New bee hotel opens for business in Santa Fe

SANTA FE, N.M. – We know bees love lavender and now many of them have a new place to stay up in Santa Fe that’s just for them.

A bee hotel is now open for business along the Santa Fe river near east Alameda and Camino Escondido. It’s also a functional work of art, providing solitary bees a place to nest and lay their eggs. 

“And so 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,” said Elizabeth Jacobson with Poetry Pollinators. 

Julie Chase-Daniel and Jacobson and started “Poetry Pollinators” and Eco-Poetry Public Art Initiative that donated the bee hotel to the city. 

It’s made from a 2,000 pound section of an old cotton wood tree removed from the Rose Park last fall in poor health. It’s now getting a second life, giving life to native bees that in turn give life to native plants. 

“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,” said Chase-Daniel.  

Jacobson and Chase-Daniel say the bee hotel not only helps the native bee population thrive – it also helps educate the public about the importance of preserving the important species.

It has one panel for education 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. Just to support the overall environmental situation going on by the river – so it’s many fold – the project,” said Jacobson.