French Opportunities ...

Winding roads take us past cherry orchards, spas with their past glory and many waterfalls. With our friends Mike & Annelies, we ride the 120-kilometre signposted Route des Chalots. Chalots are typical typicaltraditional wooden sheds in the Vosges Mountains where, in former times, grain & flour were stored. With Mike & Annelies in their fast Mercedes G and us in the VW Pick-up, we whizz trough the route. Vesta sits in the back with het head out the window and her hair in the wind, enjoying. Along the way, we regularly stop at collapsed sheds to score old ridge and roof tiles, slate and bricks with cavities. Vesta can then wander around immediately😎. The French, when clearing collapsed sheds, use the old tiles and bricks to pave their path, among other things. By Dutch standards, it takes a long time to clean up after that. For us, however, the ruins offer great opportunities. As ruins in the landscape, as breeding grounds for many insects and animal life, but also for us. We are always looking for unusual materials, in this particular case for a roof over our newly built bee hotel.

The perfect model.

Once back in the Netherlands, it has become time to figure out what that bee hotel should look like.Once again, we get in the car and tour our own country for inspiration. Maasbommel, Zuid Limburg, Veluwe, we’ve seen half of the Netherlands by now, with Vesta in the back seat of course. Finally… on one of the routes, we drive past the bee hotel that is the model for our own creation, but with a French roof, of course.

At home, Theo, the home gardener, makes a scale drawing and there is some haggling between us because we both have our own ideas 😍. Though Douglas fir posts are ordered, the trailer is put inside and serves as a workbench. Screws, a charged battery for the drill and Theo can get to work 💪.

Royal placement.

Friend Ben, in exchange for an orange tompouce and a Weizenbier, is on hand on King’s Day to put the bee hotel in the right place. It took us a while to figure out where the more than man-sized hotel will be placed. And yes, we did! In a plant box in the back part of the meadow and of course with the front facing south as much as possible, that’s where wild bees like 🐝🐝🐝🐝🐝.

And then there’s the filling of the boxes, which is another job for Theo. Drilling holes in many different but correctlysized blocks of bankirai and trunks of acacia wood. I fill old French resin jars with straw and go buy the wooden butterfly and flower-shaped models at the Boerenbond near here for decoration, I just need to hang these up.

A large proportion, 70&, nest in sandly soil in a sunny spot. To create a nesting opportunity in the ground, we have made a steel container that keeps the sand in place. The container is filled with light loamy sand.

Now our bee hotel stands proudly in the meadow and I’ve already seen the first bees buzzing around 😉. Will you come and have a look at BoksheideBuiten?