I mentioned in an earlier post that I have taken up creating habitats for mason bees.  I am finding this work to be so deeply sweet. It feels like very practical sacred work to me, both the dedicated steady work of the bees, just beeing themselves, no big deal, but essential to the future of everything, and me beeing me, curious and loving the world and helping it to go on.

I watch the process of the bees. Each Mother Bee very carefully builds a little enclosed room for each egg in a narrow cardboard tube.  She adds a pile of food.  Then she crawls out of the tube, turns around, backs into the little room, and lays an egg that attaches itself to the pile of nectar. This food will be available for the larva when it emerges from its egg in several months.

Now she comes out again, flying off over and over again to find tiny bites of mud for building a door to that space, so that she can begin work on the next little room.  Each tube is about 7 inches long, about the width of a drinking straw, and it rests in a container that holds some 50 tubes just like it. Each tube ends up holding 6-7 new bees.

These bees are builders.  That is why they are called mason bees. I think of them as building the future.  They have such faith! These Blue Orchard mason bees will work until mid June.  Then the mothers die (the guys are long dead…they only stay around for fertilization).  Their work of creating creation is done for this year.

When the mason bees finish singing the future into being, it is time for the leaf cutter bees to take up the song.  The leaf cutters emerge in June and work until August or so.  They build their compartments by cutting out little circles from leaves (not damaging the plants), and gluing them together in their version of the tubes to make walls.  I have a different habitat for them, made out of wooden trays that fit together, top to bottom, creating long tunnels like the cardboard tubes do.

In both species, over the summer into the fall, each larva will consume the food the mother left for it, and create a cocoon around itself. Each larva then collaborates with the wisdom and magic of Gaia to go through a completely miraculous process of transforming itself.

First it re-magines itself into liquid life, there in the cocoon. Next it develops imaginal cells (could there be a more magical scientific term?!!) that orchestrate the emergence of a completely new beeing out of the potentized stuff of life itself.

Now it rests, though it continues to do the quiet, creative work of deep listening.  It is growing into an adult bee.

When the weather gets cold next fall, all the bees will go into hibernation, awaiting nature’s clarion call that it is safe to emerge, and begin the cycle all over again.

There are nine mason bee tubes filled so far in my little habitat, sealed at the ends with mud, holding a vision of spring and fertility.  I find myself going out to watch their activity several times a day. Late in the fall, I will gather the all the filled tubes.  I will put them in my refrigerator, which maintains an optimum temperature for hibernating bees.  I will also separate the wooden trays, gently harvest the leaf cutter cocoons from their wooden tubes, and put these cocoons in the refrigerator too.

Next spring I will put the tubes of mason bees out into their sheltered space on the east wall of my house, where they can absorb the ever-warming rays of the rising spring sun each morning, and warm up to their work. Later, in the early summer, I will place the cocoons of the leaf cutters into their own shelter spot in the same wall. Hearing the urgent invitation of spring, the bees will all begin to wake up, according to their particular rhythm. They will chew their way out of their cocoons to begin the process again, like all of life emerging from the growth-in-stillness of winter.

Most bees everywhere are in trouble now, from human activities with chemicals and claiming land for building. Mason bees are powerfully prodigious pollinators, many times more efficient than honey bees.  There are about 4,000 species of pollinator bees in the US alone, maybe 25,000 world wide. Mason bees are non-stinging bees, except when aggravated, and they don’t make honey, they just work hard to keep food on our tables. I feel fiercely protective of “my” bees.

I hold in my awareness that each one of these bees that I am watching now was once an egg, laid carefully last summer by a bee who had emerged from her own life cycle begun the year before, and the year before, and…and…back though the ages. She was fed with willing flowers and due diligence, given all that she needed for growth.

I hold in my awareness that these bees, woven into the complex collaboration of the earth and the sun, are the powerful engine that drives the chariot of life renewing itself.

I am so happy to be a link in this chain, a melody in this song, a partner in the stately proud graceful turning of the earth through the cosmos.

If you’d like to know more about mason bees, and maybe even join life’s gala celebration in this way yourself, go here:  www.crownbees.com