The Small Bee Block makes the perfect present for the environmentally conscious and for keen gardeners who love design.
Designed and made by Green&Blue in their Cornish studio, the Small Bee Block is a stylish and innovative new product that can be placed in your garden as a free-standing bee hotel providing additional habitat for solitary bees. You can also build them into the external walls of your home, garage or garden shed!
Solitary bees don’t produce honey or live in hives, but they are responsible for a third of all food we eat, because of the vital pollination they carry out. Bees are facing decline due to more intensive farming methods, disease, use of neonicotinoids and habitat loss so it is essential to create more habitat for non-swarming solitary bees.
Solitary bees are fascinating to watch and it’s a wonderful way to introduce kids to bees. They are also pet and child friendly because solitary bees have no queen or honey to protect, meaning they are non-aggressive and won’t sting!
Bee Bricks are inspired by the natural way bees reproduce and so contain cavities in which solitary bees can create their nests. One female solitary bee will potentially use around 5-6 cavities, laying 5-7 eggs in each cavity. You should expect bees to emerge from the nests in early spring. Males emerge first and after feeding await the females. Females emerge and also feed and then mating takes place, fairly promptly! Males die quickly after mating and the females begin the nesting process straight away often reusing the same nesting site.
Material: Cast in concrete, using up to 70% waste material from the Cornish china clay industry.
Size: 65mm x 70mm x 105mm
Weight: Approx 1.1kg (unpackaged)
Positioning: The Bee Brick™ should be positioned in a warm sunny spot, south facing, with no vegetation in front of the holes. Ideally placed at least 1 metre from the ground.
