Buginn Bee Hotel
Let’s create a buzz

Order a Buginn Bee Hotel in the Dutch webshop

 

About Buginn

Design-for-nature startup Buginn presents a beautiful construction element that saves bees. We call it The Five Star Hotel.

The basic idea behind the product is twofold. Provide a safe nesting place for bees and other pollinators that can be implemented on a large scale in public space projects. Secondly, make the concrete jungle around us more natural and refined. Many years of research and development resulted in a product that is both beautiful and functional.

Dutch webshop

Directly order a Bee Hotel

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84%
of crops is bee pollinated
181
species on Dutch Red List

 

55%
pollinators endangered
1
solution

Buginn is a product of ecological gardener Babako and Dutch design agency Studio Überdutch.

Double room


Buginn has been developed with a scientific approach. The product consists of a few important parts; a concrete base, several core materials, and a concrete front. The concrete base is functioning as a constructive element for building retaining walls, garden borders, and sound barriers. The base will be finished with a beautiful design front, giving the final product an esthetic look. Besides giving a uniform look to the wall, the front also prevents insect eating birds like woodpeckers raiding the nests. Depending on the size of a project, fronts can be produced according to customer wishes with different colours/textures/solutions. Buginn is the first mass produced insect hotel that can be used on a high level of urbanization and is designed to function for a longer timespan given the right maintenance.

Single room


Behind the design fronts will be the core materials. Within the core material you’ll find the actual nesting holes. Buginn offers space for different materials to satisfy the needs of different species. In a project, it’s possible to use several different setups for core materials to give a wide variety of pollinators a preferred habitat. The cores can be made out of locally known materials to have a familiar touch. When cores are exhausted or overused, they can easily be cleaned or replaced with new ones, so nature can continue its work once again. Because of this modular design, Buginn is a sustainable solution for every public or consumer project that wants to help pollinators and the worldwide decreasing biodiversity.

Bee Flat


Specially for projects where no building works is included, Buginn offers a free-standing Bee Flat.  Based on a Corten steel sleeve, 4 Bee Hotel modules are placed on a riser to create an architectural column that perfectly matches modern public spaces.

Wall


Because of its shape and material, Bee hotel is ideal for building a wall or other separation.
By using whole and half stone, it is possible to create a stretching bond.

Technical data


General specifications:
Length: 387 mm
Width: 216 mm
Height: 187 mm
Colour: Gray
Weight: 25 kg

Core materials:
Wood: FSC certified wood, pre-drilled
Bamboo: FSC certified bamboo from local origin
Cane: In several diameters
Loam: From EU soil, focused on gnawing insects

Science behind Buginn

Science
Endangered habitat
Current solutions

Science

40% of all pollinators like bees and butterflies are threatened with distinction; this could have a drastic negative impact on biodiversity. But it also impacts humans directly; roughly three-quarters of or agricultural products are dependent on these pollinators. Without pollination there won’t be any crops, without crops there won’t be any food. The last decennium there was a lot of international attention for the honeybee because whole colonies would disappear without nameable cause, the so-called Colony Collapse Disorder. Less known is the fact that solitary bees in the wild are also facing distinction. Solitary bees live by themselves; the searching for food, preparing a nest and laying of the eggs, they will do everything in absence of others. In the Netherlands and Flanders alone there are 360 known species of solitary bees, of which no less than 56% are on the Red List of endangered species.

Endangered habitat

Especially the loss of suitable habitat is to blame on human, because of ever increasing urbanization there will be less and less natural habitat for the solitary bee. The many species of solitary bees are very distinct in appearance and behavior. The different species can have particular preferences on the type of flowers and places to build a nest. Some of them prefer to dig nesting holes in the sandy ground, others in dead wood. Cavities in a brick wall, walls of clay and hollow grass are the chosen shelter for others. In general solitary bees are best of finding their suitable habitat in a messy environment. The current situation in modern urbanization is that more and more streets, parks, and gardens are overly cultivated so a messy environment is difficult to find.

Current solutions

Fortunately, a stream of attention has come to this problem and in recent years solutions to help the solitary bee have come to the market. In many DIY-stores or garden centers, it’s now possible to buy insect hotels: a wooden house filled with bamboo, pinecone, and pieces of wood with drilled holes. Unfortunately, there is a number of reasons why these insect hotels don’t function properly. This could be the product itself, the way it is used or the scale of how the product is used.
Insect hotels are usually not designed for their intended purpose: holes are made too big for insects, edges are too rough for the delicate wings which get damaged, or the used materials are not right. Besides materials, the application is not easy to get right: hotels are not facing south or are not being cleaned properly. Current solutions are mainly focused on household consumers, there is the lack of a product that can easily be scaled up and tackle this problem with a bigger impact. Finally, the solutions now for sale lack a piece of finesse in design and look like they are homemade, making them less suitable for use in public spaces.

Downloads

New Bee Flat

Our easy to install bee hotel flat, check the product-leaflet here

Download here

Double Room hotel

Technical information, dimensions, options & examples.

Download here

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Contact us

Buginn (part of Studio Überdutch B.V.)
Lulofsstraat 55 | 2521AL | The Hague

+31 (0)70 890 95 16
info@buginn.nl

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