Crown Bees Mason Bee Cocoons Review
If you follow me on Instagram, you may have already saw my posts yesterday about my mason bee cocoons. I thought I’d do a Crown Bees mason bee cocoon review on here, in case anyone is interested.
Ordering Mason Bee Cocoons from Crown Bees
I got a brand new mason bee house this year and decided to get some mason bee cocoons as well. I ordered them online from Crown Bees, since they are a well known and trusted company.
The ordering process was really simple. On their website, you can choose which type of solitary bee cocoon you would like to order. If you want bees for spring, choose mason bees. If you want bees for summer, choose leafcutter bees.
From there, there is a drop down menu in which you can choose your shipping date. This is the date that Crown Bees will ship your cocoons out on. Crown Bees ships cocoons on Mondays from February through the end of April.
The shipping date I chose was Monday, April 5th. The cost of Fed Ex 2 day shipping is included in the price of the cocoons, so you do not have to pay any extra shipping costs. As for payment, Crown Bees accepts all the regular credit cards and PayPal, which is convenient.
The Mason Bees Emerge
When I got home yesterday, Tuesday April 6th, my mason bee cocoons had arrived in the mail! The cocoons where neatly packed in a small cardboard box. I opened up the box to look at the cocoons and saw the cutest little bee face. The bees have already started to emerge!
I quickly took the box outside as one of the bees flew away. I then set the box on top of the mason bee house as two more bees crawled out. These bees are much smaller than honey bees. Their bodies are mostly black and are very cute and fuzzy.
One more bee emerged and crawled around the top and sides of the mason bee house for a bit before flying away. Hopefully they are able to find their way back to the bee house.
At this point, it was getting dark and cold outside and no more cocoons were appearing to hatch. I removed a few tubes from the top of the bee house to make space for the cocoons. I then placed the open box into the bee house for the night.
Each box holds 20 mason bee cocoons, so there should be 16 left in there. As of this morning, they had not emerged yet, but that wasn’t surprising since it was still cold and the sun was just starting to rise. I’ll check again when I get home.
My Thoughts
Overall, ordering these mason bee cocoons from Crown Bees was a really pleasant experience. My kids and I loved watching the mason bees emerge. I highly recommend Crown Bees to anyone that is interested in raising solitary bees. I find that their website is also really informative and a great resource.
Crown Bees will be shipping out mason bee cocoons for 3 more weeks, so it’s not too late to get some!
