My newly-installed bee hotel continues to attract new users. I now have about 15 nesting tubes filled, versus the five that had been filled as of mid-April (above).
Bees are particular about what diameter tubes they will nest in. At this point, all the smallest-diameter tubes are taken, and it’s now the larger tubes that are being filled. That suggests a turnover in the bee species actively building nests. No surprise there, as solitary bees only live for a few weeks after emerging in the spring.
They eat, attempt to procreate, then die.
As do we all, I guess. Or, at least, most us.
Anyway, despite the success, this hotel is a bad design because the tubes are glued into place. You can read Post #G23-13, where I quote experts on the need to replace those nesting tubes every year. Next summer I’m either going to have to break it apart and rebuild it, or throw it out.
In the meantime, I’ve decided to add an amenity to this hotel: A bee watering station.
I had read that bees need a suitable nearby source of drinking water. I wasn’t convinced of it until we had a recent dry spell, and observed solitary bees attracted to the rims of a couple of just-rinsed clean mason jars. Best guess, they were taking a drink from the water clinging to the screw threads at the top of the jar.
So, who knew? You actually have to go to some effort to get provide a suitable watering hole for your local bees.
As is typical for me, this post lays out my thinking as I read suggestions off the internet and decide what I’m going to do.
Ultimately, after looking at a bunch of options or D-I-Y solutions, it seemed like the easiest (and plausibly the most effective) approach was just to buy a commercially-made bee watering station. Who knew such a thing existed, for the home market, yet. It has every appearance of being a flimsy piece of junk, destined for the landfill. But some people say it works, and it meets my design and maintenance criteria. I’ll tack on a brief review here, after it has arrived and I’ve used it a while.
Design considerations
Based on what I can find on the internet, there are two overriding design issues for a successful bee watering station. This boils down to having some water surface open to the air, and not drowning the bees.
First, the bees have to be able to find it. Apparently they find water via sense of smell. Plausibly, you need to have enough water surface exposed to the air to allow bees to find their way to it.
Second, bees can’t swim, so they’re picky about where they will and won’t go for a drink of water. Ideally, you need to provide a very shallow bit of water, along with a dry place for the bees to stand and take a drink.
Putting those together, you get the common recommendation to put some pebbles in a fill-in-the-blank, and use that as your bee watering station. The blank here could be a bird bath, a waterer designed for other animals (dogs, cats, birds), or just a shallow bowl or plate.
As explained just below, I’ve decided not to go that route. Any pool of outdoor standing water will eventually become a mess. The idea of trying to keep one of those clean, working around loose pebbles, is just a non-starter for me. It will just be too hard to keep filled and clean.
Options rejected and chosen
1: Bee watering station that’s just like a bird bath, but shallower. Rejected.
Source: Amazon.
I have learned a few things about wildlife watering from having a concrete birdbath in my front yard.
Mainly, I’ve learned that a traditional birdbath — a shallow puddle of water, inside a broad bowl — is a real pain in the ass to maintain. Not that I do that, in my household. My wife handles the bird bath. But if the water hasn’t evaporated in a dry spell, then it’s foul from sitting, or murky from accumulated pollen. Or something nasty has grown on the concrete and stones designed to give birds a place to stand.
So I’m eliminating one entire class of bee watering stations off the crack of the bat. Such as the one above, consisting of a ceramic bowl with glass pebbles. Looks nice, when brand new. But so did my bird bath. Like a standard bird bath, this is going to be a high-maintenance device. With an added bonus of requiring you to tip out the excess water after every rainstorm, lest it turn into a bee-drowning station.
2: Add pebbles to a bird bath. Rejected.
Same reason as above: Too hard to maintain. A bird bath is tough enough to maintain with a couple of flat rocks in it, to accommodate shorter birds. I really can’t see hosing off a bunch of pebbles every time the bird bath gets foul.
Plus, some birds eat bees, including cardinals, at some times of the year. You surely don’t want predators hanging out around the watering hole. (Above, that’s our next-door-neighbor’s cat on our bird bath, a few years back. He’s not fooling anybody, least of all our local birds.)
3: D-I-Y bee watering stations based pet waterers. Rejected, reasoning as above.
Source: Amazon, left to right: Waterers for poultry, dogs, birds.
The attraction of pet waterers is that they come with a reservoir, so they have to be filled less frequently than a simple bowl or plate of water. They also maintain a large pool of water, and so should be attractive to bees.
It’s pretty clear that these could be made to work, with the addition of some pebbles of the right size. Despite their looks, based on Amazon reviews, even the cheap plastic ones for dogs or cats will hold up to outdoor use. Durability and UV-resistance isn’t really much of an issue.
To me, it boils down to the same logic as the two above. I don’t want to have to try to keep a pebble-filled area of stagnant water clean. Even if the reservoir of a pet waterer means I don’t have to fill it often.
Secondarily, I don’t want to attract anything but bees to this waterer. I don’t want this to become a place where my local critters (deer, squirrels, chipmunks, foxes, and so on) come for a convenient place to get a drink.
4: Commercially-made bee watering stations. I guess so.
Source: Amazon.
Edit 5/8/2023, review of the bee watering station above.
Works as advertised. I’ve had this up and running for the better part of a week now, and it is maintaining a shallow pool of water on the yellow pad, and slowly drawing down the water in the reservoir. Looks like I’ll have to refill it every couple of weeks or so.
The sole drawback is that it’s fussy to set up. The base plate needs to be level, and you need to pull the reservoir up to leave a large (~ 3/8″) gap between the rim of the reservoir cup, and the yellow base plate fitting. You have to fine-tune that gap to get it to the point where it keeps the yellow base plate wet, but does not overflow it.
This (above) seems to be what I’m left with, above. If I insist that the bee waterer have a some exposed water surface area, a place for bees to land, and a reservoir, it appears that I have more-or-less one option, as pictured above. Per Amazon comments, this is finicky at best. But that’s what I’m going to try. Dozens of vendors offer this product on Amazon.
The only alternatives that I saw, marketed as a bee waterers, were devices that screw into the top of a soda bottle. These would probably work, but don’t provide much water surface area. Both were marked for use at the entrance to a bee hive, where, presumably, the bees would have no trouble finding them. On Amazon, my only option would have been to buy about a dozen of these at a time.
Finally, there were many devices sold as “bee feeders”, allowing you to feed sugar syrup to your hive of bees. These appear to have been made to work with sugar syrup, and at least some of them clearly would leak if used with plain water.
