and wished them luck.

Given the known and unknown circumstances of their new environment, we hoped for the best, but kept our expectations realistic. So what a nice surprise at the end of the season to collect 10 full tubes and 5 half-full tubes! We know that each queen will fill between 1 and 2 tubes. So of those probable 30 fertile queens, somewhere between 5 and 15 queens survived their new environment! In each of those 10 full tubes we expect to find between 6 and 8 cocoons (up to 80 bees). In each of the half full tubes, we expect to find between 2 and 4 cocoons, and they will all be queens. Much better than we expected or hoped for!

And these cocoons will be kept separate from others collected, because we believe these bee's are the offspring of the strongest of the queens. So we want to preserve the gene pool in those cocoons for returning to Valentown in 2019.

We will be harvesting these 15 cocoons later this fall. If you are interested in participating in or observing the process, please let us know by contacting webmaster@historicvalentownmuseum.org and as always, thank you for your interest and support!


p.s. You can see more images of our Mason Bee project in our "Exhibits & Media" section.

This is a viewing tube submitted by Liberte Sparrow on a Northwester FB group that supports mason bee's. This shows the progress of the 2018 spring season eggs that have hatched to be larvae that feed off the pollen pods the queens left for them.

Amazing, isn't it???