this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2025
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For anyone wanting to save the bees, look into making bee hotels. If you have a power drill and a variety of small bits, easy money. Spend a half hour watching videos, not too much to learn. They're basically free to make if you can lay your hands on some wood or non pressure-treated lumber. Chunk the old one every year and roll an new one.
Damned cool when you see your first guests having waxed off the entrance hole!
Easy money? Do they pay rent?
*easy honey
take it
If you can collect. All I get are pollinated plants. YMMV.
I researched that, maybe it's just in Australia but apparently the bees here don't use those bee hotels? They apparently just get stacked with earwigs. I read the best thing you can do for bees here is plant native flowering plants like the Bottle Brush, and let leaves biodegrade naturally instead of hoovering em up.
Also please check whether honey bees are native in your area. If they're not (or if there's too many of them) it leads to decline of other bee species and threatens other pollinators and rare plant species.
Not sure what that has to do with my comment? Bee hotels are for solitary bees, not honey bees. Exactly what we want!
Yep, sorry. Still I kind of think it's worth repeating over and over, so treat it as not aimed at you :)
Preaching to the choir. The windshield thing is what originally brought home the scope of this disaster. We travel from Florida to Tupelo several times a year. 700 mile round trip through the South, never had to clean bugs, not once. Imagine that.
I'm letting our yard go largely wild, and in any case we've loaded up with flowers. We have several tiny ponds, 15G-150G, that are all natural that are breeding frogs and dragonflies. They also act as mosquito traps because the fish and tadpoles, and hopefully dragonfly larva, eat the babies.
At our 2.5 acre camp in the boonies I've been trying to get flowers in there. Dumped a 5G bucket of crepe myrtle seeds last fall, not sure any took. LOL, mostly failing on that project. I want to get some hives going, but there just can't be enough flowers around in most seasons.
I'm trying man.
Also, stop using pesticides/ herbicides in you garden, plant native flowering plants, mow after they finished flowering, let grass grow a bit, maybe mow alternating areas.