I would guess that's Crown bees. They are very careful to sell the right bee for your area, including to your local shop. However, they did have a problem with the first set of leafcutter bee cocoons being infected with wasp larvae, and replaced all the cocoons for those who bought directly from them. I don't know if your local shop threw out the old bees or if they got the new ones. And sold the old ones anyway. Not one of my old bees cocoons hatched, and its been 4 months. Not even the wasps hatched. You might want to contact crownbees.com, and ask if yours are the old ones. They probably won't hatch.

Thanks for the information! I wouldn't have thought of that at all, I'll give the local shop a call and see if I can figure that out.

SCurtis

Welcome to ATP and the Beekeeping forum SCurtis

I'm learning about mason bees from you two as you post.

Thank you for the welcoming! I've been looking for a good active gardening forum, somewhat new to gardening so definitely have a lot of questions

Did you get fresh bees @SCurtis?

Hey Kitty! I'm still waiting on them, and none of my old ones have still hatched. I went by the local shop and they didn't say anything about a new batch or old batch actually kind of looked at me like I was crazy. Made me mad, I will never buy bees from them again because they weren't offering me a refund or a new batch or anything. So I ordered them from Crown Bees. I talked to someone who works there and they said they did not sell the bees to my local shop and didn't know who did, but they actually did give me a discount! They should hopefully be in sometime this week.

Just sad though, I'm afraid by the time I get them in there and by the time they finally hatch the peak of my summer garden season will be over. But luckily it seems like I'm having some bee life this year, I added a lot more bee attractor flowers around the garden. Last year I actually got to the point where I was out Q tipping my veggie plants to make sure they were being cross pollinated because no bees were visiting my garden at all.

I did the same thing as you. Q-tipped last year, sowed a butterfly garden this year. Have plenty of bees this year. Maybe flowers is all it takes. I saw one these sweat bees this week. Called that as they are attracted to ........sweat. It had enormous sacks of pollen on its legs, so I knew it wasn't a mason bee. It was welcome to my flowers, however. Bee was very tiny.

That's a cool looking bee! It wasn't till recently that I found out how many bee varieties there are it's pretty amazing

Anyone tried having a purple martin house with their mason bees? I'd love to add a house next year to help with the mosquitos but I don't want my martins eating my bees! I have also noticed that a few of my neighbors already have martin boxes so I am somewhat worried about my cutter bees now.

I looked up p.m., they do not eat large amounts of mosquitoes, that's a marketing ploy. They eat most every other flying insect though.

Awe that's so sad! Well i'm glad I didn't buy a house for them then. Guess I should put all my efforts into bees instead of birds

I know have bumble bees in my garden! Anyone know where they build a nest?

Don't know much about bumble bees, but I do think that they normally build their nests underground in an old vole hill or something of the like. You can actually get or build bumble bee houses just like mason bee houses but they're a lot bigger. From a fast search I found this one, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0061KBFOS/. after reading it seems like people have the best luck partially burying it or at least having it on the ground but they have to be dry. I'd think that'd be pretty difficult if you partially buried it.

Just ordered some leaf cutter bees and some more mason bees for this spring! I hope they all hatch unlike my bad batch last year.

Good luck

I look for little boxes at thrift store and them we made mason bee houses with the bamboo inserts.

Elfie, do you get any bees nesting in the boxes? ALL my bees (2 kinds) flew away after hatching, and i haven't seen one since

There are some bamboo sticks that are plugged up. I have to do some more research -- I believe those were from last year. I need to know the right time to remove for cleaning.

You can get some info from crownbees.com