A beautifully built stone solitary bee hotel
I love the ingenuity, creativity, design and appreciate the effort some people put into making a solitary bee nest. I came across this one recently when visiting a showpiece garden which itself contained a busy garden centre. The nest site is beautiful and comes very near the top of my list for its aesthetics and elegance. As I examined it in more detail, boy was I in for a shock!
Beautiful! The same could not be said for some of its residents!
Watch the video and see what caused me to be shocked as I moved in closer to film it! Not the best of residents to be using it alongside solitary bees!
“All my articles and videos, available free, are funded by my teaching, presentations, sales of award winning bumblebee nest boxes, solitary bee boxes, and wormeries. Please help by spreading the word and forwarding this link to your friends and colleagues. https://nurturing-nature.co.uk Thank you” George Pilkington
For more information about solitary bees, BWARS
For info and link to buy an excellent book Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland by Steven Falk
A handy and useful resource supports this book by an extraordinary web site feature within Steve Falk’s Flickr web site which furnishes extra photos and other valuable resources to assist with identification.
Interested in Citizen Science and pollinators? (e.g. bees!) The Buzz Club
Solitary Bees book by Ted Benton
Yeah no surprise there bet there are others too.
Question for you I have very little success this year with my solitary bee boxes. Last 2 years were very good , has there been a decline in mason and leaf cutters this year or is it just me? I live in the Midlands.
Also live in the midlands, mason bees have been brilliant, leaf cutters I have two tubes only, one completed one nearly there. One other bee in home but no evidence of any action so far. I did however have bees in a log home and in bamboo tubes which I have been trying to clear as neither are suitable for cleaning and removing of mites etc, and have successfully now emptied all, however I think the removal of these which they did love, and the awful weather at the time they were emerging, have resulted in me losing the bees to possibly other locations. Still feel good that the bees I now have are either in the nurturing natures observation home or in paper lined card board tubes so looking forward to next year and a fresh start.
A few ago I was increasing and increasing my bee numbers…. then an infestation of Monos, which I deliberately allowed in my nest boxes in order to film their activity. Since then the weather, wind, cold, rain has had an effect. This year was terrible for my RM emergence, and it’s been difficult to increase my numbers, although 6 species have now used it which is very nice. This is nature in the raw I’m afraid. Thanks for sharing Marie. Cheers, George
Myself and several others, people from down south, and further north right to Scotland have informed me it has been bad for RM and LCs. Difficult to say why, weather, cold, wind? Cheers George
Hi,
We have a bee colony in our plastic composter. The composter is located behind one of our garden sheds, so its not an issue. I contacted the bee keeping organisation to see if they could be moved, but they’re the wrong kind of bees and will apparently leave in winter.
cheers
Trev