Bee Hotel

With the recent decline of the European honey bee, it is more important than ever to encourage the activity of other native pollinators to keep your flowers beautiful and your grains and produce plentiful. In Attracting Native Pollinators, you’ll find ideas for building nesting structures and creating a welcoming habitat for an array of diverse pollinators that includes not only bees, but butterflies, moths, and more. Take action and protect North America’s food supply for the future, while at the same time enjoying a happily bustling landscape.

As concern about the welfare of our bee populations grows, it is clear that action is needed, not only on a national level but also in on an individual basis, in our own back gardens. Nurturing your own insect population is of huge benefit to your garden, as well as the bees, with beneficial insects keeping pests down and encouraging plant growth and propagation. In Bee Hotel, you’ll discover what wild bees and others need the most, and how you can provide it by building them a home. From a ‘one-hour hotel’ to a true ‘romantic retreat’, here you’ll find numerous ideas for creating insect dwellings, whether you live in a flat with a balcony, a town house with a terrace, or have a suburban or countryside garden. With step-by-step instructions, material checklists and exact dimensions for the individual parts, you can get started straight away.

Discover more about our fuzzy little insect friends with award-winning author and illustrator Charlotte Milner. The perfect introduction to bee conservation for little ones. Learn all about the beautiful world of bees and their adventure from flower to flower. You'll find out just how much they matter, why they are declining, and what we can do to help in this adorable kids' ebook. Bees are brilliant at building, super social creatures and along with other insects, are responsible for a third of every mouthful of food you eat! Children will be fascinated by the beautiful pictures and learn plenty of buzz-worthy fun facts in every chapter, covering types of bees, beehives, beekeeping, how they pollinate plants and make honey. A beautiful kid’s educational ebook about bees with a crucial message: not only does it inform and educate about an issue that is a real threat, but it also delivers it in a way that is gripping for all ages. A dazzling celebration of bees, packaged in a gorgeous ebook with spectacular illustrations. What’s The Buzz About Honey Bees? Meet the humble honeybee face-to-face - an animal that is considered nature's hardest worker, in this engaging, educational kids’ ebook that you can treasure forever. What do they do all day? Why are bees important? Find out why they need our help and what you can do. Bees are responsible for so much more than making honey. This ebook is an essential tool in encouraging the protection of our precious buzzing friends for generations to come. Learn all about these valuable creatures: - What happens in the hive - What pollination is - Who the queen is - How honeybees talk to each other - How we can help them and much, much more! This adorable book is one of three children's books on conservation by award-winning author Charlotte Milner and includes The Sea Book and The Bat Book for your little ones to enjoy.

The Bee Book shows you step-by-step how to create a bee-friendly garden, get started in beekeeping, and harness the power of honey for well-being. Fully illustrated with full-color photographs throughout, this beautiful guide covers everything you need to know to start your own backyard hive, from setup to harvest. Practical beekeeping techniques are explained with clear step-by-step sequences, photos, and diagrams so you'll be prepared to establish your own colony, deal with diseases, collect a swarm, and much more. A comprehensive gardening chapter features planting plans to fill container and border gardens, bee "hotel" and habitat projects, and an at-a-glance flower gallery of bees' favorite plants. The Bee Book also shows you how to harvest honey, beeswax, and propolis from the hive and use these ingredients in 38 recipes for home remedies, beauty treatments, and candle-making. Discover the wonder of bees in nature, in your garden, and in the hive with The Bee Book.

Bees are a fascinating and indispensable group of insects, but many species are in decline, and efforts to help determine distributions and changes in abundance have to date been compromised by a serious lack of identification resources. This book is from author Steven Falk, who is a professional naturalist and conservationist with over forty years' experience of working with bees. It is a comprehensive introduction to bee classification, ecology, field techniques and recording, a full glossary, and information on how to separate the sexes and distinguish bees from other insects. Also included are introductions to families and genera, describing key characters and life histories, as well as detailed species descriptions covering field and microscopic characters, similar species, variants, flight season, habitat, flowers visited, nesting habits, status & distribution, and parasites & associates. A series of innovative illustrated keys to genera and species are designed to guide the user step by step through the identification process. The book is illustrated with over 1,000 colour and black and white artworks by Richard Lewington, one of Europe's leading insect artists. It also includes stunning photographs of living insects as seen in the wild and 234 up-to-date distribution maps. This eagerly anticipated new addition to the highly acclaimed British Wildlife Field Guides series will unravel the complexities of identification, and is designed to cater for people new to the bee world as well as to more experienced recorders who wish to identify every species accurately. It provides the latest information on the identification, ecology, status and distribution of all 275 species of bee in Britain, Ireland and the Channel Islands.

• Author Dave Hunter is at the leading edge of bee and pollinator issues • Mason bees are part of the solution to honeybees’ decline • No other bee book addresses the topic with such depth and interest • Includes useful information about leafcutter bees too! The national media regularly features dire stories on honeybee colony collapse and its danger to our food supply. But there's another, unsung bee that has the potential to save the planet—the mason bee. Mason Bee Revolution explains how docile, hard-working, solitary mason bees (and their compatriots, the leafcutter bees) are even more productive pollinators than honeybees, and keeping them can be a fun, easy, backyard hobby for gardeners, conservationists, foodies, and families everywhere. Why these bees? Bee pollination is critical for about 80 percent of US agricultural crops, increasing crop value by an estimated $15 billion annually. Since 2006, nearly a third of all honeybee hives have been lost each year, due to parasites, pesticides, habitat loss, climate change, and a newer malady called Colony Collapse Disorder. While scientists search for answers to save the honeybee, Dave Hunter and his company, Crown Bees, are leading the effort to increase the population of other highly efficient pollinators: One mason bee can produce twelve pounds of cherries, via pollination, where it would take sixty honey bees to achieve the same. Mason Bee Revolution is an easy-to-follow guide to keeping both mason and leafcutter bees. It tells you how to set up, care for, and harvest your own bees and what types of plants and habitat encourage mason and leafcutter bees, as well as provides general information on other common pollinators and bee-related facts, projects, and personalities.

Combining the expertise of many of Australia’s leading native bee researchers, this book is a guide to observing and keeping Australia’s broad range of native bee species. Australian Native Bees, now in a slightly updated new edition, provides a wealth of advice on how you can support and enjoy our native bees, whether you grow broad-acre crops or have an urban backyard. You can learn about: • how bees build nests, forage and provide crucial pollination services • how you can examine and recognise our solitary and semi-social bees: blue banded bees, teddy bear bees, carpenter bees, leafcutters, resin bees, cuckoo bees and more • urban bee ecology • how to build a bee hotel • how to keep the popular stingless bees in specialised hives • the importance of native bees and other crop pollinators, and how managed native bees can be used to pollinate crops • bee biosecurity.