The OPAL West Midlands bee hotel project
Bees in declining numbers
You would have to have been living on Mars to have not noticed the huge amount of press coverage surrounding the recent decline of the Honeybee (Apis mellifera) due to colony collapse disorder. This has raised public awareness about the importance of bees in ecosystem functioning and crop production through their role as pollinators, and helped stimulate public interest in the conservation of bees.
Gardeners asked to help
As the pollination service provided by the Honeybee has declined in tandem with its numbers, the importance of species of wild bee as pollinators has come to the fore. Gardeners all around the country have been asking what they can do to help conserve and increase the abundance and diversity of our wild bee communities, which include around 250 different species in the UK.
The work of OPAL Laboratories
The Big Lottery funded Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) project aims to increase public awareness and understanding of their local green spaces and the wildlife that lives there through interactive, citizen science. OPAL activities in the West Midlands are run by researchers at The University of Birmingham who saw the perfect opportunity to raise public awareness of the importance of wild bees, whilst also researching the way they utilise the fractured habitat mosaic found in cities.
The Bee Hotel on Enta's Allotments
In early spring 2009, 140 bee hotels were installed in allotments - such as the Enta Allotments in Kingstanding - parks, gardens, urban farms and centres of environmental education in and around Birmingham in the West Midlands. These bee hotels were supplied by CJ Wildlife and designed to provide species of tube-nesting bees with extra nest sites. 
The clever bit about these bee hotels is that the tubes can easily be opened up revealing the cocoons of the bees inside. In early autumn 2009 the bee hotels will be collected and the cocoons will be identified and counted, before returning them back home to emerge in spring and summer of 2010.
OPAL Projects, Events and Training
OPAL West Midlands are running a range of free interactive projects, training, and events on groups as diverse as bees, birds, moths and bats. For more information on the project, or for further details of what you can do to help bees please see the OPAL West Midlands web page: www.opalwestmidlands.org
Bee Species and their Lifecycle
There are a number of different species of bee that will nest in tunnels and tubes, including different species of Leaf-cutter Bee (Megachile), the Sleepy Carpenter Bee (Chelostoma florisomne), different species of Sharp-tailed Cuckoo Bee (Coelioxys) and the Blue Mason Bee (Osmia caerulescens).
Each species has its own interesting lifecycle and nests in slightly different situations, using a range of nesting materials like chewed leaf, mud and leaf disks. However, the most well-known and familiar tube nesting species is the Red Mason Bee (Osmia rufa). Red Mason Bees emerge in spring.
The females find suitable nest sites and use mud to create dividing walls between nest cells. They then provision the nest cells with pollen and a little bit of nectar, and an egg is laid in each. Each egg hatches into a larva that eats the pollen provisions, grows to its full size and spins a tough cocoon around itself. Inside the cocoon it pupates and then turns into an adult, over-wintering as an adult inside the cocoon. Next spring the next generation of excellent bee pollinators emerge to start the whole process again.