Bee Question

While Looking for items I ran across these. https://springfieldil.craigslist.org/grd/d/springfield-mason-bee-starter-kits/6843339194.html I know nothing about them, or any bees really.

What are your thoughts? If they Pass the test of the T-Man specialists, I may just get some. Only an hour or so drive to pick them up.

Mason bees are good for pollination only. They are not honey bees.

2X

You can drill your own holes in a piece of wood and attract your own.




Those are carpenter bees, not mason bees.

Ahhh Ok....Didn't realize they were not honey bees per say.

If you are interested in Honey Bees, Mann Lake is an excellent resource:

https://www.mannlakeltd.com/

There are thousands of different species of bee divided into several genera of which Apis are the honeybees. There are six species of those only one, A.mellifera aka the western honeybee, is the honeybee we know and love. The other members of the honeybee genus are A.cerana or eastern honeybee, A.dorsata or giant honeybee, A.florea or dwarf honeybee, and a couple others I can't pronounce. Other bee genera we are familiar with are the Bombs family or bumblebees which numbers in the hundreds of species. The Adrenid bees which the sweat bees belong to and the Osmia family of bees which the ochard, mason and miner bees belong to.
The Osmia bees are non social solitary nester though they often appear to be social colony nesters as suitable sites, such as a wood block full of straws or a clear spot of sand soil in the case of miners, will be shared by many bees.
Many of these smaller lesser known bees are crucial pollinators and many times very specific in their pollinator partners, as is the case with blueberry bees and squash bees. In fact they are better for these specific blooms than the western honey bee due to size and or technique.

BTW, A.mellifera our western honeybee has 25 subspecies of which around a dozen have been imported into the Americas (not native here or asia or the pacific) based on DNA. Our bees here are as much a mutt as the rest of us.