Bee Hotel

youmagine

I built a bee hotel for my garden using scraps of wood I had lying around, and it turned out to be surprisingly easy to make despite its size. The design is forgiving of minor mistakes, but it does require some scaling down if you're not looking to build something massive. Cutting the hexagons was the most challenging part, but the design kept the number of angled cuts to a minimum, making it relatively easy to assemble the pieces together. I used a chop saw to make the angled cuts, and thankfully, all the angles were the same, so I only had to set one angle. Assembling the pieces required some screwing, although pre-drilling was necessary, which meant drilling into the corners at an angle. I decided to add a back to my bee hotel to protect it from the rain, but it's also designed with overhanging tops that shield the structure from the elements without creating shadows that would block sunlight. The design has a 200mm depth, which is apparently the ideal size for a bee hotel. Adding dividers or shelves was a breeze, and it allowed me to fill each section with something other than hundreds of bamboo pieces.