Bee Hotels in GMU’s Innovation Food Forest

Bees play an important ecological role in terrestrial ecosystems as pollinators where they assist with the fertilization of plant species. Due to unsustainable use of pesticides, agricultural practices and habitat loss, native bee populations have been steadily decreasing. In an effort to maintain and promote native bee populations, George Mason University’s Office of Sustainability built bee hotels in the Innovation Food Forest to provide an area for native bees to live. However, bee hotels on GMU’s campus have not been properly maintained and are in need of serious repair, thus impeding native bee populations. The construction of the bee hotels would serve two main functions: immediate aid to the native bees on GMU’s Fairfax campus and showing the local community the importance of native bees to the local ecosystem. The two bee hotels on the Fairfax campus will be replaced and a volunteer program will be created on campus to enable future maintenance of the bee hotels.

Hello, we are team beelonging, and this is a quick summary of our START project: Bee Hotels in the GMU Innovation Food Forest.

The problem we faced was the decline of local bee populations on campus due to habitat loss and pesticides. These bees either assist or are essential to the local plant population’s fertilization process and so are essential to SDG 15: life on land. To counter the declining bee populations, bee hotels can be built to provide optimal nesting material and shelter. However, despite a number of these hotels being built on campus, they have fallen into disrepair.

The root cause of this issue can be traced to either a lack of volunteer help maintaining the hotels or the poor materials used in the hotel construction. In order to combat these issues, we developed five action plans. From these plans, we took bits and pieces from each to make what we believed was the best course of action: research the optimal bee hotel design and replace the new hotels with old ones. Plans to introduce volunteer work to upkeep the hotels would have to come later, as replacing the hotels already took up plenty of time.

I’m going to talk about some of the milestones we achieved while working on this project. At the beginning of the semester, we began by assessing the location and damage to the bee hotels in the Innovation Food Forest and compiling information from the literature and prior bee hotel projects to get adequate background information. We then worked on getting funding to purchase the bee hotels and other necessary materials by applying to George Mason’s Patriot Green Fund. While we were working on completing the green fund application and waiting for it to get approved, we met with experts such as German Perilla who is the Director of the Honey Bee Initiative. He provided us with useful recommendations on the proper placement and materials for bee hotels. We also worked on creating a guidebook that details all of the information my team has collected from the literature and experts on the proper placement, design, and maintenance for the bee hotels. We plan to pass this information on to the next group who will hopefully take on this project.

The actions we took mainly consisted of contacting professionals on campus, such as German Perilla or Donielle Nolan, to collect data on a better hotel design and where to put them. In addition, we collected data from research papers, such as Fortel’s paper comparing a number of preexisting bee hotel designs. The rest of our time was spent applying for the Patriot Green Fund, which would fund the project.

So based off our research and meetings with experts, we found that the best time to install the hotels was late February or March. The best place for them is in the Innovation Food Forest where there is adequate sunlight and that the hotels face south for maximum exposure. We also found that natural materials are better, and that tubing needs to fit certain dimensions to increase the likelihood that native species will utilize the hotels.

We decided to not install the hotels ourselves because the timing was not right to place them in the Food Forest based on our research. We decided that it would be best to develop a guidebook that can be used as a reference for groups or volunteers to both install and maintain the bee hotels in the future. We also thought using premade hotels would be easier and cheaper pilot study to implement if the bee hotels will have a positive impact.

The biggest lesson that we learned was that initial plans may not be entirely feasible, and that it is important to be able to adapt those plans to ensure that our goals may be accomplished in the future. This realization also gave us a better understanding of sustainability in action because the most important aspect is that it can be continued and expanded on. Lastly, it is important for us to record our obstacles and how they were overcome so that future groups have access to those solutions if the same obstacles happen again.

The next steps for this project include determining the locations in the Innovation Food Forest where the bee hotels should be placed, confirming which bee hotels should be purchased, and then to actual implement the project by installing the bee hotels in the spring and ensuring that there is a plan for perpetual maintenance. Some recommendations we have for the next group is to purchase bee hotels instead of constructing homemade ones, look into placing the bee hotels on platforms instead of just nailing them to trees, maintain contact with the Office of Sustainability to see if you could possibly coordinate a volunteer program with them, and to create maintenance log to ensure that the bee hotel tubes are replaced on time. Thank you for listening to our presentation and I hope you learned something new about this project to aid the native bees on campus.