Make a Bee Hotel From Reclaimed Garage Scrap

Bee hotels are a fun project and a great way to attract pollinators to your flower or vegetable garden. Bee hotels are used as breeding places by cavity-nesting solitary bees like Mason bees, Leafcutter bees and Yellow-faced bees which naturally nest in hollow stems, earth banks or old beetle holes in dead wood. None of these bees are aggressive, so they are fine around children and pets. I also have carpenter bees and I made my bee hotel to keep them from boring into my log home.

Drill, miter saw, screws, AC glue with activator, Thompson's water seal, wood scraps, bamboo, bricks, scrap fiber, scrap roofing

I started with an old cheese box that i had been using for storage. A good bee hotel should be at least 6 inches deep and have a back wall. This box was the perfect size. I sprayed it thoroughly with Thompson's Water Seal so that it the wood wouldn't rot in the rain and snow outdoors.

I found this metal bee shape on a rusty garden stake thing and cut it off, then drilled two holes in the top of the wood box to slide it into.

I found this triangular shelf at Goodwill and glued it to the top of the box behind the bee using AC glue with an activator. This makes an ultra strong bond and cures very quickly. ( less than a minute)

I used a scrap of corrugated waterproof roofing left over from another project and screwed it into the triangular frame. The roof should stick out a few inches over the front of the bee hotel. I also stuffed an old squished topiary moss ball into the back to provide additional options for nesting.

Now comes the fun part – adding the places to nest. I cut lengths of bamboo from some old yard torches and garden stakes for thinner ones. I also drilled holes in some chunks of wood, including a big children's block and used some wooden yarn spindles stuck into another old box and added some rolled up fiber from a microgreens growing mat. And a couple of bricks ( 2 deep). You can use anything here, it just needs to be holes(tubes) that are as deep as the frame.

In the last photo you can see a block I used in last year's bee hotel where some of the holes are plugged up from nesting.

I added a little gold spray paint to the bee on top to give it some color and sanded down a bit with sandpaper to give it an aged appearance.

I don't know if bees can read, but who knows, they're pretty smart. But I like signage, so repurposed a corrugated metal sign I found at the dump. I painted over the dumb phrase on it with matte black spray paint then used an oil paint marker for the words. To make my hotel more attractive ( and get a leg up on the neighborhood competition ) I also added a Bird Executive Suite Annex with a gourd nest and a Fly-up Pool Bar.

Now to wait for bee friends ...