Native Bees

Building Your Own Bee Hotel

Many of the wild bees you may encounter in your backyard garden make their burrow homes in the soil. Some bees create hives in snags—dead or dying standing trees, often with their branches broken off—or in holes in trees. The activity of native bees encourages the reproduction of plants in your yards and gardens. You can encourage native bees to nest near your wildflower gardens by providing man-made bee hotels or by rethinking your garden clean-up habits.

Building your own bee hotel is a great way to support native bees. Bees like to nest in small holes, and will pick one that’s just the right size for them. The City of Wilmington offers free plans for the bee house pictured below, if you’d like to build one yourself. Since the plans for this hotel have holes of different sizes, it might house more than one kind of native bee. Visit https://www.wilmingtonnc.gov/departments/parks-recreation/halyburton-park and scroll down to the “bee hotel” tab, which has several links for information on solitary bees as well as a link to download the plans. On occasion, the City has ready-made bee houses like this one, available to the public for free. Email Andy.Fairbanks@ wilmingtonnc.gov with any questions about the bee hotel, or to ask about the availability of completed houses.

This bee hotel contains bamboo tubes of a variety of sizes, to accommodate a variety of species of native bee. Plans are available from Halyburton Park. This design measures 10” wide x 7 1/8” deep by 14” tall (plus bracket).

photo by Valerie Robertson

An alternate way to create housing for bees is to make a bundle of paper straws or hollow sticks sealed at one end, as pictured below. Hang it horizontally. Bee houses do best in a warm location with southern or southeastern exposure, so they see morning sun, and are protected from rain. A good place is under the eaves of a garage or shed.

Adobe Stock Tie a bundle of hollow sticks to hang from a tree limb to provide a bee home. You might be able to use something that grows in your own yard, such as a hollow elderberry shoot.

Adobe Stock photo

Another way to offer housing for native bees: when cleaning up your garden in the fall, don’t cut brown stems all the way to the ground. Leave a few inches exposed. New growth in the spring will hide the cut stems, and in the meantime, beneficial insects might use them as shelter.

My Garden of a Thousand Bees

A wildlife cameraman spent his time during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown filming the bees in his urban garden, discovering the many diverse species and personalities that exist in this insect family. “My Garden of a Thousand Bees” premiered as a new episode of “Nature” on PBS in October 2021, and is now available for streaming until October 19, 2025. See https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/ my-garden-thousand-bees-about/26263/.

Bee Campus USA

The University of North Carolina–Wilmington has been named an affiliate of Bee Campus USA. Bee Campus USA provides a framework for campus communities to work together to conserve native pollinators by increasing the abundance of native plants, providing nest sites and reducing the use of pesticides.

Find out more about Bee Campus at https://beecityusa.org/bee-campus-usacommitments/. Visit https://uncw.edu/ news/2021/12/buzzworthy-uncw-namedaffiliate-of-bee-campus-usa.html to learn how UNCW became involved in the program.

The Bees of North Carolina: An Identification Guide

There are more than 500 species of bee in North Carolina, and identifying them in flight can be tricky. "The Bees of North Carolina: An Identification Guide" is a beginner’s resource designed to help identify native bees in North Carolina. Developed by experts at NC State Extension, it provides an overview of some of the most common groups of bees in the state. The guide will help users learn to recognize bees according to key characteristics and appearance. Read it online or download a copy for future reference from https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/the-bees-ofnorth-carolina-identification-guide.