MME: It is worth placing bee hotels to help protect pollinating insects by the end of February

(Photo: Pixabay)

As they highlighted in their announcement, the extremely simple, particularly spectacular bee hotel tool kit can be used on balconies and windowsills in an effective and filling way to help the reproduction of solitary, less well-known, gentle pollinating bees and wasps, starting in early spring. According to the information, solitary bees and wasps live around people in gardens, parks, schools, kindergartens and on the upper floors of housing estates: they are everywhere where they find flowers. These animals do not attack their relatives living in families: if they are not caught, they are completely harmless.

Unlike the tens of thousands of colonies of domestic bees that require tree hollows and hives, many of the solitary species entrust their offspring with the protection of passages thinner than a finger

In these, female bees accumulate nectar and pollen, and wasps accumulate paralyzed arthropods, lay eggs there, and then close the cradles with a mud plug. After consuming the food, the hatching larva pupates, and finally the hatched adult insect chews its way through the mud plug and begins its adult life of a few weeks. Such cradle chambers can be provided very easily for them with a bee hotel, also known as a wasp garage, which can be placed on the balcony, window sill, or next to flowered balcony boxes – the announcement reads.

As they wrote, this can be made most easily in a firewood ball with holes 4-10 millimeters in diameter, but a bee hotel with a cabinet can also be built

The bee hotel is also a particularly good pollinator protection tool for the population because it is much easier to make as part of a kindergarten activity, school lesson, or professional group than artificial nests that require great precision and complicated woodworking steps. It is worth placing the new bee hotels in the second half of February or early March in a place protected from rain – the bottom of an eaves, a window and balcony opening, a porch – with an east-south orientation so that they can also receive direct sunlight – they drew attention to it. According to the announcement, several representatives of solitary bee species are hairy, this fur also insulates them, so they can be active even on the first sunny days of late winter and early spring. The bee hotels are busiest from March to the end of May and mid-June. Meanwhile, the movement of insects can be observed from a distance of just a few centimeters at home, at work, as well as in kindergartens and schools.

MTI