Alan Tysoe's Last Blossom Warden Bee Hotels

Section: Garden & Wildlife
2 days ago Advertorial  ·  8 min read

A Lifeline for Britain's Gardens? Why a Forgotten Worcestershire Craft May Be the Answer to the Bee Crisis on Our Doorstep

Alan Tysoe beside a Blossom Warden bee hotel on an oak post in a Worcestershire orchard in full plum blossom

In a converted brick stable on the edge of Pershore, in the heart of the Vale of Evesham, Alan Tysoe has spent more than four decades building homes for Britain's wild bees. But now, at 74, the moment of farewell has arrived: he is laying down his tools for good. His final series of “Blossom Warden” bee hotels is far more than a product — it is his personal legacy to the small, rust-coloured bees without which the orchards of Worcestershire would fall silent. Why are these hotels so sought after? Because every piece carries 43 years of experience, is cut from solid cedar, and after this batch, there will never be another one from Alan's bench.

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

Alan Tysoe at his workbench in a converted brick stable in Pershore, hand tools on the wall behind him
Alan Tysoe in his 36-square-metre workshop in Pershore. Several of the planes on the wall belonged to his father.

The workshop measures barely 36 square metres. Once a stable, now lined with tools on every wall — chisels, block planes, a row of fine-tooth saws — their handles worn smooth by half a century of daily use. Some belonged to Alan's father. An old pot-bellied stove ticks quietly in the corner. On the bench: a row of cedar boards in various stages of completion, each one cut, notched and dressed by the same pair of hands. Alan Tysoe, 74, doesn't look up. He is drawing a paper drinking straw slowly through a nesting tunnel no wider than a pencil.

“It's not stopping work that bothers me,” he says, without looking up. “It's what I hear when I step outside. Twenty years ago, the plum trees along this lane were humming every April. You could hear it from the kitchen with the window shut. Now some mornings I stand at the bottom of the garden in full blossom and it's silent. Completely silent. That's what keeps me awake.”

The Silenced Hum on Our Doorstep

What Alan describes is a reality backed by hard numbers. Britain has around 270 species of bee — and roughly 250 of them are solitary, not honeybees at all. A 2019 study by the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology tracked 353 species of wild bee and hoverfly across three decades and found that a third of them had disappeared from large parts of their former range. At least 13 bee species have been lost from Britain entirely since 1900. Ninety-seven percent of the country's wildflower meadows have gone since the 1930s. More than half of its traditional orchards have been grubbed out since the 1950s.

Without wild bees, apple and plum trees don't set fruit. Beans don't pod. Strawberries come up small and misshapen. The garden doesn't die overnight — it just slowly stops coming back.

For Alan, this isn't a statistic from a report. He has watched it happen from the same lane, the same workshop, for more than forty years. “People think the bees are being poisoned,” he says, finally setting the board down. “Some are. But mostly they're being evicted. Old walls get repointed. Dead trees get tidied away. Hollow stems get strimmed. The bee's still here. Her house isn't.”

80 Percent of the Bee Hotels Sold in Britain Are Death Traps

A cheap mass-produced insect hotel with split bamboo, pine cones and straw, standing empty on a garden fence
A typical “bug hotel”: split bamboo in random sizes, pine cones, straw. Photogenic — and, in Alan's experience, almost always empty.

Ask Alan Tysoe about mass-produced bee hotels and the soft-spoken joiner turns blunt. Walk into any garden centre or scroll through any online marketplace and you'll find dozens of so-called bee hotels. Stacked bamboo. Pine blocks with holes drilled in. Little painted houses stuffed with straw and pine cones. They look charming on a patio.

The problem? Most of them don't just fail to help bees. They actively harm them.

“People buy these with the best of intentions,” Alan says, shaking his head. “They want to help. But what they're bringing home isn't a habitat — it's an ornament. And in a lot of cases, it's a trap.” Over four decades of watching wild bees, he has identified what he calls the five deadly mistakes of mass-produced bee hotels:

The Five Fatal Flaws
1. “The Splinter Trap” (rough-drilled tunnels)
“If the inside of that tunnel isn't glass-smooth, she shreds her wings going in and out. She can't fly. She can't forage. She dies in the hole she thought was her nest.” Mass-produced hotels are drilled at speed, leaving ragged fibres lining every tunnel. For an insect with wings thinner than tissue paper, it's the end.
2. “Poison in the Garden” (treated softwood)
“Half of what's in the shops is tanalised pine — you can see the green in the grain. Pressure-treated, glued, sometimes varnished. Bees can smell it from two metres away. They won't go near it.” What protects a fence post from rot is exactly what keeps a bee from moving in.
3. “The Mould Chamber” (no proper roof)
“This is England. It rains sideways from October to March. A thin plywood lid swells, the rain gets in, and by February you've got mould growing inside the tunnels. The larvae suffocate before they ever see the spring.” Without a weatherproof roof, every wet week turns the hotel into a damp box of dead brood.
4. “The Shallow Grave” (tunnels too short)
“A red mason bee wants around fifteen centimetres of tunnel. That's where she lays her females, right at the back, safest place. The ones from the garden centre? Eight centimetres, maybe ten. That's not a nest — that's a larder for parasitic wasps.” Manufacturers cut depth to save timber. The bees pay the price.
5. “The Decorative Lie” (filler materials)
“Pine cones. Straw. Bark chippings. Bits of pallet. It looks lovely in a photograph. But no solitary bee in Britain nests in a pine cone. All you're doing is putting out a welcome mat for the earwigs and spiders that raid the real nests.” Decorative fillers are there for the customer, not the bee.

Alan leans back against the bench. “When people tell me their bee hotel never worked, I already know why. Nine times out of ten, it never could. Nobody gave them bad advice — nobody gave them any advice at all.”

The Wall on Bridge Street: How a Joiner Who Filled the Bees' Homes Spent 43 Years Giving Them Back

Close-up of a red mason bee entering a nesting tunnel, neighbouring tunnels sealed with mud
A female red mason bee returning to her tunnel. The mud caps on either side mean the cells behind them are already sealed.

Alan Tysoe didn't set out to become a bee man. He was a joiner — apprenticed at sixteen to a building firm in Evesham. Fifty years of sash windows, staircases, front doors, and the slow restoration of Victorian houses. Honest work with honest timber. And, when a job needed it, a bit of repointing.

In the spring of 1983, he was hired to repoint a 150-year-old garden wall on Bridge Street. Out with the soft old lime mortar, in with fresh cement. “Third day in, I noticed these little rusty-red bees coming out of the joints I'd just raked,” he says, turning a cedar board over in his hands. “Next morning they were hovering in front of the new mortar. Couldn't get back in. I'd sealed their front doors.” He pauses. “Nobody poisoned those bees. I pointed the wall. A hundred and fifty years they'd lived in that mortar, and I filled every hole in a fortnight.”

That weekend he drilled a scrap of timber and hung it on the finished wall. By Wednesday, four of the holes were capped with mud. “And I thought — if it's that easy, why does nobody do it properly?”

What started as a guilty conscience became a forty-three-year obsession. Alan varied tunnel depths a few millimetres at a time. Tried larch, oak, Douglas fir, cherry, before settling on cedar. Compared notes with county bee recorders — the volunteers who map Britain's wild bees species by species. Read everything he could find on Osmia bicornis, the red mason bee. His garden became a research station — dozens of prototypes on fence posts, apple trees and the stable wall, each one logged in a school exercise book with the date, the species and how many tunnels were sealed.

The result, after 43 years of trial and refinement, is what he calls the Blossom Warden. Named for the job it does in the orchard every April, 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 Blossom Warden Principle: Why Every Detail Decides Whether the Brood Survives

“The Multi-Species Array” — graded tunnel sizes
Openings range from 2.5 mm to 9.5 mm — graded so that one hotel suits the tiny yellow-faced and scissor bees, the leafcutters, the wool carder bee and, above all, the red mason bee. Each row targets a different group. “One size fits all means one size fits none,” Alan says. “A leafcutter wants a different bore to a mason bee. Get it wrong by a millimetre and she flies straight past.”
“The 19-Millimetre Cedar Wall” — solid, untreated timber
The body is cut from solid, untreated Western red cedar — 19 mm thick on every side. It works like a flask: through a wet English winter the sealed brood stays dry and even-tempered, and on a hot July afternoon the inside stays cool. No pine. No plywood. No tanalising. Just the timber boatbuilders have trusted for centuries because it refuses to rot.
“The Copper Ridge” — hand-folded ridge flashing
The pitched roof is made from two solid cedar boards with a generous overhang, and over the ridge sits a strip of copper folded by hand — exactly where every roof starts to leak first. Copper doesn't rust, doesn't crack, and weathers to a green patina that only gets better with age. “I've seen plastic roofs split after one frost. Copper outlasts the house it sits on.”
“The Straw Test” — hand-dressed nesting tunnels
Every single tunnel is dressed by hand until there isn't a burr or a loose fibre left. Then Alan draws a paper drinking straw through it. If the straw snags or tears, the board goes back on the bench. A bee can enter and leave thousands of times without catching a wing. “If it tears a paper straw, it'll tear a wing. Simple as that.”
“The Fortress Back” — sealed rear wall against parasites
A solid rear panel closes every tunnel from behind. Parasitic wasps — the main enemy of solitary bee brood — attack from the back, probing through thin walls to reach the larvae. Alan's back panel shuts that door. “The hotel becomes a fortress. Nothing gets in that isn't meant to.”
“The Three-Way Mount” — steel hook plus standing feet
A heavy-gauge steel hook set flush into the back panel, and two square feet on the base board. No flimsy picture wire, no plastic hanger that snaps in a gale. Hang it from the hook, screw it to a wall or fence, or stand it on a sill or a post top. “One customer in twenty years told me his came down. Turned out the fence post had rotted. The hook was fine.”

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

A weathered Blossom Warden on an old red-brick garden wall, many tunnels sealed with mud, bees in flight
Occupied. The mud caps are the unmistakable sign that someone has moved in — and sealed the next generation behind them.

Alan reaches for an exercise book on the shelf above the bench. Pages of dates, species names, little pencil drawings. He finds an entry from 2003. “Built this one for a chap with a plum orchard out towards Wick,” he says, tapping the page. “Twenty-three years ago. Same south-facing wall of his packing shed. He sent me a photograph in April — every hole capped with mud. Red masons. Every single spring since 2003.”

He turns a few more pages. “The Hollands in Upton-upon-Severn. Bought two in 2011. Their daughter was eight at the time. She's a doctor now. The hotels are still on the same garden wall. Still occupied. Every year.”

He closes the book and runs his thumb along the worn cover. “That's the best reward there is,” he says quietly. “Not the money. Knowing something I made with these hands is still giving bees a home twenty years on. That's what cedar and copper do. They don't give up.”

What Gardeners Are Saying About Alan's Blossom Warden

4.9
★★★★★
Based on 4,200+ hotels sold
★★★★★
“I've had three bee hotels from garden centres over the last four years. Not one was ever used. Put the Blossom Warden on the shed wall at the start of March — by the second week of April, nine tunnels were capped with mud. You can see the difference the moment you pick it up. This is proper joinery, not factory work.”
Margaret T., Cheltenham
★★★★★
“Bought it as a retirement present for my dad. He was a roofer for thirty-five years and the first thing he said was, 'Look at that ridge. That's not decoration — that's proper flashing.' Put it up himself. Said it was the best-made thing he'd had in the garden.”
James R., Shrewsbury
★★★★★
“I used to buy the cheap bamboo ones. The bees would start, then the whole lot would go mouldy over winter. Every single time. With the Blossom Warden I finally feel I'm helping rather than harming. Two wet winters on the fence and it's bone dry inside. The cedar still smells lovely.”
Linda K., Bath
★★★★★
“Third spring on a south-facing wall. It's been through two named storms and a very soggy summer. The cedar has gone a lovely silver and the copper's turning green. The quality of the work is the best I've seen on something this size — and I'm a cabinetmaker.”
Thomas W., Harrogate

The Questions Alan Gets Asked at the Workshop Door

Will the bees sting my grandchildren or the dog?

“Solitary bees are the most peaceful neighbours you'll ever have,” Alan says. “There's no hive to defend, so there's no reason to be aggressive. The males can't sting at all, and the females almost never bother. You can sit right next to the hotel with a cup of tea and watch them work. I've done it for forty years. Never been stung once.”

Won't it attract wasps to the patio?

“The wasps that pester you at a barbecue build paper nests in lofts, sheds and hedges. They've no interest in a narrow cedar tunnel. The Blossom Warden is sized for solitary bees. In 43 years, I've not had a single customer tell me it brought wasps. Not one.”

Should I bring it into the shed for winter?

“Please don't. The bees sealed in there right now need the cold to develop properly and come out on time in March. Bring it into a warm shed or a greenhouse and they wake up too early — when there's nothing in flower. That's the end of them. The cedar and the copper ridge are made for an English winter. Leave it outside, all year round.”

The End of an Era — and Your Last Chance

Close-up of Alan Tysoe's weathered hands resting on a finished Blossom Warden on the workbench
Fifty years of joinery in these hands. The saw still works. The fine rasp no longer does.

After 43 years at the bench, Alan has made a decision that nobody forced on him — but his body has made inevitable. About five years ago, the ring and little finger of his right hand began to curl in towards the palm. Dupuytren's, the doctor called it. Common in old tradesmen. Add the arthritis in his thumb, and the picture is clear. He can still saw. He can still plane. But the fine work — guiding a rasp down an eight-millimetre tunnel until it's glass-smooth — his hand won't do it any more.

“The sawing's fine,” he says. “It's the rasp. Two fingers won't open, and you can't dress a bee's tunnel with half a hand. If I can't do it right, I won't do it at all.”

His son Gary is an engineer in Birmingham. The grandchildren have their own lives. There is no apprentice. No successor. When Alan stops, 43 years of knowledge — the species notes, the bore tables, the exercise books, the feel for the grain that no manual could teach — all of it goes quiet.

What remains are the last Blossom Wardens on the workshop shelves. The final pieces that will ever come from Alan Tysoe's hands.

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

Alan could charge more. Anyone who has held the weight of the cedar, run a thumb along that folded copper ridge, would understand. A hand-built nesting home from a joiner with half a century at the bench? The materials alone would justify twice the price.

But that was never the point. He has kept the price for the final run deliberately low — well below what the work is worth. Not as a sale. Not as a clearance. As a gesture.

“I don't need the money,” he says. “I need these to end up on garden walls where they'll do what they were made for. I want red masons nesting in them by April. I want children watching the holes fill up with mud and asking their grandparents what's going on in there. That's worth more to me than whatever's on the price tag.”

His granddaughter Megan, 27, looks after the online side, making sure each piece goes to someone who will actually hang it. “When Grandad asked me to help, I didn't know if anyone would care,” she says. “But there are thousands of gardeners out there who've been looking for exactly this — something real, something that actually works. People send us photos of capped tunnels, children's drawings of the bees. That's what makes it worth it.”

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The Blossom Warden Bee Hotel: The Facts at a Glance

Genuine handcraft: Every Blossom Warden is made by Alan Tysoe in his workshop in Pershore, Worcestershire — not a factory, not a production line. Each piece carries 43 years of experience.
Built for British bees: Graded openings from 2.5 mm to 9.5 mm, tunnels around 15 cm deep, hand-dressed inner walls, sealed rear panel. Suited to the red mason bee, leafcutters, the wool carder bee and the small yellow-faced and scissor bees.
Honest natural material: Solid, untreated Western red cedar, 19 mm on every side. Cedar pitched roof with a hand-folded copper ridge. No pine, no plywood, no tanalising, no synthetic glues.
Made to last: Documented occupancy of more than 20 years. Cedar and copper stand up to rain, frost and sun. Built for a generation, not a season.
Strictly limited: The final run from Alan's workshop. No restock, no successor, no second batch. When the shelves are empty, that's it.

Where Can You Get the Original?

The Blossom Warden on a weathered oak post in an English cottage garden with lavender and foxgloves
The original Blossom Warden — available only through Backroad Goods.

The Blossom Warden is available exclusively through Backroad Goods, the small online shop Megan runs for her grandfather. You won't find it on Amazon, in a DIY superstore or at any garden centre.

Alan is plain about it: “There are plenty of lookalikes about now. Bamboo tubes, pine blocks, nice labels. They haven't got the cedar, they haven't got the dressed tunnels, and they certainly haven't got 43 years of exercise books behind them. If it doesn't come from Backroad Goods, it isn't mine.”

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

A hotel hung this autumn has a whole winter to weather in — the fresh-cut smell fades, the cedar settles, and by the time the first red mason bees emerge in March, it's ready and waiting. That's why the serious gardeners put theirs up now. And the shelves in Alan's workshop get emptier every week. There won't be a second run. There won't be a restock. When the last Blossom Warden leaves the stable, 43 years of handcraft come to an end.

“I want every last one to find a garden,” Alan says. “That's all I ask. A south-facing wall, a bit of morning sun, and someone who cares enough to put it up. The bees will do the rest.”

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Try It Risk-Free: The 100% Satisfaction Guarantee

Put it up. Watch the bees arrive. Judge the cedar, the copper and the joinery for yourself. If you're not completely happy for any reason, send it back within 30 days for a full refund. No conditions, no questions, no fuss. Alan stands behind every piece that leaves his workshop — and so does Backroad Goods.

More Voices from the Garden

★★★★★
“We walked the Blossom Trail four years ago and ended up at Alan's workshop door by accident. The children still talk about the smell of the cedar and the stack of old exercise books. The hotel has been on our garden wall ever since. Every April my daughter has her breakfast watching the bees cap the tunnels. It's become a family ritual.”
The Price Family, Stratford-upon-Avon
★★★★★
“My husband gave me one for our anniversary, which I thought was an odd present until the first spring. Now I check it every morning before I've put the kettle on. Eleven tunnels sealed this year.”
Julia B., Ludlow
★★★★★
“I've recorded solitary bees in my county for years. I've seen what cheap hotels do — wings torn on splinters, brood lost to damp. Solid cedar, deep tunnels and a closed back deal with every one of those problems. This is the one I recommend when people ask.”
Dr. Michael S., Norwich
★★★★★
“You know the moment you pick it up that it isn't a mass-produced import. The weight of it, the tunnels, the way the ridge is folded. It's built to last thirty years. And it's a genuinely handsome thing on the wall, too.”
Karen M., Tunbridge Wells
★★★★★
“Put it up in ten minutes. The steel hook hasn't budged through three winter storms on an exposed fence. Fourth spring outdoors and it looks better than the day it arrived.”
Robert F., Aberystwyth
★★★★★
“I thought a block of wood with holes in from the garden centre was good enough. Then a friend showed me this. The different sizes brought in bees I didn't know we had — red masons, leafcutters, and a fluffy one I had to look up. It was a wool carder bee.”
Thomas H., York
★★★★★
“I read about Alan's hands and the workshop closing and I couldn't just scroll past. Ordered three — one for us, two as presents. When you hold it, you understand. It isn't a product. It's a man's life's work.”
Susan K., Kendal

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