I bought my first mason bee house this spring. Almost all the tubes have been filled. After cleaning out all the debis from hatched grubs a couple of weeks ago, I noticed today, 3 cocoons on the floor of the house. What are those and why are they not in tubes?
I've seen cocoons that developed between the tubes or between tubes and the wall of the house, although there should be some mud walls built around such cocoons. The bees occasionally may use anything that functionally resembles a tube. Another possibility is that a woodpecker could have extracted cocoons near the front of some tubes and dropped them.
Piggy-backing on this thread, I wonder if a tree frog that has taken up residence next to the trays in my orchard bee house is perhaps eating the bees as they come to lay eggs? He's hard to see in my photo but he's there every day.
