Keeping busy as a bee.

Like most other gardeners I'm so anxiously awaiting spring.  I do the daily walk through of the yard seeing what changes are happening.  I keep trying to find things to do outside, but there's only so much that I can do yet.  Too early to put my seedlings out or to plant many seeds.  I've had a small pile of things accumulating that I have been "saving" as something to do on a day that I have time to garden.  Today I was able to do a few things.

 Awhile ago Sweet Pea and I got the idea to hang a terra cotta planter on the side of the shed when we were at Molbaks.  They had a vertical row of them filled with Spanish Moss.  That gave me the idea to try putting one up high as a nesting place, who knows maybe a bird will think the same way I do?  Then I found these letters at Hobby Lobby and thought the word GROW would be a fun one, although I wasn't sure where I would hang them.  I think they look great on the back of the shed.  It needed some character back there.

 The other project is based on our Pear trees.  We had lots of blooms on them last year, the only problem was that last spring it was too cold for any honey bees to pollinate them and we ended up with about 4 pears.  As you can see it won't be long til these bloom, and the temperatures aren't looking too promising for warming up anytime soon.

 Both of the pear trees are being used as scratching posts by our neighbor cats, any suggestions for protecting the trees?

 Gracie's projects involve trying to find new places to escape from the front yard.

 The need for our pear trees to be get pollinated resulted in me getting to have fun with one of my favorite things... Spray paint!  These are the pieces for our new Mason Bee house.  We found this kit at the nursery made by Crown Bees, which is a local company.  They have a great website with lots of information.  You can order houses and bees from them.  You can sign up for Bee-Mail and they send emails to let you know when it's time to do things for the bees.  We have our bees hibernating in the garage fridge right now.

 Here's how the house looks all put back together.  Now to find the spot to hang it!  This is nothing as cool and exciting as Clare's or Randy's honeybees, but it's as close to beekeeping as we will get.  I hope the early spring Mason bees will help get our pear trees pollinated this year.  I will be sure to post and let you all know how it goes.

On the Seattle Tilth Facebook page I found a really interesting link to an article on keeping Mason Bees.  It's suggested that the bee house is hung at head height to be able to watch their activity which makes this a fun thing to do if you have kids.

All words and photos in this post are property of A Gardener in Progress.