Bee Business

You may recall that back in March I explained why we have bees in our refrigerator.   They were Mason bees and they went outside when the weather finally warmed up enough to have some hope that the bees would emerge from their cocoons. 

Now the mason bee season is over and since we rented some of the bees from a company called Rent Mason Bees, it was time to return the bees. Well, not those bees, but hopefully the eggs that those bees laid for the next season. 

 It looks like we only got two of the tubes filled with eggs.  This is not a very good return. All but two of the bees did hatch out.  I kept a watch out for the little shiny black bees in the garden as I was working and we did see bees going in and out of the nesting house. 

 Today we went to West Seattle Nursery to return the nesting block with the eggs in it. 

 We talked about what a difficult spring it was for bees, but other people were bringing in larger blocks with every tube filled. Oh well. 

 We decided to try again with a summer bee, leaf cutter bees, so we rented a batch of them. 

They look like this, and they are also solitary, non-hive bees that do not sting. 

 Leaf cutter bees lay eggs in smaller tubes and seal in each egg with a piece of leaf instead of clay like the mason bees. The block you see here has baby bees in it that should hatch now. Their season will end in August, and then we will return the bee block, hopefully with more tubes filled this time. And no more bees in the refrigerator for this batch. They don't make cocoons. 

And then, since we were at a great local nursery that we don't often frequent, we had to do some looking and shopping. 

 They gave a very good collection of shrubs and conifers and Japanese maples. 

 Lots of perennials and annuals.

 The gift shop has lots of cool stuff. 

 I love these pillows, but at $30 apiece, they stayed where they were. 

 Wonderful pottery.

 And somebody bought this, but not us. 

 There are still more posts to come from our Memorial Weekend trip to Oregon, but I wanted to bring you up to date on the bee business. I hope those new bees get busy.