Bee hotels vs bare ground
Bee hotels serve about a quarter of bee species. Bare sunny soil serves about seventy per cent, costs nothing, and almost nobody provides it.
Which to choose
Do both, and if you only do one, leave the ground bare. A square metre of undisturbed south-facing soil supports more bee species than any hotel. If you do put up a hotel, use tubes from 2 mm to 10 mm — most commercial hotels only offer 8 mm and miss the small specialists entirely — and clean or replace them every year or two.
Why these get compared
Bee hotels are the default nesting intervention and they are visible, purchasable and satisfying. The more effective intervention is invisible and looks like neglect, which is why it is rarely done.
Where they differ
| Axis | Bee hotel | Bare ground | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| Species served | Cavity nesters — mason bees, leafcutters, resin bees, scissor bees | Ground nesters — mining bees, plasterer bees, most sweat bees | Roughly 30% of species against roughly 70%. |
| Cost | Anything from nothing to a great deal | Nothing | A bundle of cut hollow stems works as well as a bought hotel and frequently better. |
| Effort | Buy or build, site correctly, clean annually | Stop doing something | The ground intervention is entirely subtractive: no mulch, no fabric, no planting, no digging. |
| Failure modes | Wrong tube sizes, no cleaning, damp siting, decorative designs that do not work | Being tidied, mulched, paved or planted over | Uncleaned bee hotels become parasite and disease reservoirs, which makes a badly managed hotel worse than none. |
| Visibility | High — you can watch it work | Low — it looks like a neglected patch | This is most of why the wrong one gets chosen. |
| What it needs | Tubes 2-10 mm, 15 cm deep, south-east facing, dry, firm; mud within 50 m | South-facing, unmulched, sparsely vegetated, undisturbed, not compacted | Both have specific requirements that are frequently missed. |
Where the difference is overstated
The bee hotel. It is genuinely useful and it is not the main event, and its popularity has a good deal to do with being a purchasable object. Bee bricks in particular have limited evidence behind them and are frequently sited badly.
Sources
- Field Guide to the Bees of Great Britain and Ireland — Bloomsbury (2015) · Field guide
- Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production — Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) (2016) · Systematic review Link
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.