A new "bee hotel" is all the buzz in Santa Fe.
Located along the Santa Fe River near east Alameda and Camino Escondido, the bee hotel, according to KOB4 News, is made from a 2,000-pound section of an old cottonwood tree removed from Rose Park last fall because of poor health. It now serves as a beautiful piece of creative architecture that creates a breeding home for native bees, which in turn give life to native plants.
Julie Chase-Daniel and Elizabeth Jacobson started “Poetry Pollinators,” which donated the bee hotel to the city. According to its website, Poetry Pollinators is “an eco-poetry public art initiative dedicated to empowering poetry, art and education to bring back declining native bee populations and animating public spaces as ecological systems that support the flourishing of all species.”
Part of that flourishing is creating the bee hotel.
“What they do is they go into the pollinator house that we’ve made, and they have an area there that’s behind a screen that has wooden nesting material and tubes, and they’ll go in there and lay their egg and stuff that tube with pollen and seal it up,” Jacobson told KOB4 News.
Jacobson and Chase-Daniel said the bee hotel also helps educate the public about the importance of preserving the important species. “The native bees -- because they don’t hive or make honey, they don’t sting and they do pollinate a wider variety of plans than do honey bees,” Chase-Daniel told KOB4.
The carving in the tree includes two panels: one panel for education, discussing the bees, and one panel for a poem that will change seasonally.
“One of our main intentions is to raise awareness so that people can visit the site and see the structure and understand that these are imperiled, and perhaps that will help other people to create these houses or take care when they see creatures," Jacobson told KOB4 News.