Hi Don--I'm no expert but I have had Masons for a few years. I tried holding back half of my bees this year because the fruit tree bloom is a bit late. I kept that half in the frig for a few weeks. The day before I planned on putting them out I put them back in my outside shed. When I went to get them the next day (March 30) there was a bee crawling around under the lid. I wonder if it has something to do with "time" not just "temps". I do think you have some live bees still as long as the one at the head of the tube is alive. If it's dead then the rest can't get out. Give them a few more days and make sure they are on the south side of the house where they get plenty of sun. Happy gardening......................Tom

Lisa, Well, I have tried the light on, the light off, etc. and the only difference I see is if the light is on and the sun porch door is open, bugs are attracted to the light and the bat is attracted to the bugs. I wouldn't even care about the bat if it wasn't for the fact that they carry rabies. You know, it would be just my luck to have the bat become rabid and the cats find the bat, etc. The cats have had rabies shots but who wants to deal with a potentially rabid bat? We've had bats flying around our property in the evenings ever since we moved here and I love having them since they eat tons of insects, but this is the first time I know of that one has tried to take up residence in our house. We have every kind of fly outside that you can imagine, so I guess soldier flies wouldn't gross me out, though their larvae would. When Chris was younger and in school and they had to do an insect collection for Biology, he and a bunch of his friends could get all the insects they needed by visiting my garden and our back porch, which was just a screened-in porch back then. I remember they'd catch a bunch of stuff and put the insects in ziplock bags (one bug per bag) and put them in the freezer to kill them. We also occasionally caught and "saved" bugs for the children of Tim's coworkers who lived in beautiful, "tidy" city neighborhoods where everyone sprayed for bugs and kids had a hard time finding enough insects to do their insect collection. The kids were amazed at how many different kinds of flies they caught. Sometimes they'd call me and say "hey, this is a rare and endangered species of fly....am I going to be in trouble for having it in my collection?" I was shocked that any fly species was rare or endangered since we have about a billion of them per acre here. Okay, that's an exaggeration....maybe a million per acre. I always told them to ask their teacher and, as far as I know, none of them got in trouble since you cannot possibly know before you catch a fly that it is going to be one considered rare or endangered. Their favorite ones were the gigantic horse flies that are larger than the big black-and-yellow bumblebees. During the years all those insect collecting kids were working on insect collections, I almost hated to open my freezer door because inevitably there were zip-lock bags of frozen insects in there. I remember thinking "If we die suddenly and someone has to clean out that freezer, they sure will wonder about the bags of insects, won't they?" Moni, Hope the bike ride was fun and welcome home! Sheila, I agree that if 18 year-olds think you are strange, there you are just perfectly normal. For me, the fun thing is that by the time they are 22 or 24 or 26 years old, they finally realize that you were a cool and wonderful person all along and they cannot even remember why they thought you were strange! It is funny how we old fogies became cool and appreciated more and more as our son and his friends got older. I had to laugh this summer. Our son always has appreciated having a garden for fresh produce and enjoys most of the stuff I can, though I cannot get him to appreciate home-canned catsup. He is a professional firefighter and he works 24-hour shifts, so they cook a lot of their meals at the fire station, and he sometimes takes in home-grown produce or home-canned food to go with their meals. Still, I've always thought that he sort of thought his gardening- and canning-obsessed mother was a relic from the dark ages. So, anyhow, this summer he mentioned that some of his friends have taken up gardening and canning and were having a ball, and had given him some of their home-canned food to take to work. Suddenly, I was even more "cool" and in-sync with his adult friends than ever before. I just grinned. It is fun when you get to make the transition from weird to cool. lol Dawn

Tim, sounds like my house. I have 3 boxes. I put fishing line on a box that some HOSP had started building a nest in. I took the nesting material out and opened the box for awhile. This happened about a month ago. I closed the box and put fishing wire near the entrance hole. HOSP didn't like that and they seemed to have gone away. Today they are back building a nest, fishing wire and all. I opened the box, took out the nesting material to deter them. My blues have already started laying eggs in another box. There are 3 eggs now. . One HOSP landed on that box. The blues chased them away. Then One HOSP landed on the other box (empty box) blues chased them away from that box. I will have to keep an eye on everything. I live on a golf course. My yard is fairly large, but not too large that I can't see comings and goings. I don't have fish wire on the other two boxes. May have to put some on the box the eggs are in and see if that will work. Hope it won't disturb the blues too much.

Hi Kathleen- I'll address you since the other posts are old. I am so very sorry that you have experienced this. Did you read what the responses were to the older post of one that lost a bluebird on the nest? I would just repeat everything that they said. If absolutely no sign of injury, I would suspect lawn pesticides, but considering what happened to the 1st person that posted & didn't see signs of injury on her bluebird, it did turn out to be house sparrows. I would highly suspect this. Do you think the female is dead too? If so, again I would be suspicious of HOSP. Answering your question, the male would not starve himself, nor is he able to brood eggs. If the female died too, the eggs wouldn't have hatched because the female is the one to incubate the eggs. She has a brooding patch on her lower abdomen that the male doesn't have. If she is alive, she may not be returning to nest because of the failed nest situation, especially if there was foul play. Make sure you know that she is not returning before removing the nest & eggs. If she is alive, she will probably try to find a new mate. Without repeating too much, make sure your birdhouse is on a pole with a baffle & put a sparrow spooker up after the 1st egg. If you know for sure that the nest has been abandoned & you don't get any activity, you may want to change the location of the box (birdhouse). If you immediately get a house sparrow setting up shop, then you'll know that was most likely the culprit. Again, if female is not returning, now would be the time to get a Van Ert trap for your house to trap the male & female HOSP. If you do, make sure you are monitoring every hour if possible so you don't trap a native bird. They can die in there if without food for too long. One of the previous posts left a website for the Van Ert trap. Again, the previous posts left great advice for your situation. This site is not as active as it used to be for bluebirders, so you may want to post to bluebirdnut.com. Lots of bluebird experts are on that site like this one used to have. That's where I go whenever I need advice. BTW, I lived in Atlanta for ten years (live in AL now). Very sorry to hear about your bluebird tragedy. Hope you'll have another pair come for a future nesting, but definitely get that sparrow spooker!