• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Masonry bees

L

Lurker

Old Oak
Joined
Nov 26, 2020
Messages
3,263
Reaction score
595
Location
Loughborough
We have an end wall that masonry bees have been using. I’m in the process of repointing the wall and making good 50 years of neglect.
I want to look after the bees, so one of those things full of tubes or canes seems to be the way to go.
I rather like the idea of the cardboard tubes sold for the purpose. Use once and then discard , so as to remove any parasites.
Has anyone any experience?

Also I was thinking of using some short lengths of square drainpipe ( which I have in abundance) to provide the outer wall.
 
I make Mason Bee houses and use the 10mm dia cardboard tubes for them to lay their brood cells in.

This is one of this years, all filled up:

Mason bee house.jpg

I've replaced the tubes 3 times on this one alone, plus we have others dotted around the Farm and at home, which are fairly full as well.

This is a picture from one I make with pull out inspection drawers, to see what they are actually doing:

bee draw.jpg

In your situation they will have laid the brood cells in the gaps or holes in your masonry by now, so sadly when you repoint they will be entombed and wont be able to emerge next spring to start the cycle again.

I have produced pamphlet which comes with my "houses", happy to share a copy if of interest.
 
 
Them's the one's, that's a good deal to be honest, I cut mine in half (75mm) so get twice as many.

Attached my PDF brochure, it doesn't read like a normal page as its designed to be printed and folded into 3.
 

Attachments

Very interesting thread. :cool:

Just spent time searching & reading up on Mason bees.
Most probably have seen them around the garden.

Wits university in Joburg had a project years ago in promoting the building and monitoring of bee houses.

Watch this very resourceful bee

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top