“Insects, worms and other small animals that carry out vital functions for life on earth have declined by 45 percent average over 35 years, threatening humans, water quality and food supplies…”
“-Steve conner, Vital invertebrates decline 45 percent, study finds” indpendent.co.uk.July 2-14
Research Proposal & Brief Introduction
I plan to design a bug motel for solitary bees because over the years there have been many declines in the bug population due to agriculture and the use of chemical sprays. I hope to establish a colony of healthy Mason bees and other solitary bees in the motel I am creating. The bee population has been declining due to pesticides and this is creating a problem for our ecosystem. I hope that this motel will motivate and create an awareness to certain issues that affect our ecosystem and potentially our lives.
Issue Research
The Mason bees are the easiest type of bee to raise and they are very efficient in pollinating. 1 Mason bee can do the work of 100 honeybees. Compared to honey bees the Mason bees only venture about 100 feet from their homes while honey bees venture out around a 5-mile radius. This is one of the issues that farmers have when deciding one using the solitary bees compared to the honey bees. One easy solution would be to place solitary bee homes in a radius of about 100 feet apart form each other on the farmlands. With my motel I hope to concentrate solitary bees in this area so they can pollinate and live in a protected area.
There has been a decline in the 4000 species of bee population in the past few years. There are about 140 different species of Mason bees in North America and they are all solitary bees. Mason bees are solitary bees so they work for themselves and live independently compared to the honey bees who are used for their honey. The only negative thing about them is that they don’t make any honey. (gardeners.com) They are fairly friendly creatures if not trapped or squeezed so they would make amazing pollinators
in a garden or in a field of flowers or plants. 1/3 of all food depends on bees and other pollinating insects to pollinate. (sos-bees.org)
Solitary bees live prefer living in tubes with diameters around 5/16th of an inch and a length of 3 to 5 inches. Mason bees use mud as their doors for protection against predators and the elements.
Solitary bees will stock their tunnel homes with pollen and lays their eggs inside. When the larvae hatch they will eat the pollen and spin a cocoon over winter.
For the homes bamboo is often used. You can purchase cardboard tubes specifically for solitary bees. You can drill holes in a log and use that as their homes. Make sure there’s a way to clean the homes from time to time after seasons.
Initial Sketches and Final Preparatory Drawing
My design came to me randomly while I was thinking of a design for this project. I was looking for something that would be aesthetically pleasing and something simple. I ended up remembering a closet shoe hanger my girlfriend owns and I thought it was a convenient and simple looking design so I drew up some designs based off of that and out came this design. I like the minimal modern aesthetic look that it gives off with the natural wood finish. I drew out the design in my sketchbook and I labeled all the pieces I need to cut from the lumber pieces. I originally wanted the thickness of the boards to be 1” but, I made them thinner to ½” because the thickness of ½” should be able to handle the weight of the objects I’ll be placing in the interior of the box. I designed two boxes and both of them are rectangular. One box is 11” by 12” and the other is 11” by 8”. The bigger box will be on top while the smaller one will be on the bottom. I wanted to have the piece suspend from ropes connected to two bent steel rods but the problem with that would be the wind. It would probably blow all the decorations and objects inside the box away. So I took suggestions from my peers and decided to use four wooden poles to stabilize my piece to the ground.
Maintenance
My final thoughts would be, enjoyable, fun and I would do something like this again. I wish I could have gotten my wood boards earlier because the pieces I picked out were on the thinner side. I had to combine a few pieces of wood together just to create a side of a board. I would have liked to re do my measurements after changing the 1” width thickness to ½”. It shrunk everything down. I started my idea with a 2ft by 2ft box and a 8” by 1ft box but I thought it would be a little to heavy for the posts. I shrunk everything down by 6” and then I found out we had a limit to how much wood we can use so I cut that size down by another 6”. Other then that, everything else went smoothing. I learned new tools and techniques that I have never known or used before. Over all I would like to work with wood more and I am excited that this project is geared towards helping out our planet. We need to seek for better solutions and answers. The ones that doesn’t harm the planets ecosystem. We have to learn how to work with nature instead of just taking from it. I believe more projects to help the environment could help sustain our planet just a little bit longer.
Maintenance is fairly simple. They just have to take out the bamboo sticks and clean them. They have to clean the shells and the holes in the logs as well which should not take very long at all.