- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: [gentle instrumental music] - [voice-over] I'm Joe Lamp'l.

When I created Growing a Greener World, I had one goal.

To tell stories of everyday people.

Innovators, entrepreneurs, forward-thinking leaders who are all, in ways both big and small, dedicated to organic gardening and farming, lightening our footprint, conserving vital resources, protecting natural habitats, making a tangible difference for us all.

They're real, they're passionate, they're all around us.

They're the game changers who are literally growing a greener world and inspiring the rest of us to do the same.

Growing a Greener World.

It's more than a movement, it's our mission.

The role that bees play in the garden is well-documented.

If it wasn't for their pollination, many of our favorite food crops would cease to exist.

Plus you think about the home-grown honey, and it's no wonder many gardeners have taken to beekeeping as a part-time hobby, but it's not for everybody.

Maybe it's the added expense of all this specialized gear and equipment, or just the time it takes to inspect the hives and hand-harvest the honey.

Maybe it's the parasitic mites, or just the fear of getting stung.

So not everybody can keep honeybees, but honeybees are social bees, and they're not the only type.

There's another type out there called solitary bees, particularly mason bees, and they're wildly different from their stinging, honey-making relatives.

In fact, they're far more efficient at pollinating crops, and they're nearly hands-off for keeping those kinds of bees at home.

Plus, they might just be the answer to solving the world's food problem.

Backyard beekeeping has exploded in popularity in recent years, and a big part of the reason is due to the concern by many for the ongoing loss of a significant percentage of our honeybee population each year, but by adding a hive or two in our own yards, we're doing our part to help keep the population diversified and growing.

Yet with all the popularity of raising honeybees, there's another kind of bee, working behind the scenes that is incredibly efficient at pollination and without many of the mysterious problems associated with our honeybee crisis.

What started out as a backyard hobby for Dave Hunter has grown into a passion and business for this Seattle solitary bee enthusiast.

With a team of like-minded employees, they're helping to increase awareness of mason bees as a possible alternate pollinator to the world's commercial orchard and food producers.

By encouraging gardeners everywhere to actively raise the easy-to-care-for mason bee, Dave may have discovered a way to help keep our food crops around the world productive while removing many of the stress and risks to honeybees used in commercial production.

- So to actually talk about solitary bees is first of all, what is it?

Why does one say solitary bee, and to appreciate that is to understand the difference between a social and a solitary bee.

A social, you're thinking a honeybee and bumble bees and hornets and wasps.

They all work under one queen, and they've got a big hive and they work together, they communicate, whereas a solitary bee, every female's a queen.

They only live six weeks.

They come out at different parts of the year, but every female's a queen, and she winds up just doing everything, and they work together, I say together, they're gregarious.

A mason bee wants to be next to another mason bee or another solitary bee, but the biggest difference is there's no communication.

They're just an individual bee doing their own thing by themselves.

The solitary bee's got a whole ton of species out there, but what we've been looking at specifically, if we narrow that down to a mason bee, these guys or these girls are bees that go into a hole that you can actually manage.

You can actually move these around.

You can hold the cocoons in your hands in the fall, but secondly, they're just an awesome pollinator.

No honey okay, so it's not, it's not a honeybee, but the way they pollinate is so much different than a honeybee, and this is actually the key piece.

With a honeybee, as they're gathering their pollen, it's going on the back legs.

You've heard these honey pockets.

Not much pollen falls off the honeybee, and so few flowers are pollinated each day.

With the mason bee, way different.

The mason bee, she comes in and she belly-flops, and she's getting all this dry pollen on her abdomen, and off she goes to the next flower.

She's getting the nectar while she's at it.

Next flower, belly-flop, nectar, and off she goes.

Virtually every flower this bee touches is pollinated, and that's the key difference.

They stay in a tight radius.

You can hold 'em in your hands, but they are awesome pollinators, so in an orchard, you might need 20 to 30 thousand honeybees to pollinate an acre, and on the mason bee side, really about 400 to 500 females.

It's phenomenal the difference.

[gentle music] So this is the fun part of my little history where I'm able to actually solve, put a solution to food on the table, and so you can look back about 20 years ago.

As an engineer, I'm seeing an unknown insect to me, go into holes and supply pollination to my back yard, and 15 years later, I'm given time off, and I'm able to take this insect, now that I understand it, I'm learning it, but I'm able to see that as the honeybee continues to be challenged, here's this niche that I think we can actually put enough bees out there to keep food on the table.

So we've started an organization that has scientists and researchers and people all putting things together, and so there's one side of it.

We're learning the insect, but what we're also doing is teaching the back yard gardener how to be successful raising this, so it's not just food on the table for the orchards, it's food on the table in the back yard, and so you've got this really cool insect, it's gentle.

We're learning all we can and we're teaching all we can, and that's kinda one of the fun things about what we do, our company, is that we're able to teach people how to be successful, so successful that we're then able to then take their excess bees and move 'em into the orchards.

That's where we're at.

So for the home gardener, this is a gentle bee that doesn't take any extra equipment, doesn't take any extra clothing.

You can go out there with your shorts, and they're just buzzing around your heads.

These guys are an insect that just pollinates your fruit trees.

It's a wonderful bee to go into.

On the upside, there is no downside.

It's just a bee that doesn't have any problems, and it pollinates.

We just find they're just a great insect.

- Well Dave, first of all, my compliments to you and your back yard because I think if I were a solitary bee, I'd be very happy right here.

- Well there's a lot of pollen from as early as I can in the spring till way late fall, and what we find is that pollen attracts bees.

It's that simple.

- And that comes from a diverse landscape, but you know, I've got that at my house, and I know a lot of people around the country are gonna have a wide variety of plant material, so can we safely then say that we've got solitary bees in our landscape?

- Well out of the 4,000 species of bees across the U.S., we find that more than half of them are solitary, and so to actually look to your ground and to see down in the ground, you've got individual bees coming out of holes.

Those are solitary bees in the ground, and to put up holes where they might nest into, reeds or paper tubes, has bees, if they're there, to use these to nest in.

- But you talk about putting something up to see if they're there, but that doesn't mean that you have to do that.

I think of it very much like a bluebird house.

You put it up, you build it, and they will come, but if you don't put it up, it doesn't mean that they're not in the area.

- That's exactly right Joe.

[gentle music] - Well Dave, as I'm sure you know, anybody that's ever raised honeybees or has been around them for any length of time knows the golden rule.

Never stand in front of the entrance to a honeybee hive, but I think this illustrates the point.

This is clearly not the case.

- This is a little different, so these are gentle mason bees, and why we say gentle that every female's a queen, and as she's going in and out of her hole that she owns, she's gathering the pollen and the nectar and laying the egg.

So she does all these things, or she could go out there and guard her nest and protect it, which a honeybee, a social bee, would do.

In this case, she can't do both, so she doesn't.

She just sits there and does her thing.

If you could get stung by a mason bee, if-- - [Joe] It's a big if, huh?

- [Dave] The venom is less than a mosquito bite.

If you grab on in your hands, they're a bee, so they do have a stinger, you can get stung by squishing it or maybe getting it caught deep in your clothing, but it's, they're amazingly gentle.

- So remote, so if anybody's ever not had honeybees because of fear of being stung, but they want bees, what a great option!

- No honey, awesome pollinators.

Not a bad trade-off.

- Yeah, I agree.

- Utterly fascinating, especially when you understand their life cycle, and you have some fantastic props to really bring that full-circle.

- Thanks Joe.

So what we're actually looking at here, these are harvested cocoons that have adult bees in them.

A large cocoon is a female, and we've got a small, little one here for a male, and these bees overwinter in cocoons through the whole process, through the whole winter, and then in the springtime, they have a, they're ready to come out.

The males will exit first and the females, and the females are using a hole such as this to lay their eggs in.

- So this is a reed in this example, but this also applies to the in-ground solitary bees as well.

- Exactly, they all gather pollen, lay an egg, and then seal that little chamber.

That keeps 'em waterproof through the whole winter.

Okay.

- So let's open this one up and kinda see what's in there.

This was just finished a couple days ago, so there's, we should find eggs inside here.

[gentle music] [reed cracking] And so here, so we see, we've got a little pollen around here, but about 30 trips worth of pollen gathering has about a pea-size bit of pollen.

She's gonna back in, lay an egg.

See these little white spot right there.

- Yes.

- That's an egg that was laid.

Females on the inside, males on the outside, and then she seals that little chamber with a bit of mud.

In fact, we can see on this reed here where there's the mud, and it's pollen egg mud, pollen egg mud out there, and so in her lifespan, she's probably laid, probably 15 or so eggs between the two of these.

She's dead after about six weeks, and these eggs will have hatched.

The larva now consumes the pollen she left for 'em, and through the early part of summer, just eats it and gets to be a big larva, and then through the probably late June, she has spun a coccon, and then metamorphosed into an adult bee to just sit through the winter again, so it's a simple process.

- [Joe] So in the fall, this is what you would see inside of the reed or the hole.

- [Dave] Exactly.

- And so through the fall, into the winter, and back to spring, now these are emerging to start this process all over again.

- Exactly.

That's fascinating.

- Isn't it neat, I love it.

- Unlike the social honeybee that lives in complex hives with up to 60,000 of its closest friends and family, the solitary mason bee is just that, living and working its entire life in isolation, and often doing so from a solitary enclosure that's no wider than a common drinking straw, and unlike the complex hives of a honeybee, the home made mason bee habitat is remarkably easy to make, and yet there are some important considerations to ensure success.

So talk to me about some of those steps to make sure that we're ensuring success for those bees.

- And there's not very many.

The mason bee is a generalist, so she's looking for pollen.

I'm saying from dandelions to fruit trees, and everything in between.

So weeds are okay?

- Weeds are fine.

So they're generalists.

- And a good, diverse environment.

Correct.

- Okay.

- Next, they're looking for holes, so about a pencil-sized diameter about maybe six inches long is gonna allow those bees to go in there and nest, and we're looking for something that you can open up: a paper tube, a reed, or maybe wood trace that you can open up, okay?

Now these are going into a house, and the house just keeps the holes dry.

A shelter.

- Right.

- About two or three inches of overhang.

We're keeping it on a morning wall.

We want the bees to be as active as early as possible.

- Okay because the sunlight coming in from the east warms them up early, and it's the warm temperatures that gets them active early in the day.

- Exactly, right.

Now one of the most critical pieces, mud.

The mason bee uses clay-y mud that she's pulling out of the ground.

So I'm gonna say finding a hole in the ground is probably the best.

They're actually gonna be going through the sidewall trying to capture that mud.

Now if you've got a loamy or sandy soil-- - Which is what I'm thinking, somebody's watching this thinking well I just don't have that muddy situation at home at all.

- Right, so in that case, I'm gonna say get the cheapest possible kitty litter you can.

Rock bottom, clay-based, right.

So you're not gonna get that old gloopy, put it onto that sidewall, and the water content should keep it moist enough.

We think the bees would use that rather than fly off.

Okay.

- All right.

And then the last little piece it's now in June, the bees are done.

I wanna protect those bees from the developing bees, from birds and rodents or something.

Predators?

- Right.

So we're gonna take the full holes out and put 'em into a pillowcase and put those in a garage or a shed, just someplace where it's warm, and then I wanna replace those holes with smaller tubes for other nesting bees that could come out during the summer.

- Okay, so you're just giving a new opportunity for more habitat and other insects to come up and take residence.

- What we're looking for are the bees to thrive, not just survive.

- Ah, I like that.

Just as so many of us have set up certified wildlife habitats, there's certain steps we had to take to not only attract the wildlife, but once they came, make sure they had adequate food and shelter.

Well it's no different for the mason bee.

There's specific steps that we can take to not only help them get to our place, but once they're there, give them everything they need for a safe and productive life cycle.

First, add native plants to your landscape.

The bees that come to live and work in your habitat thrive around native plants that have been a staple of their diet and nesting ritual for centuries.

In addition, the bees that you attract by planting natives help reproduce more plants as they go from one to the other, collecting and depositing pollen.

Next, consider reducing the size of your lawn, then use the newfound space to add more habitat-building native plants.

The more you provide of what bees want, the more likely they are to be attracted to your garden and landscape, and that's a win-win for you and the bees.

Less lawns also means less potentially harmful lawn chemicals that can easily impact the bees and other wildlife.

Grow more food, or even one edible plant.

By growing food, you begin to understand the importance of pollination even more.

For much of what we eat, pollination is the key to producing it, and without our bees to do that, we wouldn't have many of the foods we depend on every day.

Another important step in creating a bee haven is to allow pests to survive.

As odd as it sounds, by letting mother nature do your pest control for you, you avoid use of non-selective chemicals, which kill beneficial insects as well.

Instead, by allowing pests in your garden and landscape, you provide a food source for beneficial insects, which not only take care of the problem naturally, but also help to keep our ecosystems in balance.

And finally, raise more bees.

By doing more to create a healthy habitat, bees will naturally be attracted to visit and live there, and by raising more bees, we take an active role in building their populations.

A good way to do that is to make your own bee house.

Now certainly there are numerous self-contained systems that include everything from the outer housing to the chambers inside where the bees lay their eggs, but if you have a few basic tools like a drill and a saw, for less than five dollars, you can make a complete system and be up and running in just about an hour.

First, you'll need the chambers or tubes that the bees will use to lay their eggs and where the cocoons will overwinter.

Tubes that you roll yourself from plain paper work great for this.

Fold and cut sheets of discarded paper into quarter sections.

Then, roll each piece around a pencil, and tape the end.

Remove the pencil and fold the other end over and staple or tape it closed.

[gentle music] Make as many as you desire to place into the bee house.

[gentle music] Making the bee house is a simple process as well.

I used one untreated cedar fence board that I purchased for less than three dollars.

From the top, I measured down eight inches, but any length will work.

I used a carpenter's square to draw the lines to guide my cuts.

I then used my saw to cut the first piece, which will serve as the back of the bee house.

[circular saw buzzing] [gentle music] Next, I cut two more pieces to serve as the sides of the house.

These were eight inches as well.

Three more pieces of wood are all that's needed to complete the project, one for the top lid, which I cut to six and a half inches to provide some overhang, and a bottom board which I cut to six inches.

Make sure the screws you select are weather-resistant and thin enough so as not to split the narrow boards.

With all the pieces cut, connecting the boards was quick and simple.

[gentle music] A bead of caulk across the top seam will keep the lid water-tight.

[gentle music] The final step after mounting the house was to insert the paper tubes and place the last piece of wood, cut to four inches, to rest on top.

This helps keep the tubes in place.

Now one final thought about using these home-made paper chambers.

Like me, you might have thought well, wouldn't it be just a lot easier to use plastic drinking straws and cut them down to size.

It certainly would save a lot of time, but don't do it, and here's why.

There are three things working against using plastic straws, and the first is this.

Pollen has excess moisture, and you need those natural chambers to wick away that moisture, and with plastic, that's certainly not gonna happen, and you would end up with moldy, dead cocoons in the fall, and you certainly don't want that.

Second, drinking straws tend to be the wrong size, including paper straws, but if you can find straws that a pencil slips into, that's good, but you still have an issue with not being able to harvest the cocoons, which you might want to consider doing to help expand the population of mason bees beyond your immediate area, and you can't get to the cocoons in a plastic straw without killing the bees.

Perhaps the most important step in raising mason bees and building their population is the final step of the year, which happens in fall.

This is where Dave and his team really focus on building the population with the help of people all over the country.

So this is headquarters where the magic happens.

- Yep, this is it.

- So when you're not out on your deck enjoying your passion, you're in here working, but also inspiring others to mason bees as well.

- We're trying to help people be aware that there's something beyond the honeybee and the bumble bee.

There's a gentle mason bee that they can raise.

- Awareness is huge, and you do that through a robust website and email, bee-mail actually.

Very clever, by the way.

- Yeah, the thing's once a month.

We're helping the gardener understand what to do, so it's April, this is the step.

It's October, here's the step because we realize the gardener has too much on their plate, and they just forget, so if we can remind them, we're handing them a little more success.

- Well, and awareness is gonna build desire, which you certainly have done with me.

So the good thing is everything that I would need is here as well, so I can order that, but what does that cost?

- Well we've got reeds and houses and bees.

In fact, we've got bees that are acclimated to the gardener's area.

Hugely important.

- Important for that.

So on the cost, we've got low-cost houses that we feel of bees and house, about 30 bucks to get this to them, and on a higher end, we've got houses with tubes and reeds and bees for about $100.

- Not bad either way.

Now time, that's the other one I never have enough of, so there's a cost to that, but what are we talking there?

- About 15 minutes total.

Agreed, what we're asking is that the gardener gets the box.

They open up the box, they put their house outside and put the cocoons that have the bees in it into the house, and that's it.

They stand back and let the bees do their thing.

- So just to clarify, the cocoons are in a dormant state, but when you put them out and it's warm-- - [Dave] The bees are gonna emerge from the cocoons and do their thing.

- [Joe] Very cool.

- [Dave] It's not that tough, so they're active for about six weeks.

They've pollinated the people's back yard.

They've got now food that they've been looking to raise, and they're done.

- Okay, but let's fast forward to the fall because that's really the essence of this business model.

Walk me through that.

- Okay, in the fall, we want the gardener to have been so successful that they've got an abundance of cocoons.

- Right.

- We want them keeping a lot for themselves, but the excess we're gonna buy back.

We're taking these and we're going to re-home them to other gardeners to they can become more successful, and here's the point.

We're gonna be moving them into orchards 'cause we want to supplement the honeybee.

In fact, one of our problems we've got as we look at all of our peers, we've got between all of our peers four to five million mason bees, that's it.

Under management.

- Under management, right.

- But later, as we're analyzing, we're trying to help augment the orchards across North America.

We think we need about four to five billion.

- Wow.

- Just a few decimal points off.

[Joe laughing] Right.

So the gardener holds the key to the success.

We can get enough gardeners raising these mason bees, we can then pull them into the orchards just to complete that full bridging the gap between orchard and then back yard gardener.

- In essence, you're fostering new farmers who are sharing some of their bounty.

- Exactly, right.

- I like that.

A gentle-mannered beneficial that's 30 to 60 times more efficient than the honeybee at pollinating crops.

It requires no specialized equipment to raise them, and you can give them everything they need to thrive in your garden using scrap materials you probably already have.

Plus no threat of ever being stung.

There is literally no reason why every gardener shouldn't be raising mason bees.

It will absolutely improve your garden and may just be the ultimate answer to growing a greener world.

Well I hope for many of you, today's topic on solitary and mason bees was en eye-opening experience, and perhaps for a few, we've whet your appetite enough to wanna raise important mason bees in your own back yard, but if you just wanna learn more or perhaps review what you saw today, no problem.

It's all on our website under the show notes for this episode, and that website address is the same as our show name.

It's growingagreenerworld.com.

Thank you for joining us everybody.

I'm Joe Lamp'l, and we'll see you back here next time for more Growing a Greener World.

- [Male Announcer] Growing a Greener World is made possible in part by: - [Female Announcer]: so you can roam the Earth with a lighter footprint.

- [Male Announcer] And the following: [ambient electronic music] ♪ [male announcer]: Continue the garden learning from the program you just watched, Growing a Greener World.

Program host Joe Lamp'l's online gardening academy offers classes designed to teach gardeners of all levels, from the fundamentals to master skills.

Classes are on-demand any time.

Plus, opportunities to ask Joe questions about your specific garden in real time.

Courses are available online.

For more information or to enroll, go to: [funky techno jingle] ♪ ♪