Put Up a Bee House

Most bees don’t live in hives. Around nine in ten bee species are solitary — no queen, no honey, no colony. A single female finds a hollow stem, lays her eggs in a row, seals the end and dies before her young ever hatch.

A bee house gives her somewhere to do that. It’s one of the very few outdoor projects where a child does most of the work and something wild genuinely turns up.

⚠️ Put it up before the bees emerge. A house hung in July will sit empty until next spring. Late winter to early spring is the whole window.

What you need

You probably have: a saw, twine or a bracket, a pencil, and something to hang it on.

What to buy:

• Bamboo tubes or paper nest liners — the nesting material. Paper liners are the better choice and the reason is further down. [PRODUCT URL]?tag=inklingsworld-20
• A wooden nest box or untreated timber to hold them. Cedar or pine, never treated wood. [PRODUCT URL]?tag=inklingsworld-20
• A hand lens — for looking at the sealed ends without touching them. [PRODUCT URL]?tag=inklingsworld-20

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What to do

1. Cut the tubes to length — you do this part. Aim for six inches deep. Shallow tubes produce mostly male offspring, which sounds like trivia and isn’t: males don’t nest, so a shallow house quietly fails at the only thing it’s for.

2. Check the back of every tube is closed. A bee will not use a tube she can see through. With bamboo, cut so a node seals the back. With paper liners this is already done.

3. Sand or trim any splinters at the opening. Rough edges damage wings.

4. Pack the tubes in tightly so they can’t rattle or slide. This is the part to hand over — it’s fiddly, it’s satisfying, and there’s nothing to get wrong.

5. Mount it facing south or south-east, about chest height on an adult, somewhere it gets morning sun. Fix it firmly to a wall, post or fence. It must not swing. A house that moves in the wind stays empty.

6. Check there are flowers within a few hundred feet, and a patch of bare damp soil if you can manage one. Mason bees seal their cells with mud and have to be able to find some.

7. Then leave it alone. Look, don’t open.

What’s actually happening in there

Each female works alone. She flies out, gathers pollen, packs it into the back of a tube, lays a single egg on top of the pile, then walls that section off with mud or chewed leaf. Then she repeats it, cell by cell, until the tube is full and she caps the end.

She’ll never meet her offspring. The eggs hatch, the grubs eat the pollen she left, spin cocoons, overwinter inside the tube, and emerge the following spring — by which time she’s long dead. Everything she does is for a generation she won’t see.

Watch the sealed ends across a season and a child can read the whole story off the front of the box without ever opening it.

One thing worth telling them: males emerge first, from the tubes nearest the opening, because she laid them last. She puts the females deepest, where they’re safest. That ordering is deliberate, and it’s the kind of detail that turns a box on a fence into something a kid keeps checking.

Are they going to sting?

Almost certainly not. Male solitary bees have no sting at all. Females have one but are not defending a colony or a honey store, so they use it only if they’re squeezed or trodden on. Mason and leafcutter bees are about as safe as a wild insect gets — which is a large part of why they’re the right first wildlife project for a young child.

If it doesn’t work

Nothing moves in for weeks. Normal. Solitary bees are active in a narrow window, and a house put up outside it waits for next season. The first year is often empty.

Nothing ever moves in. Usually one of four things: it swings, it faces the wrong way, the tubes are too shallow, or there’s nothing flowering nearby. Check those before buying anything else.

Something else moves in. Wasps, earwigs and spiders all take an interest. Leave them. It isn’t a failure — it’s the point.

🔴 The one that actually matters: a bee house left uncleaned can do more harm than none at all. Parasites and fungal disease accumulate in tubes used season after season, and the house turns into a trap that concentrates exactly the problem it was meant to solve.

So plan for it from the start. Use paper liners or a box that opens, replace or clean the tubes every year or two, and treat that as part of the project rather than an optional extra. The Xerces Society is blunt about this: badly maintained bee hotels can do more harm than good, and natural nesting habitat — a log pile, a patch of undisturbed bare ground, hollow stems left standing over winter — often beats an artificial box outright.

Which is worth saying to a child directly. The best thing you can do for these bees costs nothing and involves tidying up less.

Keep a record

Print the observation sheet and hang it by the back door: date, how many tubes are sealed, what the weather was doing. Over a season it becomes a real dataset, and comparing this April to last April is the moment the whole thing stops being a craft project.

Download the bee house observation sheet → (free, no signup)

The story behind it

The bee in Better Together thinks she’s managing perfectly well on her own. She isn’t, and neither is the flower — that’s the whole book, and it’s the same arrangement playing out on the front of your bee house.

For ages 4 to 8. There’s a companion coloring book as well.