Steve Peterson has been working with cavity nesting bees for a long time. How long is a bit of a mystery, as Steve is going full bore placing blue orchard bees out in California almond orchards at the time of writing (and catching up with Steve at this juncture would be very, very hard). Suffice it to say that soft-spoken Dr. Peterson would never say this out loud, but he knows A LOT about managing solitary bees. His company, Foothill Bee Ranch, helps people figure out how to make solitary bee systems work in crops like almonds, cherries, plums, strawberries, alfalfa seed, carrot seed, onion seed and lettuce seed.
Listen in to learn Steve’s experience in making and maintaining mason bee nesting blocks, and why he advocates using a wood laminate in its construction.
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“I’ve always been interested in that you can raise these bees and sort of have a lower input in terms of having to put them into cold storage so soon.” – Steve Peterson
Show Notes:
- Why the Orchard Bee Association’s annual meeting is the best kept secret in the bee world
- What Steve has learned from his nesting projects
- What makes California and Utah bees different and why
- The materials Steve uses for nesting
- How to manage your pest and parasite population in building nests
- The innovation that Steve and Agpollen had in mass-produced nesting materials
- The good and bad of using reed for your nesting tubes
- What Steve finds in his mason bee tubes that are not mason bees
- What different parasites can infiltrate the mason bee nesting tubes
- Why Steve documents a lot of data in his nests and what he uses it for
- The tradeoffs of the wood laminate versus traditional wood nesting boards
“I do like to try and keep track of things like how many cells were made per nest, how many females were in each nest, how many pollen balls, how many of each of those pests.” – Steve Peterson
Links Mentioned:
- Learn more about Foothill Bee Ranch
- Check out the Orchard Bee Association
- Learn more about the upcoming BEEvent in Albany, OR on March 2nd, 2019
- Steve’s favorite pollinator resources:
You can view our work with Mason Bees at the Wildlife Botanical Gardens in Brush Prairie, WA, on YouTube at “Mason Bees Wildlife Botanical Gardens”. As an OSU alumni, I am interested in getting more involved in your work with Mason Bees. I teach a class on “Herding your Mason Bees” annually in December at the CASEE center in Brush Prairie and at local High schools. Please contact me with further information and how I can help your program.
Capt. Brigg Franklin
Bee Herder & Worm Wrangler