Building bee homes

This process has involved creating the box structures and then sawing bits of wood, bamboo and dried hogweed to fit inside them. There all holes drilled into the homes to allow space for the bees to go inside and lay their eggs.

The bee homes are designed to provide ideal nesting sites for solitary bees, such as the leafcutter and red mason bees, who are in serious decline, partly due to habitat loss. These bees are important and efficient pollinators that can visit many flowers per minute.

The bees lay their eggs in cells along the tubes, with female eggs at the rear of the tube, and males at the front. The leafcutter bee seals each cell with a piece of leaf, and the mason bees usually use some mud. Every cell has a pollen ‘loaf’ inside for the larvae to feed on, and each pollen loaf requires up to 2,000 flower visits! Meanwhile, red mason bees are excellent pollinators of fruit trees, and a single red mason bee can do the work of 120 honeybees. They are very docile bees and unlikely to sting.

There are more than 250 species of bee in the UK and around 90% of these are solitary bees, meaning they don't live in colonies like honeybees, instead the female builds and provisions her own nest.

The males emerge around two weeks before the females, giving them time to develop and be ready to mate with the females when they emerge in the spring.

The bee homes will be installed in suitable locations in and around the Northumberland Coast to be used by bees next spring.

We will keep you posted with progress updates next year!