As honeybees die off again, some bee enthusiasts want to give mason bees a chance

Honeybees, which are tasked with pollinating many of the agricultural crops in the United States, are dying off in record numbers.

Commercial beekeepers are reporting losses this year ranging between 60 and 100 percent, Washington State University's Honey Bees and Pollinators Program reported in March.

Bee losses are not new — previous years have seen losses between 40 and 50 percent. Researchers know that honeybees are under pressure from pesticide use, habitat loss and mite infestations, but they can't yet explain why 2025 has been such a lethal year.

But the honeybee is not the only bee that can work in the fields. Today, most farmers use honeybees to pollinate their crops, even though they are, in fact, terrible at pollinating, says David Hunter, CEO of Crown Bees in Woodinville, Wash., who sells a different type of bee.

Instead of spreading pollen from flower to flower, the honeybee carries most of the pollen back to the hive.

But behold the humble mason bee! Also called the blue orchard bee, it inelegantly "belly flops" onto a flower, Hunter says. It flings pollen everywhere. Covered in pollen, the hairy mason bee then goes to the next flower and bellyflops again, which gives it a higher pollination success rate.

This is well-known in the bee world and backed up by the U.S. Department of Agriculture research. (In fact, the USDA named the mason bee a "pollinator-of-the-month.")

But farmers still rely on the honeybee, in part because these bees live in large hives that can be picked up and moved to different fields. Hunter says there is also an "only one bee mentality, and this is helping create the pollination mess we find ourselves in today."

Mason bees are among the 4,000 types of bees native to the U.S. The honeybee isn't one of them — they were brought to the U.S. from Europe in the 1600s.

Mason bees don't live in hives and they don't make honey. There is no queen bee and there are no worker bees. "All females are queens," says Hunter.

Female mason bees lay their eggs in cavities or tubes, and then seal the entrance with mud to protect them from predators. Because they build chambers inside the tubes, they were given the name mason bees.

"It's an interesting life cycle," says Hunter. "Through the summer, they become big larvae, spin a cocoon, and metamorphose to an adult. And in the fall, it's an adult bee in a cocoon that just hibernates through the winter."

Hunter, who is on the board of directors of the Planet Bee Foundation, is an evangelist for the mason and the leafcutter bee, which also nests in cavities. He is trying to spread the word about native bees because, like the honeybee, they are under pressure.

Hunter started his company, Crown Bees, which builds and sells bee hotels, to get more native species into backyards as well as onto commercial farms. Today, he sells and ships bees and bee hotels all over the country.

Beth Cummings, a retired college professor in Gig Harbor, Wash., first tried mason bees after her fruit trees burst into bloom in the spring, but they actually produced only a few pieces of fruit.

"We were obviously missing some pollinators," says Cummings, who now orders bees in their cocoon stage to arrive in the mail each spring, which then hatch as temperatures warm. "You give them a place to live, a way to make mud since they don't hive, and you never really see them. It's a pretty hands-off sort of deal."

Mason bees are a shy bee and rarely sting. That means the garden isn't dangerous for Cummings' elderly father, who is allergic to bees.

And when summer is over? After a bit of work scraping out the cocoons, they can be stored in the refrigerator. But Cummings prefers to mail the slender tubes back to Crown Bees, which will care for them over the winter. Next spring, her bees will be mailed back to her, and she'll slide them back into place in her bee hotel.

The results, says Cummings, have been "very fruitful."

Copyright 2025, NPR

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