The mason bee is a solitary bee, working only to fill tubes with pollen and eggs. Each egg chamber is sealed with mud, and a group of chambers are made to fill a given tube. Each worker is a Queen. The bees are quite non-aggressive. Compared to a honey bee, the mason bee is about 100 times more effective at pollinating. No honey but lots of pollination. These bees are active in early Spring when flowers first bloom.
The box uses 1/8 inch thick material and holds about 95 3/8 inch OD tubes for Mason bee nesting. Net weight is about 1.5 lb. You may need to edit the keyholes to fit the fastener size available. Zipped plans with no artwork are below along with a Workflow for order of operations.
Three of six sides are flipped over to make better fitting finger-slot joins. This should allow easy alignment for adding artwork to the re-flipped pieces front sides by using the cutouts from the original sides. My current Glowforge machine failed to accept the re-flipped sides even though the drawings are symmetric. Card stock templates were needed for adding artwork to the three re-flipped sides. Please let me know if your machine accepts the flipped sides into their original cutouts. Mason Bee Box Workflow and SVGs.zip (304.0 KB)
very nice. i’m looking to build another bee hotel, but for leafcutters (they come out later than mason bees). just need to find the right size tubes. this could come in handy.
We get mud daubers here, but they have no problem building their own tunnels all over the darned place. I often have to destroy and clean out their mess from any nook and cranny around the house. They look vicious but are completely harmless. I’ve had them land on me while working in the garage. A few seconds later, they fly off. They like to prey on insects and spiders that are not beneficial, like black widows - which are also common here.
This is great! My daughter and her family have a small, 16 acres of organic blueberries which are yearly pollinated by Mason Bees. They made ‘bee houses’ too, though much less elaborate and pretty than these are.
Mason bees are preyed on by tiny wasps that bore through the tubes to lay en egg on the bee larva.
Everyone is trying not to be eaten by someone else …
My son makes and gives away many simple rectangular boxes populated with bee larvae. Bees don’t care about the box shape. He did suggest adding the steps to help a bee find THE tube she is currently working. Have no idea that this might help her at all!
What a great share and a beautiful design! Thank you! I’m not even sure what types of bees are in my area so I’ll have to look that up. I see people putting up this type of housing around town but never see any guests.
Great idea! Would love to build one so they’ll have a better nesting spot than my deck boards! Where do you get the tubes? (or did you say and I missed it?)
Tubes can be found on Amazon. Some include a fine netting to help protect from the predatory wasps. Also Crown Bees is a good resource for information and supplies.
I would love to see more detail on those image pieces. They look amazing! The whole thing is quite awesome! I did not know this about the Mason Bee. Thanks for the education as well.
The 3D engraves used artwork from the internet, gray-scaled in Photoshop, and then had settings 582/Full/Vary Power/0 minimum/225 LPI/1 pass. The masking was removed prior to engraving just out to the edge of the artwork. There was some alcohol bleeding under the remaining masking after a toothbrush scrub with alcohol.
