Supercharge Your Garden By Using a Mason Bee House

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There are several beneficial insects to keep in your garden. Keeping butterflies, ladybugs, and various bees allow you to get more productivity out of your garden by ensuring all your plants are properly pollinated. By keeping a mason bee house, you ensure you keep these perfect pollinators are close by working hard for you.

Mason bees are native bees that can be found throughout the United States. They have a blue-black coloration and are smaller than honeybees, but just as important to pollination. They are named for the way in which they construct their nests. This specie of bee lays its eggs in a hollow tube or crack and seals the end of up with mud.  

Solitary Bees- Why mason bees are different than honey bees

Mason bees are solitary bees that live their entire lives alone. The females mate as soon as they emerge from their cocoon and soon thereafter begin to locate places to lay their eggs. The males, which emerge from their cocoons first, and are waiting for the females to emerge and die soon after mating. Mason bees also emerge from their cocoons several weeks before honey bees extending your pollinating season. 
 

Not Hive Dwellers 

These bees don’t live in hives like honey bees and don’t work for a queen bee but they gather pollen strictly for their own purposes.

After locating a sufficient place to create a nest, the female bee will gather pollen and fill in the hollow places she has selected. When space is filled with pollen, she will back into the space, lay one egg, then cap off the end with mud.

The egg-laying space could be hollow plant stems, small holes made by other insects, or cracks in any outdoor object.
 

How keeping a mason bee house can supercharge your garden!

Keeping a mason bee house has many benefits. Mason bees don’t produce honey, but they do provide garden benefits and will enable your food-producing plants to produce more and flowers to grow bigger.

Mason bees will work on rainy days, whereas honey bees will not and these bees will also continue to gather pollen in chilly weather. Three mason bees can pollinate an entire fruit tree, so it does not take many of these efficient pollinators to keep a large garden and landscape well pollinated. One mason bee can perform the same pollination as several hundred honey bees. 

Mason bees are also much hardier than honey bees since they have adapted to the particular climate and are less likely to move out of the area due to weather conditions or lack of their favorite type of pollen. They have adapted to whatever the elements of the area throw their way. 

Mason bees also keep closer to your yard where honey bees will often travel miles to find flowers. Since mason bees staying closer to their mason bee house, they are guaranteed to pollinate your property vs neighbor miles down the road. 

Mason bees are nonaggressive rarely sting 

Mason bees rarely ever sting making them an ideal pollinator for gardens where children and pets will be. Males do not have stingers and females will only sting if squeezed or trapped.
 
Mason bees are also good neighbors to each other and prefer to nest near other Masons.
 
Mason bees houses take advantage of the natural characteristics of this bee specie and provide a series of nesting holes next to each other so several female Masons can lay eggs in the same location.
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*Keep in mind to give you the most all-inclusive content possible and how-to guides that we may occasionally use affiliate links in which we receive commissions when you click the links and make purchases. However, this does not impact our content or establish bias. We try our best to keep things as informational as possible in order to help you grown the plants, flowers, herbs and vegetables of your dreams.

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