One of the ‘50 things to do before you’re 11¾’ is make a home for a wild animal. This May half term visitors to Trerice, an Elizabethan manor house in Cornwall, can tick this off their list by making a bee hotel.

With the decline in bee-friendly habitats it’s become especially important to look after natural spaces. At Trerice, the garden team make sure there are plenty of bee-friendly plants like lavender in the Knot Garden.

Planting wildflowers feeds the bees, but they still need a place to rest. Solitary bees make individual nests using brick walls, the stems of dead flowers and bits of leaves; and the volunteers at Trerice will be showing how to replicate these temporary homes by using pipe and bamboo sticks. The bee hotels can then be taken home to hang in dry space in the garden.

The activity will run from 11am to 4pm on Tuesday 29 and Wednesday 30 May.