Parasites and Diseases

  • All-Season Pests and Predators of Cavity-Nesting Bees

    Installing bee houses and hotels are great ways toencourage nesting,protectpollinators, and educate communities about bees' vital role in food production and ecosystem services. Unfortunately, productive bee nests are loaded with pollen, nectar, and bee larvae, making them a smorgasbord offood ...

  • Asian Giant Hornet - Murder Hornet

    This is an excerpt from a Crown Bees blog article. You can read the entire article here. Asian Giant Hornet Season The Asian giant hornet, an invasive pest that threatens pollinators and ignores international borders, is the focus of an international effort to eradicate it in the Pacific Northw...

  • Houdini Fly Alert for Mason Bee Raisers 

    Houdini Fly Alert for Mason Bee Raisers We love mason bees for many reasons! They're early spring pollinators, a lot of fun to watch, and require very little maintenance compared to honey bees, making them perfect bees for busy gardeners and farmers. Traditionally, spring mason bee care included...

  • How to Harvest Cocoons From Bamboo and Drilled Blocks of Wood - With Video

    How do I harvest cocoons from bamboo and drilled blocks of wood? Bamboo, while low cost, is too structurally sound to easily open like natural reeds. Consider this solution: Place the entire house into a BeeGuard bag early spring and close the opening. Check the bag daily when mason bees should...

  • Identifying the Bugs - Doing the Research

    We get a lot of requests to identify bees and their pests. This blog article links to three different databases that can assist you in your research. Bee Informed: Protect Bees from Disease, Master Melittologist Program, Bee Identification Another option is to do an image search on your favorit...

  • Learn how to naturally deter social wasps from building a nest near your home.

    Learn how to naturally deter social wasps from building a nest near your home. You may begin to notice and worry about social wasp nests in the late summer. Social wasps like paper wasps, yellow jackets, and hornets have similar life cycles and their nests become large enough to notice in the su...

  • The Houdini Fly - With Video

    Houdini Fly (Non-native, Introduced) - Cleptoparasite NOTE: This is an excerpt from a Crown Bees article. You can read the entire article here. Characteristics: Large, red eyes (Nicknamed "Devil Fly"; About the size of a fruit fly; dull brown with horizontal stripes on abdomen; when in rest it...

  • Wasps

    Chalcid Wasps (Monodontomerus & Pteromalus venustus) - Body Snatchers Characteristics: Mono species are widespread throughout North America, and all are metallic green, blue, or black, with red eyes, and are 5/64 to 5/32 inch in length (~2 to 4 millimeters). Males are slightly smaller than f...

  • What's Going on in This Yard? 2021 Mason Bee Harvesting Alert

    First and foremost, a THANK YOU to all of our Bee Farmers, Bee Buy Back Participants, and Harvesting Volunteers this season—we even had a volunteer come all the way from Canada! Thanks to your bee raising efforts, we've received, harvested, cleaned, and stored around 350,000 mason bee cocoons so ...