I was in garden centre at the weekend and had a look at the 'wildlife gardening accoutrements'. There was shelf after shelf of it all - bird boxes, bird food, hedgehog houses, bee boxes...
It then struck me how far things have come, in particular regarding pollinating insects. Back in 1982, the RSPB produced a book called 'Gardening for Wildlife' in which there is no mention of solitary bees or what you can do to help them; in fact, the entire book had just one mention of 'bumblebee' and one of 'bee'. In contrast, today there is widespread understanding that there are such things as 'solitary bees' and that some of them love of boxes full of tubes.
If you have yet to put up a solitary bee box, then our Activity of the Month (Build a Bee B&B) should help.
Just stick to the golden rules and success should be yours: the box should be in a sunny, sheltered position, ideally facing south, with a range of tube sizes with nice smooth entrances.
So which bees will use boxes like this? They include various of the mason bees and leafcutter bees, and there is something very satisfying about seeing them arrive at your nesting tubes bringing in supplies and nesting materials, and to see how many of those open tube entrances get sealed up by the end of the season.
In 2013, I was delighted to meet a man who has made it his passion to study the wild bees that visit his garden. Jeremy Early lives in Surrey, so a good part of the country for lots of bee species for they love the warm south and east. Even so, his garden is suburban rather than on the edge of a nature reserve, and yet in it he recorded an amazing 70 species of solitary bee between 2005 and 2013.
To help them, he installed a 5-star 'bee hotel'...
I love how Jeremy has a garden folding chair to make watching the coming and goings wholly relaxing!
What is also revealing is the amount of standing deadwood Jeremy has used, which often has old beetle holes the bees can use. Often the advice you hear is to put logs in the shade for minibeasts, but this shows how it can have a completely different use for bees. I plan to put some standing logs right in my flower borders!
If you choose to make a bee hotel, it can be quite tricky to find enough tubes, whether they be old plant stems or bamboo canes, but you can see how many drilled bits of log are in Jeremy's hotel - an easy and cheap way to create more holes.
With flowerbeds nearby full of pollinator-friendly plants, your leafcutters and masons should have their every need catered for!
Very interesting! Must try that! Can I do it on my balcony too? (Next plants 10m, but not too many)