Tag: Bee hotel

31 Days Wild: 2nd May 2025

In Braiding Sweetgrass,  Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of the reciprocal nature of gift. The Earth gifts us with plants and we gift the Earth the care and attention with which those plants thrive. The same is true for other living beings including insects.

I was gifted a bee hotel. For several years there were no guests. Then the bee hotel was blown down in a storm so temporarily I placed it in a nearby bench. The following summer every room in the hotel was occupied, each bamboo tube sealed with a paste of soil or brick dust. And every year since then red mason bees have made a beeline for the hotel. 

It seems that rewilding our environment can involve positive intervention – reciprocating nature’s gift. 

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/invertebrates/bees-and-wasps/red-mason-bee

Counting on … day 1.130

17th July 2023

Earlier I wrote about the bee hotel in our garden and its high level of occupancy (https://greentau.org/2023/05/21/counting-on-day-1-117-2/)

I have since read in the RSPB magazine that the bee larvae won’t hatch out until next spring and that to protect them against the cold, it is a good idea to put the bee hotel in a shed or porch over the winter, before returning the hotel to its outside location in the spring. 

Counting on … day 1.117

21st May 2023

We have a bee hotel which used to be fixed to the gable end of the shed. During the winter it was blown down and temporarily placed on a stone bench by the water butt. This is somewhere I also sit, and I have been watching solitary bees buzzing backwards and forwards. They land and inspect the bamboo tubes working out which is their’s. Then they disappear inside. Sometimes they quickly reappear and go in back wards. I’m guessing they are laying eggs. Some of the bamboo ends have been infilled with a clay like mixture which must mean that that incubator is full.
High up on the shed gable I never noticed this activity so that is one small blessing of the winter’s winds.