Make a bee hotel for your neighbourhood
This hotel is easy to make, mostly uses bits from around the home and is a great all-age activity.
Bee populations are struggling, but a simple bee hotel can provide a refuge for these beneficial insects. By looking after bees, you improve your neighbourhood’s biodiversity and help pollinate plants and trees.
While lots of bee hotels are made out of wood, they don’t have to be. We’ve provided instructions for how to make a bee hotel out of plastic bottles, but you could use a tin can instead – or anything else you have to hand!
What you will need
- Pieces of bamboo or tightly rolled cardboard (to create tubes), a few large plastic bottles, twine or string, scissors, secateurs or small hacksaws
- A group of volunteers
- Somewhere to make your hotels – this is a fun activity to get people involved at a local park, allotment or community garden
- Somewhere green to set up your hotels
Instructions
This kind of hotel will appeal to a number of different bees and is a fun activity to get people involved at a local park, allotment or community garden. It’s best done between September and February.
1) Get equipped
Assemble your tools and volunteers.
2) Cut the plastic bottle
Using the scissors, cut the bottle just below the neck.
3) Cut your recycled cardboard or bamboo
Cut your bamboo or cardboard to roughly the length of the remaining bottle.
4) Fill the plastic bottle
Fill the bottle with the bamboo or cardboard until it is tightly packed enough to stay in the bottle.
5) Bind your bee hotel
Use twine or brown tape to bind them together if they’re a bit loose.
6) Find a good spot
Find somewhere green, sunny and sheltered — as bees love the sun — and position the hotel just off the ground so it doesn’t end up in the shade too early. If you want it higher than a couple of feet, run some twine through the bottle first and tie either end and it should hook over a fence or gate post.
7) Improve the design
If you’ve got someone with real DIY skills then you could make a more elaborate and sturdier version by making a box to put the bamboo in instead of the plastic bottle.
Want to attract more bees?
Why not plant flowers in your street or seed a wildflower meadow?
