Living Skills: Building native bees and microbats habitats

Give a Christmas gift to the little garden helpers. What a way to say "Thank you" to all those native bees tirelessly pollinating your fruit trees and vegetables as well as those tiny bats eating your mosquitoes!

If you provide them with places to hide and breed, they will work even harder for you. You will have more fruit and less pesky nighttime flying insects. Just in time for the outdoors festive season, isn't it great?

After the workshop you will return home with bee and/or bat housing to hang in your garden.

We will make clay blocks with tunnels for blue-banded bees, bunches of soft-core twigs for reed bees, drilled hardwood blocks and bundles of hollow bamboo stalks for leafcutter bees. For the microbats we will build a lined polypipe shelter capped with a lid.

What to bring:

• a notebook to make notes
• if you have any, bring offcuts of polypipes (2-10 cm diameter for bees habitats or 1.2-1.4m piece of polypipe 10-15 cm wide for microbats roosting place). The polypipe caps are available from places like Bunnings for about $10-12.
  
• a wooden box 12-20 cm deep (like a small old drawer) may be used to pack it tight with various materials to create habitats for native bees (see the picture above)
  

Register by clicking on the "Register" button. If you have problems with registering, please email mmossakowska@yahoo.com.au