🐝 Build a Mason Bee House to Help Pollinators Thrive!

Hello, I'm Brad Wardle, a.k.a. Captain Wingnut Cougar Ridge Ranch, high in the Uintah Mountains of Eastern Utah. And we're in the big greenhouse today, and we've had a little bit of a dilemma. Because we grow squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, everything, watermelon, all kinds of stuff up on the trellises here. And the trellises get so packed in with all of the foliage. This is from last year. You can see how, what a wall it was. That our honeybees, which are over here, about 100 yards from us, don't come in. They come to the outside, but they don't come in and get everything that's inside. So we were considering putting a honey bee colony inside here, which would be great, but it's hot in here. And I'm afraid it would cook our little girls. So I had to come up with another idea. And I saw mason bees flying around in here the other day. And I said, let's make some mason bee houses so that we can keep the mason bees in here and let them do the inside pollination. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to go down and build two or three mason bee houses. You get to be a fly on the wall and watch. And here we go. So the way this works is you get a pipe and you put straws in the pipe for little, little homes for the mason bees to lay their eggs and make more mason bees. And they look for these things, you know, and they make, oh, my goodness, they fill up everything that's got a little hole around here. So I know that we've got lots of mason bees. So what I want to do is I want to get a pipe, something about like this, and cut it so that we can put the. Oh, this is such an organized place. I tell you what. Oh, my goodness. Let's see. Oh, that one might be. Oh, no, that's that's only about nine inches. What's this one? Oh, yeah, this is about 10 inches. And so that's what we'll do. Let's go cut this. When you live on the farm and you get out in the middle of Timbuktu and you need a vise, you got to have a way to have a vise remote. This baby fits on all of the equipment, the tractor, the four by four. The trucks, this lets us have a big heavy duty vise out in the middle of nowhere. Hype. There we go. So each one of these pieces needs to be four and a half inches, because that's what our straws are going to be, and I'll show you the straws in just a minute. So I'm going to make a mark here at four and a half. I'm going to make a mark here at four and a half. OK, so now I've got a line at four and a half inches on each side. And I'm going to go from this side at four and a half, this side at four and a half. Make myself a line, a cut line. Oh, so I got these boba straws and their paper, you're going to need paper. I don't think the little beasts like plastic, so get paper boba straws and you're going to cut them and just fill this container up, pack it in tight. And that's going to be the new home of the mason bees. So we're just going to stuff these into this four inch pipe that we've made, and if you lift it up and they start to fall out, you need more. Or if you see a little hole where it could use one, stuff it in. They need to be pretty tight and you don't want to glue them in because you may need to take them out to clean them and replace them in the future. Perfect. OK, they're all in there tight. Pretty good. Now, decorations are optional, but I'm sure the girls are going to decorate these and then we'll go hang them up and let the mason bees make little houses. So the next thing you're going to do is you're going to attract them with lemongrass oil, lemongrass essential oil. Now, I want to warn you about this, because if you have honeybees around, this may get them all wound up and thinking that you got the queen because this smells just like their queen. So I want you to be careful with this. Don't get it on you like I just did. And we're going to put this around the rim a little bit here and there of this thing, and this will attract the bees, not the honeybees. This will attract mason bees as well. But the honeybees think that you've got the queen if you're doing this. So let's put a couple of drops here and let them know that there's a new apartment house in the condominium. OK, so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to hang this anywhere from six to seven feet off the ground. And we've got this little string on here. And I'm hoping that this is going to put it at about that level. And so, yeah, so that's about six feet right there. Perfect. Now, if you're not in a container like the greenhouse here, you want to make sure that it's facing south. You can cover the back if you need to. I don't cover it because they'll have the opportunity to come both in and out. But you want it to face south when it's outside, put it on the south side of your house or your barn or your shed, your garage and face it south because south is where the most heat is all year long. All right. There you go. There's your mason bee house and attractant ready to go. There's a lot more in the description. Read the description. I put a lot more in the description than I talk about here. So there you go. Brad Wardle, a.k.a. Captain Wingnut, Cougar Ridge Ranch, high in the mountains of eastern Utah, signing off. Thanks for watching. OK, are you filming? OK, so when you live on the farm, you're not running yet, are you? Are you filming? Hello. I better. I better fix this. Hello, Captain Wingnut, Brad Wardle. Let me start over. You're not starting over, are you? Just rolling, rolling. OK.