Green building for bees

AECB members Green&Blue create a range of products designed as nesting sites for vital pollinators, solitary bees. The Cornish design company have innovated bee brick, a concrete nesting site for solitary bees which can be used within construction, in place of a standard house brick or block, creating additional nesting and resting places for bees in the framework of
the house. They have been designed as a fit and forget component made from a standard building material, concrete, but created with nature very much in mind, and using waste aggregates from the China clay industry in the concrete mix.

Solitary bees don’t produce honey and don’t have a queen to protect, which means that they aren’t aggressive, most don’t even have a sting, so they are completely safe and indeed fascinating for children and pets.

Bee brick is already being specified in several major developments and is due to become a part of planning law when the new ‘biodiversity
supplementary planning’ document is adopted by Cornwall Council.

Green&Blue hope to use the AECB network to communicate further with the construction industry about considering biodiversity alongside sustainability within future developments. In order to see a real change for solitary bees and to avoid a natural disaster where pollination is undertaken by hand, as is already the case in some parts of China, we need to act now. Bee brick is a simple ‘why wouldn’t you?’ measure which can help.

This article is sponsored by Green and Blue