On Tuesday, March 11, 2025, we had the pleasure of welcoming mason beekeeper, Amanda Stevenson, fo ran “All About Mason Bee Workshop”. 6 local community members gathered at the Kinross Creek Co-op common room to learn together.
Amanda first purchased mason bees in 2018, and began caring for them along with her daughter. Since then, Amanda has learned a lot about how to properly care for the bees.
Grace Nombrado, Executive Director of Free the Fern, took some notes during the presenation (which you can aread below)
Cool facts included:
- There are 450+ species of native bees in BC
- There are 60 different types of mason bees – blue orchard mason bees are the local ones we purchase as cocoons
- Mason bees are very great pollinators (100x more effective than honeybees!)
- Male mason bees only live for a few days, they mate and then they die, while females live for 2 weeks
- Males don’t have a stinger and females only use a stinger when crushed
- Houdini flies are an invesive insect that threaten mason bees
- You need to wash and use bleach to clean mason bees
- You store mason bees in the back of your fridge over winter
- Bees will hatch in the spring when it is 13+ degrees consistently
This year, we plan to purchase some mason bee cocoons and install a mason bee hotel (built by Environmental Youth Aliance volunteers) on the Red Alder Trail. Our board director, Ellie Weber, will serve as our official mason bee keeper. So, it was great to be able to learn many tips from Amanda that we hope to put into use. We would love to have Amanda come back for a second workshop in November. She has offered to do a hands-on demo on how to open and clean out the mason bee hotel.
Thanks to Park People for providing funding for these and other free community events.