A few examples of the Solitary Bee Hotel frames. Made from 25mm Cypress so will last many years.
Possible Tenants: Carpenter Bees, Green Carpenter Bee, Reed Bees, Resin Bees, Masked Bees. You don’t actually “keep” Solitary Bees, you have no real control over them as they may come and go as they please, all you can do is try to attract them to your garden by providing suitable housing.
Below: Painted Orange, Green, Oil, and the bottom left one is supposed to be brown but sort of looks a bit grey. These can be filled with anything, bamboo, drilled logs etc.
Below: example of a drilled block of wood
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Below – a simple Bee Hotel.
The outside frame is fence palings. The center block is Hoop Pine and also Cypress. The block is 180mm long with the holes drilled in about 150mm deep. I used “Auger” drill bits, 10mm and 6mm thick.
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Bee Hotels using Pine for the block and Forest Red for the frame.
Each hotel is made from 18 pieces of pine – 30mm x 30mm x 160mm and routed a 45 degree angle along each long edge.
The outside frame is Forest Red wood to strips of 40mm x 20mm and routed a 45 degree edge on one side and joined them together. Along the way I started to drill the pine, 72 holes for each hotel
It looks simple but I’m sure there’s the same amount of work in these as any hive box!
