Make a Bee/Insect Watering Station - PEP BB animal.sand.waterstation

I'm visiting family before my busy Christmas work schedule, and they have a lot(!) of bird baths. I decided to turn one of the small dishes into an insect watering station.

I had a bunch of old seafood shells I needed to do something with so I made a bug waterer.

To show you've completed this Badge Bit, you must:
- post a picture of the materials for the watering station
- post a picture of the watering station under construction
- post a picture of the completed bee/insect watering station with water

We don't have any water on the property, so this seemed like a good idea.

I started out by deciding to commit this clay tray that my daughter made for me as the vessel and then figuring out where to put it. We have these three stumps that we've built garden beds around and one of them has an adequately spacious and flat top. And then I gathered up some rocks and twigs. Once I loaded the rocks and twigs, it wasn't full and I decided I wanted more variety, so I added a chunk of terracotta that I dug up last year and some slices of slate that are in our to-throw-out bin from the slate floor we're installing in the basement. Then I tucked some bits of branch-end from fallen evergreen branches into the deep recesses. The picture I took to show it in it's place with water is hard to see, so I also took a closeup to show the water more clearly.

I need to make sure it doesn't freeze, and I need to learn how often it needs topping off and maybe watch for it getting stagnant.

I made a simple bee drinking station from an old terracotta pot, some shards of broken pot and some stone. The terracotta is porous and will slowly release the water in the vegetable bed that I installed it in, acting a bit like an olla pot. The water level drops slowly in our humid spring weather and the water level remains high enough for bees to use the drinker for about 2 days before it needs topping up.

I placed the broken shards at the bottom of the terracotta pot to act as a reservoir. The porous terracotta should become saturated with water. I used a stone to seal the bottom of the pot which originally had a hole in for drainage. I placed more stones on top of the terracotta to allow bees and other insects to access the water without becoming stuck or drowning.

Insect watering station