My bees are now at the point where they are very busy building homes, so the webcam has gone live! I have waited about a month now since they started emerging for them to visit the homes. First I saw the males come out, then a couple of the females. And now a whole lot of females are emerging. Alot of mating is going on and in the last day they started visiting the homes I made for them.
Now they are taking to them by the dozens. If you do not see any action as soon as you connect just wait a few minutes and you should see one of them. But usually they are going in and out of the homes every few seconds.
These solitary bees will build homes in some wooden planks that I constructed. Over the course of a day they will visit flowers hundreds of times a day to feed and collect pollen for their offspring. Mason bees are different from Honey bees as every female Mason bee is a queen. So all of the females lay their own larva and help start off a home and a little bit of food for them to survive.
For the next few weeks these bees will work tirelessly to collect pollen and mud for the homes. While this is going on I plan on live streaming it over VIMM. At the moment I have two cameras recording the bees and a microphone going to capture all the sounds made by their home. I added the pollen count to the live stream as well so you can see how much the trees are producing for these little bees. And the date and time are referenced during the stream.
This stream will go from around sunrise to around sunset, the bees are only active during the day and when it is warm outside. So rainy and cold days may not be broadcasted due to lack of bee activity. Stay tuned for many days of pollen collection by these little insects.
