Bamboo Solitary Bee House

I was inspired by my friends at the Texas Rare Fruit Growers tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/txrarefruitgrowers/ to start using my old bamboo to make houses for our native solitary bees ie: carpenter bees (Xylocopa spp. & Ceratina spp.) and leaf-cutter bees (Megachilidae spp.) We have quite a few native solitary bees here in Florida. I'm hoping they'll use these tubes as their home! We also have orchid bees (Euglossa viridissima) here now and I know they are solitary bees. I wonder if they will use these houses too? The leaf-cutter bees are good pollinators so I'm encouraging them to live in my yard. Here is how I'm making my solitary bee houses. I used some of my old bamboo canes to make the individual "homes" I cut them into 8" lengths and used cotton string to bundle them together, I'm trying to keep thing natural. I also cleaned up the entrance to the home by hand with a countersink tool. I then tied the houses to another larger piece of bamboo. I've angled the bundle down so the houses don't hold water they need to stay dry. I'll mount them in the yard as soon as I acquire the other parts I want to use! I hope to have pictures of my finished product and inhabited nests real soon!

Here are more articles on ways to construct your bee house using different kinds of materials that may more readily available in your area

Nests for Native Bees pdf - http://www.xerces.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/nest_factsheet1.pdf
Easy to build “Bee Condo” for native bees! - http://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/beebox.shtml
Make a Solitary Bee House - http://www.foxleas.com/bee_house.htm







Bamboo Solitary Bee House by Eric Bronson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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