Win a Native Bee House Kit Courtesy of Crown Bees

I just received a shipment of leafcutter bees in the mail the other day. Aren’t they neat? Or I should say, leafcutter bee cocoons. The silken cocoons come encased in the leafy cells the mother bee created when she laid her eggs. Unlike spring mason bees, which start flying when temperatures reach 55°F, summer leafcutter…

Linda Ly

Written by Linda Ly

Win a native bee house kit courtesy of Crown Bees

I just received a shipment of leafcutter bees in the mail the other day. Aren’t they neat?

Summer leafcutter bee cocoons

Or I should say, leafcutter bee cocoons. The silken cocoons come encased in the leafy cells the mother bee created when she laid her eggs.

Unlike spring mason bees, which start flying when temperatures reach 55°F, summer leafcutter bees like hot weather and emerge when the weather is consistently in the mid-80°Fs.

We’re moving into a week of warmer weather so I suspect they’ll be waking up just as their mason bee cousins start to wind down. I’ve had my native bee houses hanging in the garden for a few weeks and it’s such a joy to spot the mason bees buzzing around the borage and nasturtiums every day.

I love my native bee houses so much, in fact, that I’ve asked Crown Bees to give one of my readers an opportunity to own a native bee house too!

Owning a native bee house is an entirely different experience from owning a honeybee hive. Unlike honeybees, which live in highly organized colonies revolving around a single queen, native bees are solitary, so every female native bee is essentially her own “queen,” laying eggs and raising offspring without the support of fellow bees. She lives for only six weeks and nests in small holes rather than a hive. These holes can be found all over your yard in natural features like the hollow stems of pithy plants or the tunnels left by wood-boring beetles.

By hanging a native bee house in your garden, you help provide a safe place for native bees to nest and lay eggs. You also ensure that the next generation of bees will survive, since you can harvest the cocoons and clean the nests in autumn.

Raindrop native bee house with lake bed reeds

The beautiful bee house in this giveaway is a handcrafted wooden house called the Raindrop and it’s part of the Complete Raindrop Kit from Crown Bees, which includes the bee house, 80 natural lake bed reeds, 20 bee cocoons, and an accessories package for storing and protecting the cocoons (a $125 total value). This is everything you need to start keeping native bees! (And it couldn’t be easier — see my original post here.)

How to enter: Leave a comment below and tell me what kind of flowers, fruits, herbs, or vegetables you have growing in your garden this season that will feed your native bees, or could use their help being pollinated! To receive an additional entry, follow @gardenbetty on Instagram, and leave a second comment below indicating your Instagram username. You have two chances to win!

The giveaway will end at 11:59 PM Pacific Standard Time on Friday, May 1, 2015. Winner will be drawn at random and announced the following week. Good luck!

Giveaway Rules

  1. Giveaway begins April 27, 2015 and ends May 1, 2015.
  2. No purchase is necessary. To enter, leave a comment on this blog post.
  3. Only US residents ages 18 and older are eligible to enter.
  4. Two entries allowed per person.
  5. Odds of winning are based on number of entries received.
  6. Winner will be drawn at random.
  7. If winner does not respond within 48 hours after time of contact, that entry will be forfeited and a new winner will be drawn.

By the way, Crown Bees is currently running an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for native bee education. One of their perks is a Mother’s Day special that includes a bee cabin with wooden trays and leafcutter bees, and it’s offered at a discounted price off retail. They will expedite shipping in time for Mother’s Day — a great gift to consider for your garden-loving mom, aunt, friend, or even yourself!

This post is brought to you by Crown Bees. Thank you for supporting the sponsors that support Garden Betty.

Update: A big thanks to everyone who entered!
This giveaway is now closed. The winner is Anat from Arizona.

Linda Ly

I'm a plant lover, passionate road-tripper, and cookbook author whose expert advice and bestselling books have been featured in Time, Outside, HGTV, and Food & Wine. The National Parks Cookbook is my latest book. Garden Betty is where I write about modern homesteading, farm-to-table cooking, and outdoor adventuring—all that encompass a life well-lived outdoors. After all, the secret to a good life is... Read more »

210 Comments

  1. My plants are

    Crocus, comfrey +agastache foeniculum ( this one has a long season, till frost) they crowd these, bee balm, chives, borage another one they crowd, dill, the different goldenrods, and then the run of the mill, gaillardia, tickseed, daisies too many to mention, phacelia tanacetifolia a magnet too. Then there are the tree blossoms after the crocus, apples, pears, peaches, apricots, grapes and the vegetables when they bloom (bolting). Others are complaining that there are no bees in their gardens, but I never have that problem. I have a shallow dish with stones and water for all insects, no pesticides. I hand dig and pull the bermuda grass from the neighbors. Worst thing ever.

  2. A great favorite with the bees here in PA is the Scarlet Emporer Runner Bean (very popular with humming birds too). Add nasturtiums and marigolds plus a host of wild flowers (dandelions are briefly around but quickly get snapped up for wine!) and numerous chili and tomato plants to keep the bees busy.

  3. I have so many lovely flowers and plants including an orchard, butterfly bushes, lilacs, rhododendron, azaleas, lavender, buckwheat, etc. The bees would fit in nicely!

  4. So far there are not to many things blooming yet in New Jersey. I have alpine strawberries in bloom, dandelions and “creeping phlox”. I have lots of borage and fennel volunteers popping up from last years plants. I started sunflowers, okra, peppers, tomatoes and about 10+ sorts of basil, parsley and lettuce blends. Would love to win the Crown Bees Raindrop Kit.

  5. On Guam! We are holistically intercropping sunflowers, eggplant, 3 kinds of basil, fennel, pumpkin, cilantro, tomatoes, okra, dill and marigolds in our home garden patch. Plus around the house we have papaya (Taiwan type), mulberry, moringa, cotton, night-jasmine, henna, banana, calamansi, lime, mango, guava, coconut and betel-palm. In our small pond we have lotus and lilies which attract an small native sweat bee. We are looking to get stingless bee colony from the jungle so we can help share stingless bees for farmers and community gardens. Interplanted with these are a host of native forest trees, pandanus, pago, breadfruit, cerbera and premna, all important as bee-forage…and well just darn pretty and functional plants in the landscape. just a typical Guam 1/4 acre peri-urban homegarden landscape. i have been making bee houses from stem base of palm fronds and bamboo tubes, we are experimenting with rolling up mango leaves inside of jumbo plastic drinking straws. Jai Nepal!

  7. We have lots of flowers for the native bees to pollinate, including star jasmine, trumpet vines, daises, sunflowers and a bunch more not even counting our garden! The blueberries, grapes, raspberries, zucchini, tomatoes and basil! The list goes on and on! Thank you for the opportunity to win!

  8. My mom and I are all about saving the bees! What a great giveaway thank you for the chance!

  9. Thanks again for the chance to win this awesome bee house. What a nurturing (and beautiful) way to help the struggling native bees.

  10. Many flowers to pollinate from, especially echinacea . We have at least ten different varieties of them. Strawberries are also abundant around our gardens, bees are the key to the worlds health!

  14. I’ve got a front yard full of mostly California natives, and lots of things like hyssop and borage in the back yard. Hopefully they’ll attract lots of bees that will then pollinate my fruits and vegetables while they’re here.

  15. Bees are awesome! My family and I grow lots of native California plants and drought tolerant plants like California poppies, Bush Island Poppies, white sage, Mexican sage, agaves, aloe veras, narrow-leaf milkweed, bougainvillea, daisies. We have two Palo Verde trees that the bees love. We also have fruit trees-lemon, orange, nectarine, lime, kumquat, apple, and plum. We’ve got some vegetable beds too with tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, serrano chiles, green onions, parsley, green beans, cauliflower. The bees would be very happy in our yard.

  18. Oh, gosh! So much! Strawberries, asparagus, marigolds, sunflowers, leeks, tomatoes, peppers, herbs like basil, mint and rosemary, squash, cucumbers, root veggies, and more!

  19. This is amazing! I have apple trees, strawberries, chives, nasturtium, Camas, Evergreen Huckleberry, blueberries, raspberries, Elderberries, Lavender, a Hawthorne Tree, Colombine, native lilies, squashes and melons in the fall (if I’m lucky…strange weather these days 🙂 ), Jasmine and Trillium flowers. Good luck everyone.

  20. Right now I have Spiderwisp flowers already blooming. This is Cleome Gynandra, an edible, summer-long flowering variety that loves the warm summers in Missouri. The garden has okra, squash, peppers, cucumbers, sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes), sunflowers, beans, peas, tomatoes, onions, lemongrass, and more. By the time it is warm enough to wake up the bees, they will have a lush Missouri rural landscape to pick from, as well as the Spiderwisp flowers, sunflowers, okra, and sunchokes–which also love the hot sunny days.

  21. I have citrus trees – lemons, mandarins, grapefruit, blackberry bushes, Rosemary, strawberries, and miscellaneous flowers/weed sin my backyard.

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