Buy or make the product, mount it, and stand back to watch your bees. Maintenance and Care of Your Bee HotelĬommercial products and many websites make it sound so simple to provide a bee hotel. If this is a problem, cover the entrance with wire mesh, keeping it an inch or so away from the openings of the holes. Woodpeckers and other birds may attack the hotel looking for a quick meal. Few commercial products meet this requirement. The bee hotel should have an overhanging roof, so the nesting bees stay dry and out of the wind. The use of reeds or rolled up paper is much better than drilled blocks of wood since they can be easily replaced each year, reducing the chance of spreading disease. If you use natural plant reeds, the ends should be cleanly cut with no splinters and no cracks.
Lots of hotels are poorly designed, or incorrectly located and don’t work very well or not at all. If the goal is to have bees nest in your hotel, then they will work, provided you have the right kind of hotel. For example, m any species of bees nest in dead stems and will not use drilled holes. People talk about mason bees as if they are one type of bee but there are actually over 300 species found across the Northern Hemisphere.Įach of these species prefers slightly different habitats, so it is a good idea to research the ones in your specific location to see if the characteristics of your hotel match their requirements. The most common group of these are the mason bees, in the genus Osmia. The hotels are designed specifically for bees that lay their eggs in small cavities.
There are also thousands of native bees and most of them will not live in a typical bee hotel. It is the native bees that need our help. If you care about native bees you really don’t want them in your garden. In fact, the honey bee has been shown to out compete our native bees and introduce diseases to our native bees. Honey bee are not dying! They do not need our help in the garden. I’m all for the movement to save bees, but much of this enthusiasm is misdirected towards honey bees.
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