Last season, we found two bumblebee nests, the first under a tiled roof, which survived the season, and a second, in an old badger excavation hole behind the shed.
I thought the 'Badger-hole' nest looked to be a fairly vulnerable, so in true nature 'tooth and claw' I setup my trail camera to see if anyone else also thought so... Pending something dramatic happening to my roof, the first one stood a much better chance of survival.
and, low and behold, along came a badger:
Our solution for this years' bumblebee queens who I keep evicting from my shed, looks like this:
Apparently they like a room for poo and a room for general living.
I have similar preferences :)
That's really interesting. Have you had success with bee house designs before?
ReplyDeleteI'd read that some university had conducted a trial with expensive Garden Centre boxes which proved they were a waste of money. Only about 20 boxes were used by bumblebees out of over 700 tested.
The info on this site (http://www.bumblebee.org/nestbox_plans.htm) indicates that the nest material is very important, and it must be kept dry. So I may give the flower-pot design a go, and use the nest material from our blue tit box once they vacate in June.
I've not done a bee house before. The book I took the design from didn't go into bedding material, so mine doesn't have any... think I will add some. The nest in my roof space didn't have an old vole nest, so maybe its not a pre-requisite? I think fondly back to the old nesting mterial that I threw out from the owl/squirrel box when I cleaned it out earlier in the year....
ReplyDelete...I wonder if the fluff from my Dyson would be any good.
ReplyDelete