Today I want to show my home for bees in my garden. Last year I purchased some "ready to go" bee-homes from a hardware store and placed them at a sheltered position under a roof. They do their job good, but soon I discovered that not all sections of the homes are used well. The first sections which got filled were the bamboo sticks. Only the smallest bee-home was "sold out" completely within a few days. The larger ones were only partially occupied by some bees.
Atter the bamboo sticks became completely occupied, the round wood blocks got filled. The rest (small fir cones) left unused. But I wanted to give more bees a home in my garden. My first idea was to buy a new bee house from the hardware store, but it seems a little bit too expensive if they only got used half. The next idea was to build a bee home myself. It should be cheaper than one of the purchased ones and the material should easy to get and recyclable.
As a first test I cut some bamboo sticks in about 10 cm length and put them with a string together. After I put that in the near of the old bee houses they soon got curious. And some bees moved in. After a day some sticks got occupied a few not. I wondered why not all bamboo sticks were used.
The answer was easy: Those without bee in it were open at the back side. So I filled the end with a piece of wood. As soon this happened the bees continued to move in. That was easy! I grabbed some tools, a old tin, some bamboo sticks with diameter around one cm and tried to build a new, bigger bee-home.
The first step was to cut the large bamboo sticks in a length of round about 12 to 15 cm. After that I tried to make the ends a little smoother to prevent that bees got hurt if they land directly on it.
Then I filled the shortened bamboo sticks in the tin until no new stick could fit in to it anymore and nothing could break out easily
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While filling the tin I remembered 'bees want one end of the stick closed'. So I filled those sticks with a really short piece of wood. 
After I got three tins prepared one thing came in to my mind: After a while like a year or two there could be mites or something like that in the bee homes or some parts could get damaged. It wouldn't a bad idea to build something modular. The easiest way for me was to glue three tins with heat adhesive together.
It was a funny project which could easily done at home. It was a perfect covid lockdown project for rainy days and it will help my bees...
...there were more bee homes to come...
I took all photos with a Huawai P20pro.
Thank you for reading.
The first two of the links below are garden posts from me. The last ones some great posts of bees and their homes..
Thank you solominer for giving me the idea to write about the bees in my garden.
