> Of course, the organic farmers want to have native bees protected and then restrict pesticide use on farms. 

My ongoing attempts to replace my honeybee apple pollinators with tubes of Japanese Hornfaced Bees for apple pollination (see the various works of Suzanne Batra, USDA from the 90s onward) settled into a configuration that allowed for spraying, as there simply was no way to convince any apple grower to not spray.

So, the initial "thinning" spray (perversely, the use of an insecticide, most often "SEVIN" [Carbaryl] as an herbicide) is the most dangerous to solitary bees, as they are likely still active, and their eggs have yet to hatch.  The problem was solved with a pair of activated charcoal respirator filters, a CPU fan, a small solar panel, and a battery.  Each deployment unit (a metal Chock-Full-Of-Nuts coffee can) contained 60 to 70 empty paper-in-cardboard nesting tubes from Crown Bees.  The cocoons for this year's pollination force had been removed from their tubes during winter, candled, and placed in a tray attached to the inside of the coffee can from which they would hatch. 

After sunset, when all the bees would be resting in whichever tube they were working, the wasp-barrier mesh would be removed from each can's opening, and replaced with the original plastic airtight lid.  The solar panel would have charged the battery (along with spinning the fan all day) well enough to keep the fan running all night, so the fan never stopped spinning day or night, and the bees would not suffocate or overheat.  A filter was on both the "in" and "out" vents.  (These days, there are cheap single-chip solar charge controllers to regulate battery charging, but I simply admitted that the batteries were a consumable, and replaced them all every year.)

After the spray had dried, the lids could be removed, and the bees could fly and continue to forage after thinning.  The adults would die off in July, and the cans could be moved after egg hatch, larval period, and cocoon spinning, mid-August in VA, so any further sprays would prompt additional trips to seal up the openings.

While this worked, mortality was still high "in the orchard", for a variety of reasons, necessitating a central breeding population  away from all poisons from which to replenish the foraging force each spring.

The problem of building up and keeping a breeding population of sufficient size to fulfill contracts was that a critical mass of bees were persistently plagued with disease outbreaks.  The bottom-line lesson to me was that, no matter how good the husbandry, raising solitary bees in large numbers was asking to have the entire battalion wiped out for no good reason by yet another unknown-to-science disease or fungus or what have you.  In summary, one should read the label - "SOLITARY BEE" means what it says, and says what it means.

So, my dream of pollinating entire orchards with nothing but a Volvo wagon load of coffee cans never materialized, and the solitary bees remained a curiosity better-suited to a small kitchen garden or a suitably overgrown "English Country Cottage Garden".

But I tried.

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