Bee Hotels

Red Mason Bee

One way of encouraging wildlife in to your garden is to install a bee hotel, you can either buy one or make your own & I have had a go with several different kinds which I will tell you about below, but first of all a bit about bees...

A Bit About Bees

Most of us know about Honey Bees and Bumble Bees, but there are many other types too, a lot of which are known as "solitary bees" as they do not nest in colonies. In the UK there is just one species of Honey Bee, 25 species of Bumble Bees but about 250 solitary bees. All of our bees need help because of the very worrying decline of insects: so if you have a garden please plant bee-friendly plants and maybe install a bee hotel. The two commonest occupants of bee hotels are Red Mason bees and Leaf Cutter Bees: if you see little round circles missing from the edge of rose leaves then you have been visited by Leaf Cutter bees. 

Leaf Cutter Bee

Another bee more unusual bee found in Hitchin is the Large Headed Resin bee, and here you can see it dealing with a bit of resin by its nest hole. The yellow pollen it has collected can also be seen under its abdomen.

Large Headed Resin Bee

 

Hotel Designs

You can either buy a ready-made hotel or, if you have the right tools, make your own for free. A quick bit of googling will show many possible designs from the humble to palatial, but they all provide a hole or tube which allows female bees access to make a sequence of little nests lined up along the length of the hole. Different diameter holes will attract different species and positioning of the hotel is critical to success. Hotels are best deployed at around chest height in a sunny spot: don't hide them away in shady undergrowth, and for maximum interest put them where you can check them each day.

Bought Hotels

I have a bought hotel based on a length of drain pipe containing cardboard tubes. This is very effective, very expensive, but not terribly natural, and the company selling them encourages you to bring the tubes indoors, soak the tubes in water so the individual cells can be collected and kept safe over winter (you have to buy new tubes for the next year). They are great for Red Mason bees which are excellent pollinators, but I am not a big fan as these as they use heavy duty plastic it all seems a bit industrial. 

A cheap & cheerful wooden structure can sometimes be bought in places like Wilko's: use a bit of common sense to work out how well it is made and whether it will last outdoors, might a bit of extra attention (paint maybe) help it last longer and keep the interior dry? ( You might like to keep it in a shed over winter). Here is one where I painted the roof & this Red Admiral seems to like it, I am still not a fan as this particular design has wire mesh obstructing several holes.

Another expensive type I have not tried, but sounds cool, has a glass side panel where you can observe the lines of cells being made.

Home Made Hotels

One of my favoured designs is to take a log, such as might go on a fire, and drill some holes in (as deep as possible) and cover the top with a bit of roofing felt. This might not look the best, but the bees seem to love them, you can easily see which holes are occupied. In fact I did an experiment with a set of logs each with a different hole size from 2mm up to 10mm and there was lots of activity in all sizes with the smallest holes being particularly popular but used by tiny solitary wasps not bees (but that's ok as I am keen on a bit of bio-diversity). 6mm to 8mm holes are recommended for Red Mason and Leaf Cutter Bees.

My biggest hotel took some building and has been very successful, there is a variety of hole sizes and different types of wood (don't used any wood treated with preservative) leading to a diversity of occupants. This one is just near "Maisie's Meadow" close to The Three Moorhens.

 A really quick & easy method is to fill a plastic drinks bottle with bamboo canes and dried plants which have hollow stems such as Cow Parsley. My effort looked naff & was just not used by bees, I think maybe I should have trimmed the contents to have smoother ends?

Another design I have yet to have success with is a "cob brick" which is made from clay and straw. So far I have had no occupants but this is probably because I have deployed it in a shady spot: it is very heavy and I just sat it on the ground, I need to think how I might site it higher up in the sunshine.

  

My most artistic effort was very popular (with the bees), with all the different sized holes in use.

Observations

Assuming your bee hotel is home to Red Mason Bees in the first year, then in the second year when cells are hatching in April a sight worth seeing is a frenzy of males desperately fighting for mating rights as each female emerges.

If you have Leaf Cutter Bees, look out for them carrying the little discs of leaf back to their nests.

Other visitors you might attract are predators, these might be woodpeckers or insect parasites. In particular parasites sound like a bad idea, but in my view they are a part of nature too and have a right to be here and are usually only found in small numbers. My hotels have been visited by Sharp Tailed Bees, which technically are cleptoparasites, that pointed tail is used to lay an egg in Leaf Cutter Bee cells.

Another parasite I spotted is a wasp  Gasteruption jaculator (sorry it doesn't have a common name) and that scary looking rear end is an egg-laying tube ready to reach way down into a solitary bee nest.

 

Conclusion

For me a bee hotel is a lovely addition to a garden and spurs me on to make sure I grow plants which are insect friendly. 

Some good ideas for bee hotel designs and bee-related gardening tips can be found by Googling Bee Hotel and Gardeners World or the Natural History Museum. Have fun!