Dateline: 21 May 2015
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| Bee hotel in foreground. Bird house on a hops trellis pole in the background. Bird on electric wire (click to see enlarged view) |
I finally got around to building a bee hotel for my garden. That's it in the picture above. I made it with recycled pallet wood. It is mounted on top of a T-Post with a T-post platform (as explained on page 27-29 of my Idea Book For Gardeners).
You can learn more about bee hotels At This Link.
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3 comments:
Herrick,
What type of sticks, branches or brambles did you use and did you drill all the same size holes? Thanks.
I had a "grove" of enormous lamb's quarters weeds that grew on a pile of horse manure and bedding by my garden. The plants grew 6ft tall. I used the dried stems of those weeds. They were solid on the outside and the center was soft and easy to drill. I drilled two different size holes, depending on the stem diameter. Can't remember which bit sizes I used.
I also put some lengths of raspberry cane in there. Reason being, one year I noticed that small solitary bees of some sort had drilled holes and nested in the top of raspberry canes I had pruned. Almost every cane in the row, where I had snipped the tops off, had a bee hole in it. So it will be interesting to see if they take advantage of the cane pieces in the hotel.
There's some discussion of the best hole size for solitary bees here (in the comments as well as the article):
http://www.honeybeesuite.com/are-we-raising-extra-large-mason-bees/
It sounds like different species of solitary bees might tend to prefer different hole sizes, but any hole close to 1/4" diameter is likely to attract something.
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