[mattgrice]

I've got a ton of mason bee tubes. They are awesome.

To use a silicon valley analogy, nobody has figured out how to scale out mason bees. Not to the > 200sq miles of pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds owned by the Resnicks. The Resnicks funded some in-house research and apparently considred it a failure.

It's probably possible. Might not even be hard once you know the trick, but it's certainly not a slam-dunk.

[giantg2]

Supposedly, it only takes 250 mason bees to do the same pollination as 10,000 honeybees. I think there are people working on scaling this. The honey business is secondary to the pollination money, so having pollination done without having to truck around large hives, could be a big deal.