Home-made Insect Hotel for Solitary Bees. Repurposed Wood. Part 1 'The Chalet'. Hotel a Insectes.

Simple to make, a practical and aesthetically pleasing addition to your own garden or made and given as a gift. This project is ideal for children when presented in kit form, with the more tricky cutting and drilling already completed.

There are over 200 types of solitary or Mason bee and Worldwide they are responsable for pollinating most of our fruit and vegetables. Due to loss of habitat, coupled with the use of pesticides, their populations are in decline. Insect hotels provide a safe, warm and cosy environment for solitary bees to spend the Winter in hibernation. Happily this will then lead them to stay on into Spring and turn your chalet into a honeymoon hotel with the chance of a permanent occupancy and more bees.

For information and help with finding, choosing, transporting and dismantling pallets:
http://thegreenlever.blogspot.fr/2011/11/how-to-collect-pallets.html
http://thegreenlever.blogspot.fr/2011/11/few-guidelines-for-collecting-pallets.html
using and working with natural paints and pigments:
http://thegreenlever.blogspot.fr/2012/02/using-natural-earth-and-mineral.html
Public Domain Music from 'A Tiny Window' http://archive.org/details/SecondJamWithMarkHewins
and also at: http://soundsfromthespring.blogspot.fr/

Facile - Rapide - Bois de Recup - Sympa
Il existe plus de 200 types de abeille solitaire et dans le monde, ils sont responsable de la pollinisation de la plupart de nos fruits et légumes. En raison de la perte d'habitat, couplée à l'utilisation des pesticides, leurs populations sont en déclin. Les Hôtels à insectes fournir un environnement sécuritaire, chaleureux et confortable pour les abeilles solitaires pour passer l'hiver en hibernation. Heureusement, ce sera alors les amener à rester sur place en printemps et tournez votre chalet dans un hôtel 'lune de miel' avec la possibilité d'une occupation permanente et encore d'abeilles.

Comments

[Brett Beedrill]

Very cool! Do you have an idea of the preferred depth of the holes? Just to double check, the diameter of the holes that the mason bees liked best was 8mm?

[Pavlovafowl]

Sorry Brett the link seems to be not working but if you just copy and paste this into the address line on your computer it will take you directly there. Cheers, Sue

http://thegreenlever.blogspot.com

[Pavlovafowl]

Hi Brett,

Thanks for your comments! The pallet wood blocks are 75mm depth and this seems to be a good depth. There are over 200 varieties of solitary or mason bees and they vary in size from the Harebell bee, which can fit into a wheat straw stem to the large Black European carpenter bee, and all sizes in between. Normally we just use a couple of drill bits on the chalet - 6mm and 8mm but you could go up to 10mm (this is the maximum sized recommended for mason bees). Then we have other insect houses around the garden with stems and stalks and branches in to cover as many sizes of bees as possible. If you go onto our site thegreenlever.blogspot.com and scroll down the page you will come to a sub heading 'Insect houses' with many of our other designs. Hope this helps and if you have any more questions please do ask. All the very best, Pavlovafowl aka Sue