May 13, 2021

 Killed another Houdini bee today.  Hip hip, hurrah.

Well, condo #1 is totally filled. Yet I still see die hard bees searching for an open tube. They love condo #1.  Finally, bees are

making the obvious move to condo #3.  While there are only a few filled tubes, many tubes have bees coming and going.  The same is true for condo#2 and condo#4.

As condo#2 fills up, they are aggressively moving to condo#4.

Glad I built condos 3 and 4 or there would be no tubes available.

I dont know what flowers are most attractive to the mason bees. The large stand of blueberry bushes are very near the bee condos. Yet the bees I see working on the blueberry bushes are mostly bumblebees. I see very few honey bees.  The most common bees is a small bumblebee. I do see a huge bumblebee occasionally.

But the mason bees are missing from the blueberries.  Since the blueberries are almost all of the flowers in my yard, I don't know where the mason bees are working.

One behavior which interests me is that these mason bees which are supposed to be solitary, certainly seem to have some communal behaviors.  I notice that many bees arrive at the condos at the same time. It would appear the bees are visiting flowers together and returning to the condos together.  I also notice that some bees know exactly which tube is their own.  Yet, some bees cannot seem to figure out which tube belongs to them.  Maybe some bees are just stupid.