This post is about putting up a bluebird house, and rehabbing my Home Depot bee hotel for another year of use.
Bluebird comeback
Source: Ace Hardware.
I don’t think I ever saw a bluebird, growing up in Northern Virginia in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s not due to my poor memory or lack of birding skills, as my wife never saw one either. That’s because by the 1970s, the eastern bluebird appeared to be headed for extinction (reference).
The bluebird was, to me, as much a mythical creature as was a unicorn. I saw them in cartoons, but never in real life.
Fast forward to yesterday, and after seeing a nesting pair of bluebirds in a local park (Meadowlark Gardens), I spotted a pair of bluebirds in my backyard, perching on branches and generally checking out the real estate.
So, I’m putting up a birdhouse, to see if I can entice them to stay around. One specifically designed for bluebirds. If for no other reason, bluebirds eat bugs. Which is (almost) surely a good thing.
I’ve never put up a birdhouse before. How hard can it be?
$50 and three hardware store trips later …
The Audubon-recommended mounting for a bluebird house is a five-foot or longer piece of EMT (metal electrical conduit), sitting on top of a piece of rebar that has been driven firmly into the ground.
Piece of cake, right?
The simplified Audubon Society instructions did not account for my local fauna.
"Squirrels not only eat eggs and nestlings, but they have also been known to eat birds." Source: Bluebird predator information.
Ponder the text above the next time you’re filling your squirrel feeder.
My only mistake was underestimating squirrels. Because of the threat they pose, that five-foot pole wouldn’t do, and a squirrel baffle was called for, and so on.
In the end, the entire project consisted of:
- Off-the-shelf bluebird house from my local Ace Hardware, $20. The only thing it seemed to be lacking is some horizontal kerfs (shallow saw cuts) on the back of the door. It took about five minutes to add some saw kerfs with a table saw. These kerfs are recommended by the Audubon Society (reference).
- 10′ piece of 1/2″ EMT (metal electrical conduit), $5, Home Depot.
- Squirrel baffle, $15, Home Depot.
- Two 4′ to 5′ pieces of rebar, $10 if you need them precut (as rebar is tough to cut without the appropriate tools).
- A couple of two-hole EMT straps (for attaching the EMT to the birdhouse), some screws, and a medium hose clamp (call it $3, at Home Depot).
In hindsight, I should have gone one size up on the EMT diameter, as a 10′ piece of 1/2″ EMT is a little bendier than I like. Ultimately, I stiffened it up a bit by driving two pieces of rebar into the ground close together, putting the EMT over one, then hose-clamping the whole assembly together for rigidity at the base.
The results appear acceptable to me. I set it in a spot that’s shaded from the afternoon sun. With any luck, the squirrel baffle in the middle of the pole will baffle the squirrels. And we’ll see if any bluebirds decide to use it.
Edit: One day later, and a little group of bluebirds decided to check this out. There were at least two couples, along with a similarly-sized black-and-white bird, all of whom stopped by in the early afternoon to give the box a look-over. To my eye, there was one clearly dominant male bluebird who drove off the other male and the little black-and-white bird. Then the entire gang took off. So, no resident bird yet.
Edit: Five days later, and we definitely have a pair of bluebirds using that nesting box. Some websites advise checking on the interior of the box weekly (the entire front of the box pivots open), but I think the best thing I can do for them is leave them alone.
Second chance at mason bees: Correcting my mistakes, and my rules for a replacement bee hotel.
Last year, I bought a cheap little bee hotel from Home Depot. That is, a wooden box filled with tubes for solitary bees to use for laying eggs. The hotel itself worked fine, with several of the nesting tubes filled during its first season. But I should have left it outside all winter. As it stands, I followed (seemingly sensible) advice I found on the internet, and put the bee hotel in an unheated building for the winter. This, I am virtually certain, caused my bees to emerge way too early (Post G24-004).
But I learned a lot. Mostly, I learned that these are not the bees that will help pollinate my garden plants. They are out-and-about way too early. At least, the bees that found the Home Depot bee hotel to be attractive.
I think I owe it to the bees to try it again.
I now know that the cheap little bee hotel from Home Depot was designed to be a throwaway. You’re supposed to put in clean nesting tubes every year, but the bamboo tubes in the Home Depot bee hotel were non-removable. Turns out, they’re just lightly glued into place. If you can pluck one out, you can pry the rest out, domino-style. As shown above. So they’re not designed to be removed, but they are removable.
The other drawback of this bee hotel is that the nesting tubes are much shorter than experts recommend. E.g., Virginia Tech (and pretty much everybody else) says the tubes should be around 6″ to 7″ long (reference). Here’s the box from the Home Depot bee hotel, and some 6″ bamboo tubes I cut last year:
Worse, a brief trip to my yard to harvest some natural bee tubes comes up blank. After a winter of weathering, the hollow stems of pokeweed and sunflowers are too fragile to be cut to length. The moral of the story is that, while experts say you can use natural hollow-stemmed plants as a source of bee tubes, what they don’t say is that you really ought to harvest and cut those when they are green and pliable. That’s what I did for the bamboo above, and that worked fine. Once those hollow-stemmed plants are dry and crunchy, no tool that I own will give clean cuts at 6″ intervals. Mostly, they just shatter, even when using the thinnest double-edge (shaving) razor blade.
So if I redo this, this year, I’m going to have to buy commercial bee tubes anyway.
At this point, it’s time to cut my losses. The entire point of this is to give these solitary bees a clean, secure place to lay their eggs. I don’t think that a bunch of fragile thin-walled plant stems hanging out of the shell of a reclaimed disposable Home Depot product qualifies as a good bee hotel.
The location and orientation last year seemed pretty much ideal for attracting bees. A lot of folks report that their bee hotels aren’t used, or that it takes years to attract their first bee. The Home Depot hotel was a hit from day one. I think the key is that bees don’t have great long-distance vision. I hung this one firmly attached to a porch post, so that the tubes faced out, into the open space, lit by the morning sun. I’m guessing that this made it easy for the bees to spot the tubes and/or this otherwise mimics their ideal nesting sites in nature.
The bottom line is that I’m just going to chuck the Home Depot bee hotel out. It was a flawed design both for non-removable tubes, and for short tubes.
That said, I think it was right for its orientation — tube holes facing out into the yard — for having variable-diameter bamboo tubes, and for having all the tube ends securely sealed with glue, which bees like because it keeps the predators and parasites from moving among their nesting tubes.
Ideally, I need to find or make a bee hotel with these characteristics:
- Nest tubes around 6″ long.
- Tubes securely sealed at the back.
- Tubes that are replaceable.
- Mountable so that the tubes face out into the yard.
- Tubes of varying diameters, to accommodate different bee species.
And, ideally, I’d need two of them, for one location, as discussed in earlier posts. (Otherwise, some bees will be laying eggs in those nest tubes before all the other bees have emerged, so there’s never a correct time for disposing of the old tubes and replacing them with clean new ones.)
Assuming I can find or make something like that, I’ll update this with a pic of this year’s been hotel when I’m done.
Edit: In the end, I figured that in a sheltered location, using bamboo, I didn’t really need a bee hotel at all. This year, my bee hotels are just the nesting tubes, ends plugged with mud (where needed), bound together, hung on 16d nail.
I don’t think the bees will mind the lack of amenities.
In any case, I’m pretty sure that all the cute stuff you see on the typical bee hotel is there to please the owner, not the bees. With these, the whole thing is disposable. After the bees have left next spring, I can just chuck the used nest tubes away.
