Saving native bees, one ‘hotel’ at a time

ANIMALS

Australian ecologist Clancy Lester travels from town to town across the country building bee ‘hotels’ and educating the public on the importance of making room for native insects, many of which are in decline. Australia has a high prevalence of solitary native bee species — bees that don’t live in colonies or hives and potentially don’t even make honey and his dream is to ensure no more go extinct.

Lester’s interest in entomology was first ignited when he embedded himself with the Yolŋu (pronounced YOL-gn-oo) people in the Northern Territory and saw firsthand how their livelihoods were affected by declines in native bee species. Annual harvests of honey from native bee species not only represent a happy and nutritious part of traditional diets but are also a feature in traditional songs and fables.

Declines in the populations of honey-making bees, which Lester says is due to a combination of habitat loss and over-application of pesticides in agriculture, is slowly robbing this and future generations of Yolŋu people of their birthright. Seeing empty hives, Lester told ABC News, lit a “fire in his belly”.

These days, Lester runs school workshops and community-based conservation projects teaching people how they can make room for bees, either by planting native species and converting nature strips and road verges into native floral beds — or building bee ‘hotels’ (see below).

“It’s one of the simplest ways of simulating, as best as we can, the natural environment where native bees and other insects will nest in,” Lester says. “Then, when [a bee] goes into someone’s garden, it might start to see little bits of leaf from a leaf cutter bee or some tree sap from a resin bee, and that gets them to engage and stay connected with native pollinators.”

Lester has put together a number of online resources about how to build one of these  ‘hotels’, 800 of which he has overseen across Australia.

TOP Clancy Lester (second from right) with the Yolŋu

ABOVE TOP Clancy Lester giving a school presentation

PHOTOS Clancy Lester/ABC

ABOVE BOTTOM A bee hotel

PHOTO Clancy Lester

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