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bee houses, bees, birds, build your own bee house, cool beehouse ideas, cool birdhouse ideas, cool birdhouse plans, native bees, solitary bees, unique bee houses, unique birdhouses
I was once an architecture major, which I gave up for teaching, but I have a pretty big library of architecture books, and one of my favorites is Designing Your Natural House, by Charles G. Woods and Malcolm Wells. It’s both very architectural- meaning the art- and useful, meaning a regular person who wants to design a beautiful something (shed, house, etc.) can use the book to do so. The illustrator of the book, Malcolm Wells, a pioneering underground architect, has another book of birdhouse designs calledĀ Build a Better Birdhouse, and it opened my mind to the architectural possibilities of birdhouses, and bees houses as well. By bee houses I think I really meanĀ nests: bee hives for honeybees are actually pretty tightly constrained design-wise (though I’ve been having some thoughts about that recently), but nesting structures for native solitary bees are very architecturally flexible. Here’s some of what I’ve done, for the birds and the bees:
The above was the first birdhouse I made. I got the dimensions from a little book called The Complete Book of Birdhouse Construction for Woodworkers by Scott D. Campbell, which has this great table with suggested house and opening sizes for all kinds of cavity nesting birds. I sized this one specifically for owls, and gosh darn if one didn’t move in:
That’s a Western Screech Owl.
Here are several more birdhouses. A very vertical one:
I like the next one a lot. Makes me think of Greece. The sparrows don’t seem to mind the larger hole, but it does seem to make them vulnerable to roadrunner predation:
This was an experiment to see if a bird that normally is not a cavity-nester might choose to nest on a structure instead of on a branch. Didn’t work:
This next one is my favorite. I love the long willow branches sticking out below:
We are beekeepers, and along with honeybee hives we try to support native solitary bees with nesting sites. Costco sells some good ones, but I’ve started making some, too. This was the first one:
And here is the most recent, finished just today:
There are two different hole sizes. All of these, the birdhouses and the bee nesting structures, were made out of scrap wood and other odds and ends lying around in the yard. Or other people’s yards.