How do I help the bees?

Cedar talks about our pollinator house launch and what you can do to help bees and other pollinators.

Pollinator house launch

So this is our pollinator house that we release a run of each year. It’s our upcycled project where we get off-cuts from the Flow Hives, we get our laser cutter and we cut these shapes and make this little project, which you can put together with your family. Here's what they look like when they are put together. So you've got our western red cedar shingles on top, which is good. It's a nice hard wearing shingle for weather protection. And you've got the araucaria and you put that together and put in your bamboo tubes like that and then mount it where you want. But it's a good idea with the araucaria to give it a paint first and have some fun with your family painting it. 

And it's designed to help out the native bee species. So there's 20,000 bee species in the world, most of which don't form colonies like honeybee does. And they just need often little bamboo tubes or perhaps holes in mud. Or sections of your yard unkept and left wild is another thing you can do. The whole idea with this is to inspire people to look out for these little unsung heroes of our world. Planting forage in your garden is a great thing to do. You'll notice they'll come in, they'll start using those flowers in your garden and that you never know, they don't have a very big range, the native pollinators. So you might just help them get to the next stepping stone. And we're building corridors across our urban landscapes by getting out in the garden and creating some spaces for them. 

So jump online, have a look at this, it's our fundraiser. So 100% of the profits go towards habitat. We support a whole lot of great projects in the world that support the bees and also habitat. So it's a good one, it's a bit of a staff favourite. We launch it at this time because they make great Christmas presents

Where's the best place to put your pollinator house? 

So I actually find the best place to put this is under shelter. I found the native bees go for it much more. It's a bit counterintuitive, you’d think out amongst the flowers would be the spot. But if you put this on the wall of your house, so at the back here we've cut out a little shape and we've supplied a longer screw. You put that screw into the wall of your house and you mount that on the wall, which looks really cute. It's a nice talking point when visitors come, the bees actually will go nuts for that pollinator house. And we've actually found that at some times of year you'll get quite a lot of traffic in and out and you'll get multiple bee species in here. You get the fire-tailed resin bee, the masked bee, lots of little native bees coming and using these to just raise a few young. 

The whole idea is very inspiring for people to notice these native bees. And once you start noticing them, you see them everywhere, it gets quite addictive. You see them in your garden and you see all the different types. You can look them up and identify them and then you'll see them using these tubes to raise their young. 

How else can I help the bees?

There's lots of things you can do to support pollinators in your garden. You can plant forage, you can just keep some parts of your yard wild. As David Attenborough says, we need to rewild our world. That's where habitat is made. But you can accelerate that by specifically making substrates for bees and not only things like this like our little pollinator house, but you can get mud and poke holes in it for some of the bees species who like to nest in mud rather than bamboo tubes as well. There's lots of ideas. We've got a page about it online. Have some fun. It's a great educational piece. Have some fun looking after the unsung heroes of our world that do the amazing thing we call pollination.

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For in-depth training, check out our online beekeeping course at TheBeekeeper.org.