How to attract pollinating bees to your garden? Add one of the Best Bee Brothers' bee lodges to attract solitary bees such as mason bees and carpenter bees to your garden area. The bees will nest in the bee lodge and pollinate your surrounding garden area. This lodge is a great way to lure the bees away from nesting in your home. It is a win-win! You get a beautiful garden and the bees get protection ... what could be better?
Carved Bee Lodge
If you are looking for a way to give your garden a little extra power this year or next, a bee lodge is the perfect accessory. Not only are our bee lodges skillfully handcrafted for a fun, whimsical look, they also provide a home for solitary bees. Placing our Bee Lodge in your garden will get those flowers pollinated and flourishing and give your neighborhood bees a safe place to nest.
The trick behind how the bee lodge works is very simple – its design attracts solitary bees. A solitary bee, like the mason bee or carpenter bee, does not live in colonies like the honey bee or bumble bee and they don’t produce honey or beeswax. Instead, they mate and lay eggs in hidden chambers.
For the mason bee, these homes can be in existing holes in trees, sheds, homes and porches. Mason bees are harmless when it comes to your home, unlike the carpenter bee. And, mason bees are great pollinators! Often times they are overlooked because of their solitary life cycle, but are becoming increasingly more relied upon as the honey bee population decreases.
Carpenter bees, unlike the mason bees, are not as helpful. Carpenter bees don’t need to seek out existing nests to build their home. Instead, they can drill straight into any wooded area they chose to nest in. The good news is that these bees are rather lazy. Every season they have a huge task of creating a perfect nest and laying eggs, so if they can find anything to make their duties easier, they will take it. Placing a bee lodge away from your home and in your garden will help attract the carpenter bees away from nesting in your home.
While every one of our bee lodges is unique because they are handmade, they all have the same variety of hole sizes drilled in. Smaller bees like the mason bee prefer the smaller holes, while carpenter bees can only fit in the larger holes. The bee lodges can be set on the ground, mounted to a wall or even hung. Set these in your garden and watch nature at its finest. You are protecting the bees and getting a gorgeous garden; nothing could be better!
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mason_bee