Mason Bees are hilarious bees native to North America that don't fly very well, so they just kinda dive-bomb flowers to get pollen. This is important because that heavy slam (well, heavy for a flower) is enough to distribute pollen into the air. These bees are fat, fuzzy, and winter over by crawling into holes and sealing themselves inside with some mud-spit.

It's VERY easy to create homes for these guys - if you've ever seen someone with a large log that has lots of little holes drilled in it, they were likely prepping a Mason Bee habitat. Ideally, they burrow into hollow, dry grass stems that broke off at some point in the fall.

I try to tell people about this bee because it's so easy to make homes for them. Just make sure to move the home every year, or it becomes too easy for predators to find them.

edit: also worth mentioning this bee is so docile, it usually only stings when it's squeezed or wet, and its sting is very light, and the hook is unbarbed. Better than honey bees in so many ways.

This is so interesting. A while back I took an online course about native bee species in Brazil. We have more than 700 different species of stingless bees.

There's a few interesting common species whose response to being threatened are worth mentioning. The jataí (small, wasp-like bees) run away to hide when threatened; the arapuás (small, completely black bees) try to bite you. The mandaçaias have a similar behavior to the jataís.

And one thing I learned as well is that we have a native bee species called "lemon bee", which they are predatory bees that invade hives and release a substance that smells like lemon (hence the name), which intoxicates bees in their hive. The attacked bees either leave their home or die, to which the lemon bees just invade their colonies and steal all the food. They literally make a gas chamber inside the hive.

I am fascinated by the amount of bee diversity we have in Brazil. If anyone's interested to check them out, search for "melipona".

Just to go off of this, carpenter bees are closely related to mason bees and are another kind of solitary (non-hive bee). I think carpenter bees are the greatest and I can't stop thinking about carpenter bees. They are a bee, which is cool, but also a lone wolf, also cool. In my wooden house I have several carpenter bee nests. My neighbor Mr. Grubb hates all my carpenter bees because he says all the holes they are making in his walls will make his house collapse, but he doesn't see it, he doesn't see carpenter bee magic. 10/10 please consider adopting some carpenter bees!!

I'm not familiar with American carpenter bees, but I have made it my mission to feed the European ones. They are extremely fond of clary sage and from what I have read online [0] this is true for all Xylocopa on the American continent too, so please consider planting some.

[0] https://www.fountainofplants.com/post/clary-sage-salvia-scla...

Edit: yet another typo I give up!!

I wonder what it would be like to have a giant Mason Bee hotel in a riparian buffer strip alongside a plot. One problem would be as you point out that predators could find them easily. Another might be that pollinating one crop doesn't do enough for a mason bee all season long.

It looks like some folks use them for berries though: https://backyardbeekeeping.iamcountryside.com/plants-pollina...

We have some of those in our wild crazy yard. I gotta build me some homes for them because you're right they are so cute.

I thought you meant "Giant mason bee" which is not native in north america, is an endangered species and whose jaws might not appeal to the uninitiated.

Wow, that is one large bee.

Looking into these guys, I find it pretty funny that one of the only "sightings" of this bug were a couple of specimens for sale on ebay.

During the season we had a bunch of mason bee nests inside the hollow metal of our porch furniture. Supposedly, mason bees can sting, but the sting is barely perceptible.

You have now convinced me to be the biggest supporter of mason bees now, thank you.

Welcome to the rabbi-- er, bee hole

I’m urging for someone to write «welcome to the rab-bee hole», and now someone did!

I have a line of big orange flowers lining the border of my front lawn. Sometimes ill just sit in the mulch and watch a dozen kinds of bees I’ve never seen before happily moving amongst them. Green bees and all sorts. Never a lot of any species just a wild variety

Here is a video tutorial on hosting Mason Bees - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQhg82f-OPI

You can start out simple, but you might need to be more involved if you want to prevent the spread of parasites since they are more easily spread when all the mason bee larvae are in one place.

I've got a ton of mason bee tubes. They are awesome.

To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.

It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.

Supposedly, it only takes 250 mason bees to do the same pollination as 10,000 honeybees. I think there are people working on scaling this. The honey business is secondary to the pollination money, so having pollination done without having to truck around large hives, could be a big deal.

Not to be confused with mining or carpenter bees that also like logs. My mom's yard has some carpenter bees that live in the ground. They are as big as bumble bees but more black and a male drone hovers around in a certain area above the females and will dive bomb other male carpenter bees. The male bees will follow you around if you go into their area but they never stung anyone.