The orchard mason Bee is better than the honey bee for pollination because they are faster than the honey bee and also have bodies that have more hair on them. The orchard mason bee has no pouches for holding the pollen. The Mason bee is not as neat at gathering pollen. It doesn't have any pollen sacks but just has hairs. This way the pollen can be distributed to other plants.
The Orchard Mason bee has many advantages.
One: the mason bee is very, very, docile and will not sting unless squeezed.
Two: The Mason bee's sting only feels like a mosquito bite.
Three: The mason bee is a better pollinator because it is so messy in the act of gathering pollen.
A female Mason Bee A male mason bee
To keep these mason bees, the Beekeeper has to provide housing for the bees. There are many types of housing, plastic straws, cardboard tubes, or wood. The Plastic straws are the easiest and fastest way to provide housing for the mason bee. The plastic straws usually produce about 90% males and only a few females because the tubes are small.
The cardboard tubes are one of the best housing for the mason bee. They are expensive little cardboard tubes that have to be steamed so that they can be bent in half to provide two holes instead of one. the bending process takes a long time. The cardboard tubes have to be placed in a covered area or in a cover of some kind.
The wood method is the most time consuming, but it lasts the longest. First, mark the wood with a punch. Next, drill holes into the wood using a bradpoint bit and a drill press. The wood next has to be sanded and then a thin metal sheet is nailed on to the top of the wood to repel rain.
The Mason bee project is a new partnership which involves the study of mason bee diseases, pests and parasites which may be harmful or beneficial to the bees. The experiment only takes place when the bees are in the cocoon stage, that is in the winter. The tubes that we used were made of plastic instead of wood or cardboard.
the first step to the experiment is to cut open the tubes and look at the condition of the cocoons. Next see if there is any foreign materials inside the tube other than the cocoons or the dried mud. The excess material is scraped into a or a petri dish for inspection. we cut open about 150 tubes.
80% of the bees in the tubes were dead. they had a silk like webbing over them or they had little wasp larva feeding inside the cocoon. When we looked through the microscope at the webbing there were little mites crawling all over the webbing. Since the tubes were smaller than the regular cardboard or wooden tubs about 70% of the bees that were not dead were males. We decided that since there were so many dead bees with mites or larva on them or around them that these pests are very harmful