Bee Hotels

olly300

Wow - found this site where you can make a bee hotel, make a bumble bee house and plant a garden for bees.

Done the latter so my garden is constantly buzzing from spring to autumn but haven't made a house for any of them yet.....

harrys_nan

http://bumblebeeconservation.org/

This is another interesting site

mysk_girl

Aldi are doing the bee hotels again from next Thursday. I'm off to get a few, we've planted some bee friendly flowers this year, hopefully we can provide a bit of a haven...

forgotmyname

I got some branches from the waste wood pile at the local garden centre.

Spent a Sunday afternoon drilling holes in them all. Various sizes and suggested on several websites.

They did say 2mm to 10mm. But i dont have any long 2mm drillbits. Mine are 6mm, 8mm and 10mm. Nice and deep also.

I read they lay 5 eggs in the tube 2 or 3? females then 2 or 3? males. The males come out 1st.

mrbadexample

My leafcutter bees are emerging.

coldcazzie

Glad I found this thread! I know what I'm going to be doing tomorrow

seabright

pinkcandyflossprincess wrote: »

well I have bees live in my house, not sure if thats a good thing or not:eek: I think they are masonry bees?

They are Mason Bees, not Masonry Bees, so don't worry about them eating your bricks and mortar. They will use spaces that are already there (holes made by cavity wall filling being installed, holes where masonry has fallen out etc) but they won't make new holes.

I'm a beekeeper and beekeeping teacher, so happy to answer questions if I can (we teach about "wild" bees as well as honey bees) but I am abroad a lot at the moment, so access to wifi is a bit hit and miss. But will do what I can!

bizzybee

I have bees nesting behind the fascia boards at the back of my house, that faces south. They were there last year too and the pest control guy said it would be unlikely that they would come back this year!

I managed to catch one last week just to try and identify what type of bees they are and it seemed to be a buff tailed bumble bee.

Can I expect these visitors every year now?

Saturnalia

My bee hotel has been up a good few weeks now and still seems to be empty. It's in a quiet part of the garden, south-facing, there are plenty of plants about including those little purple star-shaped flowers that get lots of bees visiting. But no bees taken up residence! Anything else I can try?

Beetlemama

seabright wrote: »

I'm a beekeeper and beekeeping teacher, so happy to answer questions if I can (we teach about "wild" bees as well as honey bees) but I am abroad a lot at the moment, so access to wifi is a bit hit and miss. But will do what I can!

Could you tell us please who were our ground nesting bees last year? They found or made a hole in the ground, we think they were bumbles, but we're not 100% positive, looked like a few really big cuddly ones and some much smaller ones of the same sort of shape and colour.

We liberated an old wire shopping basket from the dump and tent pegged it inverted over the hole so the bees could come and go without my Labradaughters sticking their noses down the hole the big ones had to land and crawl through the wire while the little ones flew straight through.