A Lifeline for New Zealand's Gardens? Why a Forgotten Hawke's Bay Craft May Be the Answer to the Bee Crisis on Our Doorstep

In a timber-and-iron shed in Havelock North, below Te Mata Peak, Bruce Gillespie has spent more than four decades building homes for New Zealand's wild bees. Now, at 74, he is laying down his tools for good. His final run of “Bee Bach” bee hotels is his legacy to the small solitary bees that quietly do the work in Hawke's Bay's gardens. After this batch, there will never be another one from Bruce's bench.

Havelock North, Just After Seven: Where Time Still Smells of Cedar Shavings

The shed measures barely 34 square metres. Corrugated iron, a roller door that opens onto the apple trees, an old wood burner ticking in the corner. Tools hang on every wall, their handles worn smooth by fifty years of use. Bruce doesn't look up. He is drawing a thin, dry flax stalk slowly through a nesting tunnel no wider than a pencil.

“It's not stopping work that bothers me,” he says. “It's what I hear when I step outside. Twenty years ago the apple trees down this road were humming every spring. Now some mornings I stand at the bottom of the section in full blossom and it's quiet. Properly quiet. That's what keeps me up at night.”

The Silenced Hum on Our Doorstep

In April 2000, the varroa mite was found in Auckland. Within a few years it had wiped out most of the wild honeybee colonies living in the bush. Since then, much of the pollination in home gardens has fallen to New Zealand's small solitary bees — 28 native species, plus a handful of introduced ones.

Then came the 14th of February 2023. Cyclone Gabrielle buried whole orchards in the Esk Valley and around Hastings under silt. The trees were dug out by hand. The fence posts, dead wood and hollow stems the bees had nested in for decades went out on the same trucks as the mud.

“Everyone was digging silt off the trees,” Bruce says. “Nobody was looking for the holes the bees lived in. The water went down in a week. The bees' homes never came back.”

The Numbers Nobody in New Zealand Can Ignore

Most of the Bee Hotels Sold in New Zealand Are Death Traps

Walk into any garden centre and you'll find dozens of so-called bee hotels. Stacked bamboo. Pine blocks with holes drilled in. Little painted houses stuffed with straw. “People buy these with the best of intentions,” Bruce says. “But what they bring home isn't a habitat — it's an ornament. And a lot of the time, it's a trap.” Over four decades he has seen the same five mistakes again and again:

The Fence Posts at Twyford: How a Joiner Who Nearly Burnt the Bees' Homes Spent 42 Years Building Them New Ones

Bruce never set out to become a bee man. He was a joiner — apprenticed at sixteen to a building firm in Hastings. Fifty years of windows, staircases, kitchens and old villas brought back to life. Honest work with honest timber. And, for the orchardists out on the Plains, a good many fences and packing sheds.

In the spring of 1984 he was pulling out an old macrocarpa fence for a grower near Twyford. The posts were riddled with beetle holes. “I had the first one on the trailer for the burn pile,” he says, turning a cedar board over in his hands. “Then I saw these tiny black bees with little yellow faces coming out of the borer holes. Dozens of them. Native masked bees. They'd been living in that fence longer than I'd been alive.” He pauses. “I nearly burnt their whole village. I put that post in the corner of the paddock instead.”

That weekend he drilled a scrap of timber and stood it beside the old post. Within a fortnight, three of the holes were sealed. “And I thought — if it's that easy, why does nobody do it properly?”

For sixteen years it stayed a hobby. A few blocks on the shed wall, a few for the neighbours. Then, in 2000, varroa arrived. Within a couple of seasons the wild honeybees that had lived in the hollow trees along the Tukituki were gone. “That first spring after, the orchard down the road was still flowering like mad,” Bruce remembers. “But the hum was thinner. And the only bees I could find working the blossom were the little ones coming out of my blocks. That's when I stopped calling it a hobby.”

He varied tunnel depths a few millimetres at a time. Tried pine, rimu, macrocarpa and eucalyptus before settling on cedar. Compared notes with the bee people at the regional council and the growers who relied on them. His section became a research station — dozens of prototypes on fence posts, apple trees and the shed wall, each one logged in a school exercise book with the date, the species and how many tunnels were sealed. Ngaire, his wife, still teases him that the exercise books take up more room in the house than her cookbooks.

Then came Gabrielle. Bruce's shed, up on the slope, stayed dry. Half the orchards he had built fences for over forty years did not. For weeks he was out with a shovel alongside everyone else, digging silt away from the trunks. “You'd look along a row and every post, every old stump, every pile of prunings was either buried or carted off,” he says quietly. “That's when I knew the last few years of my working life were going to be about this. Putting the homes back.”

The result, after 42 years of trial and refinement, is what he calls the Bee Bach. A bach is a Kiwi holiday home — small, simple, built to last, and back in use every summer. It is the sum of four decades of watching. A home built on what the bees actually do — not on what looks nice in a shop.

The Bee Bach Principle: Why Every Detail Decides Whether the Brood Survives

“I've Got Hotels Out There That Have Been Occupied Every Spring for Over 20 Years”

Bruce reaches for an exercise book above the bench and finds an entry from 2003. “Built this one for a grower out at Pakowhai. Same north wall of his packing shed. He lost half his trees to the silt in 2023 — the shed wall stayed dry. His daughter sent me a photo last November. Every tunnel sealed. Every single spring since 2003.”

He closes the book. “That's the best reward there is. Not the money. Knowing something I made with these hands is still giving bees a home twenty years on.”

What Happens on the Fence Every Spring

Each female fills tunnel after tunnel: pollen, one egg, a partition, the next cell — until she seals the entrance with cut leaf or a thin, papery cap. The brood stays safe inside the cedar until the following spring.

What Gardeners Are Saying About Bruce's Bee Bach

The Questions Bruce Gets Asked at the Shed Door

Will the bees sting my grandkids or the dog?

“Solitary bees have no hive to defend, so there's no reason to be aggressive. You can sit right next to the hotel with a cuppa and watch them. Forty years, never been stung once.”

Won't it bring wasps onto the deck?

“The German and common wasps that wreck a barbecue nest in the ground and in roof spaces. They've no interest in a narrow cedar tunnel. Not one customer has ever told me otherwise.”

Where should I hang it?

“North or north-east facing, morning sun, about chest height. And leave it out all year — the bees inside need the cold to come out on time in spring.”

The End of an Era — and Your Last Chance

In the autumn after Gabrielle, Bruce spent six weeks helping a neighbour dig silt out of his orchard. On the last day he came off a ladder and tore the rotator cuff in his right shoulder. He can still saw at bench height. But the fine work — holding a slim rasp out at arm's length and dressing a tunnel until it's glass-smooth — needs a steady arm. His won't hold still any more.

“Ten seconds with my arm out and the rasp starts to wander,” he says. “You can't dress a bee's tunnel with a shaky hand. If I can't do it right, I won't do it at all.”

His son Blair flies helicopters in Rotorua. There is no apprentice, no successor. What remains are the last Bee Baches on the shed shelves — the final pieces that will ever come from Bruce Gillespie's hands.

“It Was Never About the Money. It's About the Bees.”

Bruce could charge more. The cedar and the hand-folded copper alone would justify twice the price. But he has kept the price for the final run deliberately low. Not as a sale. As a gesture.

“I don't need the money,” he says. “I need these up on fences where they'll do what they were made for. I want bees nesting in them before Christmas, and kids asking their nana what's going on in there.”

His granddaughter Libby, 27, looks after the online side. “People send us photos of sealed tunnels and kids' drawings of the bees,” she says. “That's what makes it worth it.”

The Bee Bach Bee Hotel: The Facts at a Glance

Where Can You Get the Original?

The Bee Bach is available exclusively through Craft Folk, the small online shop Libby runs for her grandfather. You won't find it on Trade Me or at any garden centre. “If it doesn't come from Craft Folk,” Bruce says, “it isn't mine.”

When the Last One Leaves the Shed — the Workshop Closes for Good

Nesting season is under way right now. A hotel hung this month can be occupied within weeks. And the shelves in Bruce's shed get emptier every week. There won't be a second run. When the last Bee Bach leaves the shed, 42 years of handcraft come to an end.

“I want every last one to find a garden,” Bruce says. “A north-facing fence, a bit of morning sun, and someone who cares enough to put it up. The bees will do the rest.”

Try It Risk-Free: The 100% Satisfaction Guarantee

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