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One of the most important aspects of keeping mason bees
is having the right type of nesting material.
As a tunnel or cavity nesting bee, or blue orchard bees
and other types of mason bees will
nest in a wide range of materials, including
holes in your fence post.
If you do some Google searching, you'll
probably see bamboo reeds, cardboard tubes
with paper straw inserts.
Lots of different nesting materials.
And for the backyard gardener or small orchardist,
these types of nesting materials are
worth considering because you can find or collect
them or create them for pretty cheaply or almost free if you
don't count your time and effort,
but since most people do--
if you want to keep blue orchard bees for fruit pollination
for pollinating more than just a few acres,
then you really do want to use these wooden laminates or wafer
boards.
So this really is the industry standard right now.
At first glance, it sort of appears
like a solid wooden block, but really it
is layers or laminates, pieces of wood
that are stuck together.
They also are called groove boards
because they have grooves in them that when put together,
they sort of interlock, fit nice and tightly together, and then
also create these linear nests for the bees to nest in.
So the bees really do seem to like these nest blocks.
And then they also have a lot of advantages for the people
who are managing and keeping the bees,
most notably, being that they are probably
the fastest and easiest nesting material to clean.
So that's a really big advantage, a really big time
saver.
You can get started almost immediately really cheaply
with just a sort of dull screwdriver.
You can take and scrape out the cocoons
in each individual groove here.
You can pretty simply build a tool that
fits into each one of these grooves
and then you simply scrape each side of these groove boards.
You can scrape one whole side at a time.
And then these laminates can even be put into a machine
and the cleaning process can be almost completely automated
or a large portion of it can be automated and save you
a ton of time.
You can get through just a huge number of these nests
really quickly.
And then another advantage is they
can be reused for many years you want
to invest in some high quality, durable wood like alder
or cedar.
You want to avoid something like pine because that'll warp
and then they can't be reused for as long so--
and then also with them being durable,
they can be sanitized so you can treat these
with heat or other methods of getting
rid of some more serious diseases or pests
like mites or chalkbrood which is a fungal disease.
And then also, they're versatile in other ways too.
Like, you can make nest units of various shapes and sizes
by just stacking these pieces of woods
in different arrangements.
So here we have some different sizes that
are commonly used in orchards.
These smaller ones are often used
as sort of the satellite nests at the perimeter
of the orchard.
And then this is kind of one size up
that can be used anywhere throughout the orchard.
And then here's a bigger nest unit
that are typically used at the center of the orchard.
You don't want to put too, too many nests in the same place,
especially with blue orchard bees.
They tend to like to be spread out a little bit more.
But this nest block has 366 holes in it,
so you really don't need to be specific with your number
of holes or anything.
That is one advantage, is you can make these nest units
fit whatever kind of shelter that you're using.
So this really is the gold standard.
We really do recommend these wafer boards
or wooden laminates for anyone who's keeping populations
of blue orchard bees.
Thank you for watching.
Please check out some of our other videos
on how to keep mason bees for orchard pollination.