MARYSVILLE They dont live in hives. In fact, they are almost totally anti-social toward each other.
They dont make honey, either, though they will help pollinate your garden and your fruit trees, if you happen to have either of those types of greenery in your yard.
And most importantly, said Marysville beekeeper Jim Welk, 81, they dont sting. (Or at the very least, do so only very, very rarely.)
Nothing seems to bother them and they dont seem to bother anybody, Welk said of the Mason orchard bees he has kept for the last seven years. There seems little doubt the bees non-aggressive behavior has helped keep the peace with Welks 88th Street neighbors, who probably have noticed the swarms of bees heading for home beneath Welks eaves.
If you get stung by a Mason bee, you probably deserve it, said Lisa Novich, owner of Knox Cellars in Sammamish, one of the largest local suppliers of Mason bee equipment and livestock. She noted male Mason bees dont even have stingers. Having taken over the company started by her father, Novich said shes only been stung three times in some 15 years.
According to Welk, Mason bees dont look much like typical bees, their black coloring giving them a closer resemblance to houseflies. In terms of raising the bees, their antisocial nature toward one another makes keeping them fairly simple.
Unlike honeybees, Mason bees wont establish organized hives, with worker bees and queen bees and so on. They set up homes in long, thin holes, but cant drill their own holes.
Youll see them up on your eaves or something, and you think theyll bore in to the wood, but they wont, Welk said.
Keepers such as Welk essentially supply the bees with a place to live, traditionally wooden blocks with lines of precisely sized holes. Welk said the holes need to be 5/16ths of an inch in diameter and about six inches long. The holes must have some sort of backing at one end or the bees will not use them.
Both Welk and Novich said placement of Mason bee nests is especially important. For keepers in western Washington, a spot with southern exposure, which provides the most sunlight locally, is nearly a necessity.
Among other factors, Novich said Mason bees are early spring bees, launching their life cycles when the temperature hits about 50 degrees. The cooler air means the bees need to absorb the warmth of the sun to help them fly.
Once the young bees come out of the nest in late March or early April, Welk said the females will go right to work, picking a hole and beginning to lay eggs inside that hole. Over the eggs, the females will put in a layer of protective pollen and nectar. Novich added food for the eventual larva springing from those eggs goes in as well. More eggs, more protective layers and more food all follow until the hole is filled with up to six eggs and sealed tightly at the end.
Though they are made entirely by the bees, the hole plugs strongly resemble cement.
The last two eggs are always males, the rest are females, Welk said. How the mothers manage that, I dont know.
According to Novich, female Masons can predetermine the sex of their eggs by adding or withholding sperm. According to both Novich and Welk, the ordering of the eggs is a way of making sure plenty of females survive should holes come under attack by birds mostly woodpeckers or other predators.
It only takes a couple of boys for the colony to survive, Novich said. The whole game with Mason bees is girls. You want a lot of them.
Welk became attracted to raising bees after a visit to a local nursery. Wife Yvonne Welk is an avid gardener and during the summer months, the backyard of the couples home is filled with flowers and fruit trees. Hoping to add to his fruit crop, Jim Welk took home what he called a ready-made bee condo complete with bees in three holes.
From that humble start, Welks colony has grown every year. A cold spring killed some of what should have been Welks bumper crop of bees last year, but today Welk has about 850 nests from which, in the next few weeks, should spring some 4,000 bees.
Although most of Welks bees call a wooden block home, he also is trying to grow bees in what Novich describes as a cleaner, more modern approach to keeping Mason bees. Essentially, six-inch straws are placed in Mylar sheaths, which are then housed inside rounded, reusable boxes. The whole thing is mounted and the straws become the holes used by the bees. At the end of a season, keepers push out the old straws and put in fresh ones for the following year.
Novich said cleanliness of the holes is the key advantage the straw approach has over the traditional wood blocks. The blocks can become permeated with nectar, waste and ultimately bacteria that can wipe out entire colonies.
Novich said raising Mason bees has grown in popularity partly because of increasing problems affecting the honeybee population nationwide.
Most good gardeners have some thought about the importance of bees and pollination, she said.
But she said honeybees are under constant threats, the latest being a sort of plague known as colony collapse disorder. So far, Mason bees have escaped such problems and predictably, Novich sees them as a great alternative to honey bees in pollinating gardens and fruit.
Because they are out and about in the early spring, Novich added Mason bees are especially helpful with cherry trees, Asian pears and Italian plumbs.
With early blooming fruit, Mason bees can make all the difference in the world, Novich added.
Novich notes its probably too late for any would-be keepers to launch a Mason habitat this year as the bees are just about ready to come out and play for the year. Bees only can be shipped in a hibernating state. She suggests those looking to start new colonies this year can check for livestock at local nurseries that sometimes stock bees until early April.