To be fucking upset that my neighbours

[PisforPeter]

Have started keeping mason bees??
They look like wasps but are mason bees apparently. We live in new build houses so gardens are small & our patio area is now full of these insects. I'm so upset & have 2 young dc's. What can I do??

Mason bees don't live in hives they are solitary, and they certainly don't swarm around your head ... You can make or buy a mason bee 'hotel' but they simply come and go from it to the nectar source and back again, they don't swarm. This sounds a bit odd to me, are you sure they're mason bees? Could you post an image?

Any chance that the Mason Bees will be deterred by citronella? I absolutely applaud your neighbours for their bee keeping and having seemingly carefully selected a less aggressive and "painful" bee but I also appreciate your concern OP.

Citronella can be found in everywhere from the £1 shops to b&q.

It would piss me off greatly

Pest controllers aren't allowed to kill bees

They may be harmless, but so are bluebottle flies

Wrong.
Flies feed on rotting material and dogshit, and carry disease. You certainly don't want them in the house - one reason why you should let spiders do their job of killing them.

Bees are beneficial, and mason bees are harmless.

I sometimes wonder how some people cope in the world. There are bees, flies and wasps all over the place. If some people are as terrified as they make out it's a wonder they leave the house.

I have masonary bees. I did not buy them, they just found me. They burrow in little holes in the earth outside my front door. They are there every year. They have never hurt me or my grandchildren. They do not go in hives. They go in holes.

We have mason bees, too - they set up home in our garden. I used to look after a child who was allergic to wasps and he was fine.

Bees are hairy; wasps are not. Wasps are more predominantly yellow, too - much brighter.

A friend had a hornets nest set up near her - now that's scary!!

I wouldn't worry about it. We have two massive lavender bushes in our garden, which luckily I love - we rent and aren't allowed to take them out. In the summer, there are billions of bees in them. We've been here four years and never been stung. They aren't interested in us, only in the lavender.

What can you do? You could try fucking educating yourself, you and some of the other numpties on this thread. Especially loop.

You can't 'keep' solitary bees, you can only provide a nesting site and see if they come. They look absolutely fuck all like wasps and they don't sting. They certainly are not 'swarming' around your heads.

What makes you think that your neighbour is 'keeping mason bees'?

This is a really good opportunity to educate your DC about the huge importance of bees (especially solitary bees, as honey bees are in crisis) to our human lives and the delicate balance of our ecosystem and food production. Will you take that opportunity though? Somehow I doubt it.

Oh no that's horrible! I think keeping bees in a tiny patio garden is very selfish indeed.

I would be very pissed off. Obviously we need and depend on bees. Everyone knows that. But millions of them zzzzing around a small city garden is all wrong.

So there is no hive just a little hole in some garden masonry?

It's tricky. Technically your neighbour is not doing anything wrong and, as many have said, is probably acting with the best of intentions. Really, when you think of it, he/she is no more unreasonable to keep bees than you are to buy a house with a small garden and lots of neighbours and expect to be undisturbed.

That said, when I read your OP substituting the word 'bee' for 'spider', I get a sense for how you must be feeling...

As a young child, my elderly neighbours kept bees. Apparently I was terrified, so my parents asked our neighbours if I could come round and meet them properly. The lovely old chap next door spent ages letting them walk over his hands and introducing them to me (then his wife gave me a kitkat ) which must have helped as I still love bees now.

Perhaps your neighbour would do something similar for you and DD if you explained how wary you both felt about them? you might even get a kitkat out of it

Did anyone else, at first glance, think this thread was going to be about fucking the neighbours?? Or am I losing it?

But millions of them zzzzing around a small city garden is all wrong

Exaggerate much?

Mason bees are solitary and therefore do not swarm. They live in single tubes/holes created by burrowing insects, nature or man made (you can buy solitary bee hotels which is possibly what your neighbour has done OP).

This is not a hive of honey bees (which actually do very well in suburban gardens and don't usually cause problems if kept properly). There are anything up to 80,000 honey bees in a hive.

You don't 'keep' masonry bees. You put up some sort of 'bee hotel' or just a bundle of hollow sticks and hope they'll move in. You get up to one bee per hole but probably far fewer.

They don't sting and they don't swarm.

We have mason bees living in one of our walls. Somehow they keep making their way into the house, we get 3 or 4 a day who've made their way in and are staggering dozily around the house.

I'm not overly enamoured but its only for a few weeks and they haven't come every year, though they've come back this year.

We're using it as a good way of teaching DD(3) about bees and animals, about how not to touch them but they are nice and friendly. We just try to scoop them up and put them outside (or if they've died in the house, to put them outside for the 'bee doctor' to help ).

If you are worried then ask your neighbours what kind of bee they are. But if they are mason bees they are entirely harmless, and maybe you could use it to try and get your DC used to bees?

Imagine if the op's dd put a collection of straws in her little Wendy house and the neighbour wasn't the bee keeper at all?

Ah plenty, so THAT is what they are! Decorative and with a purpose. I think I will get one!

quietbat the voice of reason!

YA!of course BU - but it would have been nice for your neighbours to have given you a heads up. This is what I did just before getting chickens

Wow just learnt about these, I've signed up to buy some new year but don't worry I have 4 acres.

How could they have given a 'heads up'? They didn't bring the bees in - the bees chose the site themselves