Contact: Dave Chandler and Fiona Tainsh

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Mason bees as pollinators.
The red mason bee is a solitary bee (i.e. it doesn't form colonies like honeybees or bumblebees where you get a single queen that produces lots of daughter worker bees). The females nests in hollow reeds or holes in the earth. They lay their eggs in small cells that are lined with mud and provisioned with pollen. If conditions are suitable then they will form multiple individual nests in the same spot.

There are about 250 solitary bee species in the UK. Mason bees are efficient pollinators and are thought to be more effective than honeybees or bumblebees on a per bee basis. We are working with Mason Bees UK who have developed a service that provides mason bees to fruit growers. Bee cocoons are put into a release box in the crop in the spring alongside nest boxes. The cocoons hatch and young adult bees emerge when the crop is in blossom. They then pollinate the crop and make cells in the nest boxes. These are then collected in July, the cocoons are then extracted in the autumn, stored over winter and returned to the field the next year. If left out on their own then the cocoons would suffer high mortality from bad weather, predators etc so this system makes sure there are enough bees for the next year.

In Fiona's PhD we are getting baseline information about this pollination system including:
1) understanding whether this mass rearing system leaves the bees more vulnerable to diseases
2) developing molecular markers so we can study the population genetics of the bee. We have a release system set up in the orchard with a release box and nest tubes.