Bee Hotel

We have spent a lot of the day doing things in the garden. Mowing, tidying up after all the rain, planting tomatoes, and having lunch. A fine day after the recent storms and heavy rain,

And it has meant I have noticed the goings on otherwise easily overlooked.

One of the things I wanted to do this year was to make a bee hotel. Lockdown scuppered that, as I couldn’t access materials, so I bought two small bee houses online from the RSPB, slung the string hangers off two concrete posts, and forgot about them.

Until today. I noticed a leaf over a tube entrance in one of the little bee houses - it has been used as a nest chamber by a leaf cutter bee. And leaf cutters were busy on the other bee house too.

They create cells in each tube, This involves a little food pile of nectar and pollen, on which is lain an egg. They are then sealed in with a leaf and the process repeated until the entrance to the hole is reached, and that is sealed too.

The blip is a bee carrying a piece of leaf in its legs to the entrance to its nest hole.