Blue Orchard Mason Bees

     As honey bee colonies suffer from Colony Collapse Disorder, more farmers, gardeners, orchardists and others realize that native insects also pollinate crops and fruit trees.  Solitary bees, hornets, flies, butterflies and other insects are some of those pollinators.  And blue orchard mason bees, which originally are native to woodland edges where holey dead trees provide nurseries and flowers in bordering fields provide food near the nurseries, are one of the better of them, fertilizing many blooms a day, as they sip nectar from those blossoms.
     Fascinating and attractive little critters, mason bees are better pollinators than honey bees in the longer run.  They are hardier than honey bees, active earlier in spring, will pollinate during rain and cool weather and fertilize more blooms in a day's time.
     Appearing black at times, blue orchard mason bees also are a shiny dark-blue, particularly in sunlight, and slightly smaller than honey bees.  And being hairy all over, they are good pollinators.  Their many hairs collect pollen grains from flowers and brush them onto other blooms of the same species, thus fertilizing them, and later producing a nut, fruit or vegetable.
     Mason bees are solitary, meaning each fertile female, and they all are, works alone to produce offspring.  Several females may rear young in up to six-inch-deep holes in dead wood in loose colonies to take advantage of that limited nesting niche.  But each one doesn't depend on other female mason bees.  However, there is some safety in numbers, though larger woodpeckers chip out some of the eggs, larvae or pupae to eat.
     Each female mason bee works independently to provision her young with balls of flower nectar and pollen.  She starts in the back of each of her wooden tunnels by placing balls of pollen grains and flower nectar in the backs of those burrows, lays one egg on each ball and seals off that part of each burrow with a mix of clay and mud, hence their mason name.  She repeats that process until each of her holes in the tree is filled with several marriages of food and larvae, sealed off with mud.  Female mason bee larvae will be in the back of each tunnel and male young will be in the front.  Each larva hatches in its cell, eats all of its provisions and pupates in that same cell through winter.
     Early in spring, the males, which were in front of the tunnels, leave their cells first and wait outside for the emergence of females.  When females come out, the males mate with them and die.  Then those new females make their own nurseries in dead wood in trees.  By mid-summer, their work is done and they die.  But their offspring in those wooden cells carry on the species into next year.
     Blue orchard mason bees can be bought, and housed in wooden tubes clumped together and attached to a tree or building.  Those built nursery structures substitute for holes in trees, and increase the number of these beneficial, pollinating bees.  But whether wild or living in tubes in gardens, these are lovely, intriguing insects that help make life more interesting.