Most of our effort to make our gardens wildlife friendly is expended in selecting, planting and nurturing appropriate local native plants, and incorporating elements to provide habitat and protection for native animals and other life forms.
We can also introduce purpose designed nest boxes to compensate for the loss of natural nesting hollows due to clearing of all our old growth forest.
Another thing we can do is to directly introduce living creatures into the garden, and one of the easiest of these to live with are Australian Native bees.
All you need to do is obtain a populated bee box and place it properly oriented into your garden, and nature will do the rest.
The bee box shown in this article is insulated with a foam polystyrene cover in order to even out temperature fluctuations, hence the white colour. If you don’t want a white box in your garden, then just paint the sleeve with paint suitable for polystyrene, some weeks before transferring live bees to allow for volatiles to be given off without harming the bees.
The only other thing you may do from time to time is to separate the hive that has developed in your box, and this will be the topic of the October Urban Wildlife Gardens workshop advertised in this Newsletter.
Tony Haslam