Bee hotels

Once selected to receive a bee hotel, a Council Officer will visit your school and show you everything you need to know about looking after your hotel and its visitors. Students will learn to keep a happy and healthy bee hotel with a bit of annual maintenance.

What is included?

• A high-quality bee hotel and mount constructed at a local community workshop.
• First year’s nesting materials.
• An emergence box, for releasing soon-to-hatch solitary bees.
• 12 native plants chosen to support bees and pollinators with fact sheets for students.
• Access to expert advice and events on solitary bees and maintaining bee hotels.

Visit our Smart Schools program for more information on how to incorporate sustainability more broadly into your playground and classroom.

Schools can apply for a bee hotel through the annual Environmental Levy Grants program. You can also include it as part of a larger grant application if you wish. 

Can other groups apply?

Yes! We welcome applications from childcare centres, community gardens, scouts, and other community groups.

Get in touch with the Sustainability team to have a chat about the options available.

Bees need two major things; somewhere to nest and something to eat.

Cavity nesting bees can be supported by retaining hollow stems and wood borer holes in logs already in your garden. The other alternative is to build a Bee Hotel - providing artificial nesting materials for our buzzy friends. Some great resources for you below:

• Watch our bee hotel webinar.
• Aussie Bees step-by-step guide.
• Another guide from Grow it Build it in the UK.

Food resources are the most important thing to look after native bees:

1. Nectar and pollen – ensure a mix of nectar and pollen producing plants for a bee-healthy diet. A great guide is the RIRDC’s ‘Bee Friendly’ planting guide.
2. Winter and summer flowers – Native bees are active during all but the coldest months so having flowers throughout spring, summer and autumn is very important.
3. Diversity – Bees have excellent colour vision so a mix of blue, purple, white/pinks and yellow flowers work well. Both shallow-petalled flowers and those with deep petal heads will suit a variety of bees.
4. Buffet – Aim to plant attractive flowers of the same species/colour in clumps. This makes for a more powerful stimulus for the bees when foraging.
5. Native or Exotic? – Focus on natives wherever you can. Try to fill the spot with a native first and if there’s a gap then select a suitable non-weedy exotic.

The Australian Native Plants Society share their recommendations for pollinator plants. Download recommendations(PDF, 1MB).

Read the guide from Aussie Bees on how to provide a long-lasting and varied source of food for bees.

The majority of Australia’s native bees (70%) are actually ground nesters!

They prefer loamy, sandy soils of at least 60cm. Raised beds can help to provide a suitable patch of deep soil that bees may like. Scattering a few rocks over the soil surface is also good. Avoid weed matting or mulch in the areas where you’re encouraging ground-nesting bees. 

Do solitary bees sting?

Native stingless bees do not sting! Solitary bees are capable of stinging, however this is extremely unlikely as they do not defend a hive and are not aggressive; unless physically grasped they tend to flee if they feel threatened. Secondly, many of our solitary species are simply too small to deliver an effective sting to a person, even if they wanted to.

The bee hotel has been designed to encourage observation without allowing children (younger children in particular) to prod or poke any of the nesting materials. The hotels aim to teach students about their native bees and develop respect for them in a controlled environment.

Are there other things that might live in the hotel?

Solitary wasps can utilise bee hotels for their offspring. They tend not to be aggressive and are incredibly beneficial, acting as natural pest controllers.

Beetles and spiders are nothing to be concerned about but if a web is built across the entrances it is worth removing as it will put off other residents. If you use paper tubes to line your materials, you can simply remove any that contains a spider and replace it with a fresh one.

Are there any predators to worry about?

There are some other species that will take advantage of a bee hotel.

• Ants – They can break open the seals and raid the occupied nests, eating the stored food stuffs and killing the offspring. If this becomes a problem then try applying some grease to the pole that the hotel is mounted on, this will prevent the ants from climbing up to the hotel.
• Birds – some birds may take an interest in a bee hotel. The larval bees can make for a nutritious meal. You can place wire over the front of the hotel, with some space between it and the front of the nesting material. This will stop any birds getting in but allow bees to enter.
• Parasitoids & Kleptoparasites – A parasitoid is an organism that spends its larval stage on or in another organism. In the case of bee hotels these are often wasps. A kleptoparasite, is an organism that steals its food from another. For example, Cuckoo bees lay their eggs on the food of other bee species rather than gathering their own supplies.

If they are dominating the hotel, then strategic removal of some of the tubes that have been affected can work, but by keeping the hotel small it does limit large numbers of these.

Do I have to do any preparation to receive my hotel?

The only thing that needs to be done prior to delivery is the digging of the hole. All hotels are pole mounted and these are then secured into the ground. A hole 60cm deep needs to be dug to receive this. Once that is done, we will install and secure the hotel for you!

Can I get a hotel for my personal garden?

At this time, we do not provide bee hotels to individuals or for sale. This program is aimed at education and looks to reach the maximum number of people possible per hotel we install.

Check out our build-your-own bee hotel section above. You can also enter the bee lottery to foster one of our native stingless bee hives. 

To ensure you don’t disturb baby bees, you can line your holes with a paper tube. Once a nest has finished and the new bees hatch, the paper tube can be removed and replaced.

You’ll know the nest has been vacated once the seal on the front of the tube is broken and bees emerge. Use paper that is unbleached and acid free. Bees tend to prefer brown paper. Make the tubes by wrapping the paper around a pencil and simply insert into the cavities.

This is simply a light-tight box with a small hole at one end - those who are a part of the program will have one provided. Once your nesting block or other materials have been filled you can remove them from the hotel and place them inside the emergence box.

Place the box outside, in a dry, sheltered position. When the bees hatch inside, they move towards the light of the single entrance hole and escape. Bees actively looking for new nest sites are unlikely to discover the materials inside, so no new nests should be created. The materials that you have removed can then be replaced in the bee hotel.

It’s often easier to replace materials such as bamboo stems rather than reuse them, however drilled wooden blocks are worth keeping and reusing. To sterilise them, clean them out with a pipe cleaner once the bees have emerged and pop the block in the freezer overnight to kill any mites or other pests left inside. Then all you need do is defrost it and it is ready to be used again.

You can also combine the above 2 methods.

Line your wooden blocks with paper straws but use an emergence box as well. For example, when your paper straws get full, rather than wait for the bees to hatch out before replacing them simply transfer them straight to the emergence box, same goes for your bamboo tubes. You can either do this as you go along or wait until the end of autumn and do it all in one go.

It is important that the bee larvae experience the natural fluctuations in temperature, so you don’t want to keep the emergence box inside a house or heated building, a standard shed is fine. Remember though, if you do place your emergence box in the shed over winter make sure you remember to put it outside again before spring, else the bees will hatch out in the shed!