How to make a bee watering station

One thing I have started to notice about my 6 year old is that she loves to be outside after school. Whilst my 8 year old is happy playing with Lego or on the Playstation, my 6 year old is drawn outside. Recently she has been enjoying our homemade mud kitchen and keeps asking for water to make her magical mixtures.

We’ve spent some time tidying up our garden recently. We took down a tree that was blocking a lot of light which has made it feel bigger and sunnier. We don’t have a lot of luck with plants but that doesn’t stop us wanting to attract bees and other insects into our garden. Last year we all helped make a bug hotel which is still going strong. This week we added a bee watering station to our garden.

We all know how vital bees are. We’d never really thought about giving them access to water but we received some Paws Outdoors Alphabet cards and loved the idea of making a bee water station.

It really didn’t require much equipment, just a waterproof container and some large stones. I found an old plastic container in the recycling bin and removed the sticky labels so my daughter could write her own label – bees water station.

Then we took our container outside and found some smooth stones from the stash we keep for creating our painted rocks. We filled up a jug of water too and carried that outside to set everything up.

My 6 year old carefully placed the stones inside the container and we poured in the water so it was just about covering the tops of the stones. We wanted to make sure that the bees had something to stand on when they stopped off for a drink.

When she had finished we carefully carried our bee water station over to the part of our garden where we built our bug hotel. We placed it on a pile of spare bricks, disturbing two baby frogs in the process! that scared me but my daughter found it really funny. I love that our bug hotel has attracted some real wildlife!

My daughter has been keeping a watch on our bee watering station but sadly hasn’t seen any bees yet. We’re going to change the water regularly and hope to see something soon.