Leaving aside the house design for a moment . . . For positioning a house, there are a few things to pay attention to. Rarely will you have every single thing right, so just give it your best shot. If you have several houses, you may wish to experiment with a few different places and find which ones do best over the years. 1) Warmth and sunlight. People say to make them east-facing for more sunlight, but they also need sunlight for a good portion of the day, too, to keep them warm. At dawn, it's still might be chilly in early spring and they won't fly yet. Some commercial operations even use supplemental heating to get the bees going earlier, but they have higher mortality if the air itself is too cold to fly. 2) Height. About knee-level to 12 feet is good. I always place mine right at shoulder level so I can check them out and they do fine. 3) Protection from wind and bad weather--especially from several days of bad weather, like a rainy cold front in the spring. Much of this can be solved by having a house with an overhang, just like roofs on human houses. If your house design doesn't have shelter like that, try building a box shelter for it that gives it about a 2" roof overhang. The bees like having a little ledge to land on too, but it's not mandatory. Make sure it's positioned so that any rain drains out of it instead of pooling. 4) Prominent location with a landmark. Bees will find your house better if it is located next to a prominent landmark with high contrast (black and white) or color (especially blue and yellow.) Placing the house on a prominent object that they can see from ~100 feet away also helps them find their way back home, fly to it, and land better than if it's tucked into a tree or narrow space. They need a clear approach. Masons can see blue and yellow and I think green. Paint chips didn't make much of a difference for me, but putting it on a stand-alone shed improved reproduction rates. 5) Stability. They're landing on it and moving around quite a bit. Stabilize it, just like you would a birdhouse. Hope that helps!

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!

Ok, made a bee house last year from a length of oak limb. Drilled all the way through and hand-rolled brown paper tubes inserted. A few holes seem to have been used. According to what I've been reading, now's the time to renew the tubes and clean everything up for next spring. Question .... how does one get the tubes out?!!! Seems when mama bee laid the eggs and sealed up the chambers, the tubes also got glued to the walls. Anybody have a way to solve this issue that doesn't involve jamming a rod in the hole thereby squashing anything that may be left in the tube? Think I'm going to build a different style bee nest. The one that's layered and drilled on the separations so everything can be taken apart and cleaned.

Yes, wasps can kill the mason bee cocoons. They are done by June latest, so you are best off harvesting them in early summer.