Oooh, good to know, Mary, thanks. No, I'm not providing any mud for them. I didn't know that was one of my duties, LOL. I'll get on it! I'd love to hear any instructions or tips/tricks you have. Here's mine. Imagine an echo sound as you look in all of the empty tubes, tubes, tubes..... Happy gardening all, Grant with a serious case of Mason Bee Envy Here is a link that might be useful: Pics, so far, from my garden June 2012

If you spray for carpenter bees, you will kill all the native mason bees you attract to your nesting spaces! So that is something huge to consider. If you have an out building that you do not spray, that might be a consideration - however you will probably still kill off that population. Now is the time to work on changing over your carpenter bee habits. Fill each hole with diatomaceous earth or borax. Then take a dowel and plug each hole up. That will stop new bees from emerging. Spraying in the holes will not totally eliminate the baby bees in there, only the first. There will be several in each hole. After you do that, then you can put up the bee houses for your carpenter bees. It really does work wonderfully well. Each fall, just take your Carpenter Bee houses down and clean out the tubes and kill the baby bees inside if you don't want them. Wash them well to remove bee fermones. Hang them again for next year. It's the existing fermones of baby bees that attract the new adult bees (and the babies also come back as adults) to lay more babies in your house. I had some good luck keeping the bees out by simply regularly washing my home and stopping up bee holes, and removing all mud dauber tubes (after hatching) and using this method for carpenter bees. We did get a lot of them when I moved here.

I drilled holes in a block and mason bees used it until it got old and dirty. You might need to clean it somehow every year. I also used the cardboard tubes with the straw liners. The problem I had with that was trying to get the straws out to change them at the appropriate time, because the bees are very active and either haven't emerged yet or are already filling up holes. The straws seemed hard for me to pull out and put in. I've heard a solution, you take the old one down and put it somewhere that the bees can emerge but not find it to start filling it, but have a new setup for them. I've also heard if you find some bamboo of an appropriate diameter, you can cut lengths, tie them together, and the bees will like them. One problem I had was that I needed to take the filled house and store it in a sheltered place, refrigerator, or whatever over winter, one winter mine seemed to be killed off by too much cold or ? I kept putting out a new straw house and didn't seem to attract any new bees last year, but this year I think some are using it. There are other small native bees as well, like leaf-cutter bees, check google. I think they may also use mason bee houses.

I am going to check this out. I have been concerned with the "decline of Honey Bees due to cell phones" I have no idea if this is true, but my Hubby mentioned the other day that he hoped the Hummingbirds would pollinate the fruit trees because there were no Bees out there. ( I saw a few today). We are in National Forest land and thank GOD we don't have a tower out here where anybody can use a cell phone! I have 5 acres and I would love to try to help the Bee population. Instructions please!