pollinate all the things?

i cleverly [i]planted all the things![/i] just before a hot, dry spell, so i've been watering them like mad, something i usually don't have to do until much later in the year.

my blueberry bees have emerged from their pupae and are doing their thing. unfortunately, i don't have many of them. i originally bought a box of ten, five each male and female. i was keeping them in the fridge, but a couple of times, let the bit of sponge stored with them dry out, so i was worried they'd died. i got another box of twenty from a different supplier.

i guessed right: only three bees emerged from the first box. they're mason bees, which look like small honeybees. the second box turned out to have actual blueberry bees, which are blue-black and very fuzzy. five or six of those "hatched". they seem happy enough sharing the same little wooden house holding their nesting tubes.

then sparrows tried to move in to the bee house. this seems like an obvious failure mode in retrospect, and i'm surprised there's not built-in way of preventing it. (next year, the bee house will have slats or wires across the entrance to keep out birds.) the sparrows scattered the nesting tubes, so i've lost more bees. i have a handful left, apparently two male blueberry bees and some females of both species. the latter are laying eggs and sealing up tubes, so i guess the species are close enough for them to hybridize.

i'm also not sure if the bees are pollinating my blueberries, which have just started to flower, or if they're pollinating other plants. the bee house is above the bed with the blueberries, so it seems like they should, but i haven't seen it happen yet. (not that i have much time to stand and watch.)