Modular Bee cubes

thingiverse

There's another bee house waiting to be made out there that takes a long time to print, but it's a great design. I decided to take a different approach with modular housing, making something that can be printed quickly instead. Modular housing? Yes, I mix and match boxes with hexagonal openings of various sizes within a standard cube size. The ones labeled honeycomb can be printed as is; you can make as many as you want and then custom build a frame and hanger out of a cedar fence picket. The 25x25x3 cube will be useless unless you do some printing tricks. Here's what to do: 1. Place the box so that the three-inch dimension is the height. 2. Set your infill as honeycomb. 3. Go into your slicer settings and set your top layers to zero. 4. Change your infill to a percentage; I used 10, 15, and 20% for different hole sizes for various wild bees. 5. For visual variety, you can scale the cube or simply run out of filament twice like I did to get next cubes of varying depths. 6. After printing four, glue them into a cube, aligning them as desired and using any number you want. 7. Next, cut your wood and glue it together with nails, making sure not to nail into the plastic. 8. Add a back that's taller than your wood box and drill a hole in it for a nail or screw. And there you have it - your first Bee Box Modular nest box! The GCODE files I uploaded are for PLA on a Prusa MK3. On the honeycomb files, be aware that the one with the largest hole might be bigger than most bugs would find interesting. A wood frame protects the boxes and their inhabitants from cold winds, sun, and other harsh elements.