Solitary Bee Hotel

Several years ago, I had a pergola built out of Australian Cypress and at the end of the project, there was some scrap lengths of timber left over. Too good to use as firewood, so I set them aside for a future project.

Advance eight years on, and I still hadn't used them for anything. It was time to declutter, so I thought I would use them in some garden artwork and at the same time, provide a home for our ever decreasing native bee population. These important pollinators are sadly in decline through deforestation resulting in loss of habitat, abuse of pesticides, pollution and climate change.

When people think of bees, they immediately think of the imported European honey bee. There are 20,000 different varieties of solitary bees the world over, and down here in OZ, nearly all of our 1,700 indigenous species are solitary.

As the name suggests, they live alone, although in truth they often nest close to one another. They do not produce honey, do not have a queen and do not live in hives, rather building individual nests just like birds do where they lay their eggs.

I wanted to cater for the bees that made their home in wood borer holes as well as those that preferred to tunnel in the earth.

Materials.

• As mentioned in the intro, I already had the wood. I basically had enough to make a rectangular frame plus a little extra to come up with a random pattern.

• Aquarium Bio Filter media - ceramic noodles

• Two plastic bottles to house the plants that I wanted to incorporate into my design.

• Fibre cement or plastic sheeting or marine ply for the back (something that wouldn't rot).

• 2 funnels and some tubing to catch and direct rain water to my plants.

• Length of wire to hang it up, just like you would a painting.

This was pretty straight forward, I just had to mitre or true up the ends and fix with galvanised batten screws.

With the pieces left over, I just added them with no particular idea in mind. I also made provision for where my two empty juice bottles would sit, placing the timber so as they would be a snug fit.

I didn't just want to just drill holes at random all over the place, but rather come up with a pattern to add some artistic value to my piece.

Being an outside garden ornament, what better to than to come up with the pattern of a vine bearing flowers. I sketched up a few designs on the timber in pencil before settling on one which I thought was best suited to my liking. Because bees come in several sizes, I decided the holes would need to be of varying diameters to cater for as many species that would hopefully be attracted to my hotel.

I already had a bottle of 20mm ceramic noodles that were used as filter medium for my aquarium. These would be ideal for representing the petal of each flower. They already had a 7mm hole in the centre as a bonus.

I chose to countersink each noodle for sturdiness rather than just glue them in place on the surface.

Because i needed to make several flowers, i created a template out of scrap Perspex to drill just the pilot hole where each noodle would sit.

I found the timber was rather prone to splintering with my spade bit, so I used a piece of scrap timber (as shown) to sit over each hole prior to drilling out each petal. This also served as a depth stopper so all the holes would be of uniform depth.

With that complete, i drilled the centre of each hole made by the spade bit to further extend the nesting hole into the timber.

As with the flowers, I created another Perspex template for the leaves. After drilling the first hole, I inserted a nail through that hole to hold the Perspex in place, then swung the leaf around until I was happy with the orientation then proceeded to drill out the remaining holes to complete the leaf.

For the stems of the vine, I drilled 10mm holes along the marked outline, spacing them about 15mm apart, then for definition, i joined them all up with a router.

After drilling umpteen holes, it was time to give it all a light sand to clean up my work.

Although this timber is relatively resistant to wood rot, I applied a few coats of exterior varnish for further protection.

Before adding the sand medium, i screwed some marine ply at the back of the frame where the sand will sit.

Sand on its own, is not suitable for the nesting bees and needs to be strengthened with clay to help with binding and prevent cave ins when the bees are tunnelling out their nests.

I already had the sand and clay on my property so went with a 1:5 mixture of clay to sand.

After tamping it down and smoothing it off with a trowel, I proceeded to poke holes with a pencil at random into the moist mixture for nesting. I didn't poke too deep, just about 5mm as a starting point for each burrow. This would allow each bee to do the remaining work in digging out their rest. It is obviously much easier to do this step while the mixture is still damp.

Once thoroughly dry, I then coated the sand mixture with a couple of coats of clear lacquer to provide a sturdier surface to prevent any erosion that might occur from the weather.

Once the lacquer was dry, I then gently re-drilled the front of each hole, just enough to break the dried lacquer.

To complete each flower, I secured each ceramic noodle in place with hot glue.

I also wanted to incorporate some plants into my design in the form of a vertical garden. For this component, I used two plastic juice containers with the side partially removed. I wanted to keep the wet garden soil away from any timber to avoid any dampness and rotting over time. For the growing medium I used a good potting mix with sphagnum moss to retain the soil from falling out the bottom and open side. I then covered the open side of each bottle with a layer of spacnum moss, and then some mesh to retain the plant medium, allowing the plants to grow through. The mesh was held in place with a wooden frame I made up and screwed in place. This enables the bottle to be accessible for replanting at a future time.

I also wanted it all to be fairly maintenance free when it came to watering. It would be fairly difficult to water the plants without disturbing the nesting sites.

I incorporated some plastic tubing with a funnel attached to one end, and mounted the funnels on the roof of my shed to catch the rain. Metal fly screen was added to each funnel to prevent them from becoming blocked with leaves over time. Tubing was attached to the bottom end of each bottle to direct water run off below the wooden frame.

For the plants, I chose sedum as it is relatively hardy and produces flowers occasionally which the bees quite happily visit.

The tenants didn't hesitate to take up residency, and seemed happy with their new homes as they scurried about their business.

Below is a short video I took about a month later with the new tenants settling in. Accompanying music - "Flight of the Bumble-bee" by Rimsky-Korsakov.