Building Solitary Bee Nests for your Garden

If you were out at the Austin Community Landfill yesterday, you would have seen me chopping down bamboo. And not only because I really dislike bamboo.

 

I'm putting together examples of solitary bee nest "boxes" that you could put in your garden. For solitary bees that nest in the ground, I always recommend leaving some bare dirt in your garden–you don't really need to mulch every piece of land. And don't even get me started on the bad sides of black plastic covering the ground.

But if you want to add a nest box for cavity nesting solitary bees, I want to be able to show you lots of alternatives.

So I was cutting down bamboo. In particular, I'm going to try to attract Osmia lignaria (Blue Orchard bees). Most of the directions I find for constructing nest cavities from reeds or bamboo suggest cutting them to lengths of 6 inches. It was not easy to find bamboo that measures 6 inches from node to node. Most of what I found yesterday was under 5" from node to node. And if it was 6", then the hole in the stem between the nodes was larger than 5/16".  I understand that if the stem is shorter than 6", bees will still use it, but I will get fewer females and that if the stem is longer than 6" I will get more females and the cavity will be less attractive to the bees.

Preparing the bamboo was pretty easy. After an hour I had a big bucket of stems.

So I'm going to go ahead and gather my bamboo stems into bundles and hang them out. I'll put some out at the Austin Community Landfill garden area and some in my own garden.  I'll watch them and see what happens this year.

 

Comments

[Kim]

I forgot to answer your second question. No, you don't leave them out all winter, but you need to be sure to put them out right before the fruit trees begin to flower. See page 9 of the publication link I sent you to see the life cycle of the Mason Bee.

Kim

[Kim]

Dan,
So Sorry to be so late getting back to you. Here's a link to a publication that will tell you everything you want to know about making artificial nest boxes–for Mason Bees in particular.

http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/Place/54280500/Bosch2001.pdf

I'm thinking the PVC pipe might be too big. I've tried using bamboo and it is a lot of work. I've found that preparing one of the drilled boxes is easiest and very effective.

[Dan Jones]

I have some small pvc pipe a inside diameter less than an inch. I cut them six and half inches long and placed them in a larger pvc pipe. Is this ok? Do you leave it out all winter here in Ohio?