My husband blamed the lack of bees for not getting fruit on our trees.
- We had forty fruit trees, and it was the third consecutive year we hadn’t had usable fruit on our trees.
My husband kept saying he was going to get the bees into our orchard, but he hadn’t done it. I was going through a website that was talking about bees, and they offered bees for sale. They had smaller mason bees that came out of the hive in the early spring, and they fed from the plants and helped with the early blooming plants, to pollinate them. They had bees that came out of hibernation when the temperature was staying in the seventies. These worker bees helped to pollinate the fruit trees and vegetable plants. The company offered special bee hives for the bees and had a book that discussed how to keep the bees healthy and when to harvest them. I bought two bee hives and eighty bees for him for his Christmas present. He carefully put the bees in the refrigerator and set the desired humidity to keep them safe. When the proper time arrived, he put the mason bee larva into their hives, and waited to see if they were going to hatch. He got upset when he didn’t see any bees, but I told him to be patient. The same thing happened when the second set of bees went out. Three years later, we had so many bees on our property that he was all smiles. He still harvests the bee larva once the bees are sure to be dormant, and eighty bees have turned in hundreds of them.