163VIDEO Bee Box Plans Tour

This video is all about a project that I call the bee box. This is a project I made a number of years

ago for publication in a woodworking magazine and it's also something that the gardeners would

appreciate. This box is designed to encourage the flourishing of an insect called mason bees. They're

a docile bee. They can sting but they almost never do so they're quite safe and they're easy

to encourage too which means that you have an opportunity to increase the number of insect

pollinators in your garden using this little house. Mason bees can be encouraged to take over

from honey bees and other pollinators which seem to be in decline so that's one reason you might

want to make this. Now the project is inspired by a professor here in Canada who has kind of

championed the cause of mason bees. Her name is Marguerite Daugherton and she offers these plastic

trays for sale and that's kind of a key part of this mason bee house as I will show you but you

buy the plastic trays but you make everything else. In fact these are these are made out of

fence board material so one by six cedar fence board material does a great job on this but let's

get right into it all by looking at the plans right now. So we got a cutaway view here showing

how everything fits together. I would strongly urge you to buy your trays before you start

building. There really is no substitute for building something out of wood around something

that you buy. Start with the something that you buy first because it'll be terribly disappointing

if you build this and find out that the trays can't fit in. It's very easy for things to get

too small even when you're working according to a plan so save yourself some potential grief and

get your trays first. The trays are interesting because you can't see it here in this drawing

but there each layer is split right through the middle of the holes so lots of layers here and the

idea there is so that you can you can take them apart you can at the end of the season in the

fall you slide out the trays and then you open them up and what you're looking for are the the

embryonic mason bees. They're they're in a kind of a kind of a cocoon like egg and you could leave

them over winter but the hatching rate is is much better if you take them out because you see how

long the like the tubes that are here in the tray they go all the way along the full length and a

mason bee female mason bee will will go all the way in and she'll lay an egg and then she'll seal

that egg behind some mortar that's why they're called mason bees a kind of a mortar that they

make with mud so you get your your egg some mud egg mud egg mud egg mud so you can have quite a

few eggs in there and the ones at the back are gonna have a hard time getting out when they

hatch and surviving so the idea is that when they've been laid and they're they're pupating

and it's that time of the year you can open this up and you can take the the little soon-to-be

mason bees and you set them on top of this shelf and they sit there over winter they're protected

but notice here at the front you see how the sides don't come right down to this inner top

there's a little little gap here and that means when the when the roof goes on when the removable

roof goes on there's still a little slot here a little opening so that when the mason bees do

finally emerge as adults they can get out so they'll spend the whole winter here sheltered

everything's great and then they can fly out when they want to after they've hatched so that's that's

the scoop the top as I said is removable it sits on these dowel pins but no glue the dowel pins are

sufficiently tight in the holes that it holds the lid on without falling off now there's a feature

here which is not necessary but makes the house look much nicer and that's you see there's a

rounded edge here on the front of this piece rounded edge rounded edge rounded edge rounded

edge all around the lid too that's done with a router in a router table and it really does make

things look nicer you could leave them square if you're looking for a way to simplify this project

that's a good way to do that everything should be held together everything except the lid of

course should be held together with weatherproof glue regular wood glue regular carpenters glue is

not weatherproof and it will go mushy and soft and it will let go if it's exposed to moisture

for a long period of time after it has dried but there is a whole class of very similar looking

glues that are called cross-linking glues so they look just like regular wood glue it could

it could be yellowish or brownish in color except after this glue has dried a chemical change occurs

making it completely waterproof after a dry so you get the best of all worlds you got water

cleanup while the stuff is still wet but complete reliability when it comes to outdoor applications

so what could be better than that works very well you still want to use some nails not because you

really need them so much with the glue but it certainly does help with assembly and you don't

want to just use regular finishing nails because they will rust and the rust will stream down and

it'll look ugly and be surprised how quickly those nails let go to they just rust right through so

get yourself some stainless steel nails how they work well they never rust they drive just the

same it just it's it's a little thing but makes the project much better as far as mounting this

goes you want to mount it to a post or tree or something like that we have ours well the photo

you saw previously was was of ours where it is where it lives which is screwed to the side of a

bird feeder that we have in the middle of a perennial garden at our house so you want to

drive a screw up here at the top you can take the lid off take the top off drive a screw in the back

you can drive a screw on the extension part of the bottom there is there's enough room to drive

one in up at a bit of an angle through here to stop it from flopping around and then that's about

it you just take your trays out in the fall do your maintenance clean them out get them ready

for the next spring and it's amazing how you can encourage mason bee populations in your area I

don't have any numbers on the increase but I just I noticed that there's more basic mason bee activity

around than there used to be since we've got our house in place mason bee activity is you can see

it because they'll find a little hole anywhere and they'll they'll lay an egg put some mason some

other mortar in it another egg just like I told you before except they'll do it in different

places too so we've got mason bees and plenty of them around here lots of flowers our raspberries

in our gardens set fruit incredibly well so just a nice harmonious partnering with nature which is

a wonderful thing to do with a woodworking project