Beehive Shelters: Giving bees a place to live

Bees need shelter, often from the environment, animals and other pests. Here are some ideas for bee shelters

Most people provide flowers for bees without thinking where these animals will lay eggs and raise offspring. Our gardens are places where we can provide simple accommodations for bees to take advantage of. The concern that is raised most often is whether more people will get stung if we facilitate bee nesting. Only the honey bee is known for being able to sting and being likely to sting because it has to protect vast stores of honey from potential predators. Other social bees such as bumblebees are far less aggressive. In fact, most bee species are not highly social, living in small colonies or in more solitary conditions. These types of bees will not sting you. The thousands of native bees that exist in N.America either cannot sting humans or are not prone to stinging. If you already have flowers in your garden for pollinators, then you already have bees around anyway. By providing nesting sites, you are at the very least lowering the distance that the bee needs to travel to find its food resource and you may be helping a species of bee that is having a difficult time finding a suitable location to reproduce. Bees can end up expending vast amounts of energy just getting from their abode to their food source.