How to: help the bees!

An article I saw yesterday about how bees might be harmed by neonicotinoid pesticides reminded me to put up my wild bee house in my front yard.

This is an easy thing you can do at your home to help some of the wild bees in your neighborhood. If you live somewhere with four seasons, early spring is the best time of year to put out a bee house, but you can really do it any time of year, anywhere. Then enjoy watching as bees start to fill it up with nests!

This type of nest will only attract certain kinds of bees called stem-nesting or cavity-nesting bees, but its a great start to your home pollinator protection program. Stem-nesting bees are solitary bees, which means that they don't make large nests like the social bees (e.g. honey bees and bumble bees). 

Honey bee Apis mellifera

Honey bee hives in a blueberry field

Bumble bee Bombus sp.

A solitary bee entering her nest

Solitary bees also don't aggressively defend their nests, which means that they are much less likely to sting you or your family. I made my bee house out of an empty steel can, but any container that is impermeable to water and open on one end will work just fine. Size doesn't matter much either, although it should be at least 15 centimeters (6 in.) long or a little bit longer to protect the nest entrances from the rain. One important consideration is the direction that the nest faces. It is best if the open end or the bee house faces toward the east so that the sun warms it in the morning. However, if its not convenient to hang yours facing due east don't worry about it, the bees will probably still use it. I filled mine with a variety of nesting options to increase the diversity of the bees that will nest there. Bees can be pretty picky about their nesting sites, so if you only have one size nest hole you might only get one kind of bee. Easy options for nesting sites are sections of hollow reeds (e.g. bamboo) or blocks of wood with holes drilled in them. The tunnels for the bees should be about 15 cm (6 in.) deep and anywhere from 3 to 7 mm (1/8 to 1/4 in.) in diameter. If you're feeling really ambitious you can create a bee hotel with a variety of different nesting options.

Now if this post has piqued your interest, I recommend that you look at a couple of fact sheets that were produced by the Xerces society and provide more detailed information on Nests For Native Bees and Tunnel Nests For Native Bees. Good luck and have fun!