A Lifeline for Australian Gardens? Why a Forgotten Adelaide Hills Craft May Be the Only Bee Hotel in the Country That Actually Works

Section: Garden & Wildlife
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A Lifeline for Australian Gardens? Why a Forgotten Adelaide Hills Craft May Be the Only Bee Hotel in the Country That Actually Works

Keith Pethick holding a Hollow Keeper bee hotel in a blossoming Adelaide Hills apple orchard

High in the Adelaide Hills, above the apple blocks of Lenswood, Keith Pethick has spent forty years at a workbench and the last six of them building nesting boxes for native bees. Now, at 74, the arthritis in his hands has made the decision for him: he is putting down the tools for good. His final run of “Hollow Keeper” bee hotels is more than a garden product — it is one man’s answer to something almost nobody in this country talks about. Because the bee hotel most Australians buy has a problem. It was fumigated at the border before it ever reached the shelf, and the bees can smell it.

Lenswood, Just After Sunrise: Where the Air Still Smells of Cut Cedar

The shed measures thirty-eight square metres. Corrugated iron, a concrete floor, a roller door that faces east down the slope. Tools hang along every wall — chisels, block planes, a wooden brace older than the house — their handles worn smooth by four decades of daily use. Some of them belonged to Keith’s father. On the bench sits a row of cedar bodies in various stages of completion, each one docked, drilled and dressed by the same pair of hands. Keith Pethick, 74, does not look up. He is running a fine rat-tail file down the inside of a bore no wider than a matchstick. He has been doing this since 1984.

“People think the fire killed the bees,” he says, still not looking up. “It didn’t. It burnt their houses down. Every hollow stem, every dead limb, every borer hole in every old redgum post out the back — gone in one afternoon. The bees that got away had nowhere to go home to. Everyone was looking at the trees. Nobody was looking at the holes in them.”

Keith Pethick dressing a cedar bore at his workbench in a corrugated iron shed
Keith Pethick in his thirty-eight square metre shed above Lenswood. The tools on the wall belonged to his father.

The Fire Took the Trees. What It Really Took Was the Housing.

On the morning of 20 December 2019, the Cudlee Creek fire started in the Adelaide Hills and burnt through more than 20,000 hectares. Dozens of orchards and vineyards were wiped out. Keith’s shed survived. The old bush block behind it did not.

What burned there was not just scrub. It was four decades of standing dead timber, hollow stems, split posts and beetle-bored hardwood — the entire accommodation stock of every cavity-nesting native bee on that hillside. Australia has roughly 1,700 described native bee species, and more than 99 per cent of them are solitary. No hive. No colony. No fallback. A female resin bee finds one hole, provisions it, seals it and dies before her offspring emerge. If there is no hole, there is no next generation.

The following spring the apple blossom came in thick. Almost nothing came to it.

“I stood under the Pink Lady block in October and I could hear a car two kilometres off,” Keith says. “That’s how quiet it was. Blossom everywhere and nothing working it.” The science backs him: bee hotels are now documented in the research literature as a recovery tool for cavity-nesting native bees after fire, precisely because the nest sites take decades to come back and the bees do not have decades.

Almost Every Bee Hotel Sold in Australia Is Empty. There Is a Reason.

A cheap mass-produced bee hotel on a fence: split bamboo, pine cones, straw and a rough-drilled pine block, completely unused
Split bamboo in every diameter, pine cones, straw, a rough-drilled block of pine. Four seasons on this fence and not one bore sealed.

Ask Keith Pethick about mass-produced bee hotels and the quiet Hills tradesman turns blunt. Walk into any garden centre or scroll any of the big online shops and there are dozens of them. Bamboo bundles. Pine blocks with holes punched in. Painted little cottages stuffed with straw and pine cones. They photograph beautifully on a verandah post.

The problem is not that they fail to help. It is that most of them were never capable of helping in the first place — and in this country there is one reason for that which almost nobody hears about.

“People buy them with the best intentions,” Keith says. “They want to do the right thing. But what they’re bringing home isn’t habitat. It’s an ornament. And half the time it’s been gassed.” Over four decades of watching native bees, and six years of building for them full-time, he has settled on five mistakes that account for nearly every empty hotel in the country:

The Five Fatal Flaws
1. “The Fumigation Residue” (imported stock)
This is the one that is unique to Australia. The overwhelming majority of bee hotels on sale here are imported, and imported timber and bamboo products are fumigated at the border under biosecurity rules. The treatment leaves a residue. “A bee reads a hole with her antennae before she ever goes in,” Keith says. “She can smell that from outside. She turns around.” The hotel is not faulty. It is simply, chemically, uninhabitable — and it looks exactly the same as one that works.
2. “The Poisoned Pine” (CCA-treated timber)
Treated pine is cheap, weatherproof and everywhere. It is also impregnated under pressure with a copper, chromium and arsenic solution, specifically formulated to stop insects living in wood. “They’ve built a bee house out of the one material on earth that’s designed to kill insects,” Keith says. “And then painted a bee on the front of it.” Varnishes, lacquers and construction adhesives add the same problem in a different form.
3. “The Wrong Bore” (holes sized for the wrong bee)
Most imported hotels are drilled to European specifications, for European bees. Australia’s cavity-nesters are far smaller. Masked bees want 3 to 5 millimetres. Leafcutters want around 7. Resin bees work between 4 and 8. Anything over 10 millimetres is almost never taken up. “A ten-cent-piece hole looks generous to a human,” Keith says. “To the bee that’s a cave with a draught in it. She won’t risk the brood.”
4. “The Shallow Grave” (bores too short)
A nesting tunnel needs to run deeper than 100 millimetres. The ones sold in the chains are routinely 40 or 50. “She lays her daughters at the back and her sons at the front, because the front is where the losses happen,” Keith says. “Make the hole short enough and the whole tunnel is the front.” Parasitoid wasps and predatory birds work the entrance. Depth is the only defence the female has.
5. “The Decorative Lie” (fillers and tins)
Pine cones. Bark chips. Bundles of twigs. Painted tin cans with sticks pushed into them. “Not one native bee in this country nests in a pine cone,” Keith says. “And a tin can on a north wall in January is an oven. If anything does move in, it cooks.” The filler exists for the person buying it, not for the animal it is supposedly for.

Keith puts the file down. “When someone tells me their bee hotel never worked, I don’t need to see it. Nine times out of ten it never could have. Those people weren’t given bad advice. They were given no advice at all.”

Forty Years of Watching: How a Hills Cabinetmaker Worked Out What the Bees Actually Wanted

Keith Pethick did not set out to build habitat. He was a cabinetmaker — apprenticed at seventeen in Mount Barker, fourth generation in the Hills on his mother’s Cornish side. Kitchens, wardrobes, staircases, fencing. Honest work with honest timber.

The fence line behind the shed changed that. “It was the old redgum posts,” he says, running a thumb along a bore to check it. “Full of borer holes. And one summer I noticed the holes were being capped off — little plugs of resin, neat as you like. Resin bees. I started leaving offcuts out with holes drilled in them, just to see. They were in them inside a week.” He pauses. “And I thought, well, if it’s that easy, why is nobody doing it properly?”

That was 1984, and for thirty-five years it stayed a hobby. He varied bore diameters by half a millimetre at a time. Tested western red cedar, jarrah, blackwood, radiata, macrocarpa. Rang the entomology people out at the Waite Campus in Adelaide and asked questions until they stopped answering. Filled school exercise books with dates, diameters, species and occupancy rates, one line per bore, one book per summer.

Then came December 2019, and the hobby became the job. The result, after four decades of watching and six years of building nothing else, is what he calls the Hollow Keeper. Named for what the fire took: not the trees, the hollows in them.

Native resin bee at a hand-dressed cedar nesting opening, neighbouring openings capped with resin
The Hollow Keeper in use: a resin bee working a hand-dressed cedar bore, neighbouring tunnels already capped and sealed.

The Hollow Keeper Principle: Why Every Detail Decides Whether the Brood Gets Out

“The Multi-Species Array” — bores from 2.5 to 9.5 millimetres
Bores run from 2.5 up to 9.5 millimetres, every one of them under the 10-millimetre ceiling that Australian cavity-nesters will accept. Masked bees take the fine end, leafcutters the middle, resin bees the wide end. “One bore size is one species,” Keith says. “This country has about seventeen hundred. Get it wrong by half a millimetre and she flies straight past.”
“The 19-Millimetre Cedar Wall” — solid, untreated, no CCA
The body is cut from solid untreated western red cedar, 19 millimetres thick on every face. No treated pine, no plywood, no laminates, no glues, no lacquer. The wall works like a thermos: it holds nest warmth through a cold Hills night and keeps the bores well under the surrounding air on a 40-degree January afternoon. The same timber that has been used for boatbuilding for a century, for the same reason — it refuses to rot.
“The Copper Shield” — hand-formed roof
A solid copper roof, bent and dressed by hand, throws water clear of the nesting face before a drop reaches the timber and cuts the summer UV load on the bores underneath. Copper does not rust, does not split, and develops a patina that only improves. “I’ve seen plastic roofs go brittle in one Australian summer,” Keith says. “Copper outlasts the box it sits on.”
“Mirror-Finish Bores” — hand-dressed, gauge-checked
Every tunnel is dressed by hand until the inside wall is glass-smooth, then checked with a set of turned brass rods, one per diameter. If a rod catches on a fibre, the bore goes back on the bench. “If the rod catches, the bee catches,” Keith says. “Same fibre, same wing. A native bee’s wing is thinner than cigarette paper. One splinter and she never flies again.”
“The Fortress Back” — sealed rear panel, and a three-way mount
A thick solid cedar panel closes every bore from behind, so parasitoid wasps cannot drill through to the brood — the single most common way a populated hotel fails in its second season. A heavy-gauge steel hook is set flush into that panel: hang it, screw it flat to a wall, or stand it on a bench. “Whatever the backyard is, the box fits it.”
Close-up of the hand-formed copper roof seam meeting the top cedar board and its row of dressed bores
The folded copper seam where the roof meets the top board, and the graded bores beneath it. Solid untreated cedar, dressed by hand, bore by bore.

“There’s One at Forest Range That’s Been Full Every Summer Since 1997”

Keith reaches for a school exercise book off the shelf behind him. The cover is soft with handling. Inside: dates, diameters, species names, and a column of tally marks for capped bores. He turns to a page from 1997. “Built this one for a bloke with a cherry block over at Forest Range,” he says, tapping the page. “Twenty-nine years ago. Same east-facing wall on his packing shed. He sent me a photo last February — every bore in the middle band sealed with resin. Every summer since, without a miss.”

He turns forward a few years. “The Dimasi family down at Woodside. Ordered two in 2011. Their youngest was six. She’s a vet nurse in Adelaide now. Boxes are still on the same wall. Still full.”

He closes the book and runs his thumb across the cover. “That’s the part that matters to me,” he says quietly. “Not the money. Knowing something I made with my hands is still giving bees somewhere to go, thirty years on. That’s what cedar and copper do. They don’t give up.”

Weathered Hollow Keeper on an orchard shed wall with most bores sealed with resin
Occupied. Bores capped with resin — the unmistakable sign that somebody has moved in.

What Australian Gardeners Say About Keith’s Hollow Keeper

4.9
★★★★★
Based on verified customer reviews
★★★★★
“I’d bought three bee hotels over four years from the usual places. Not one of them was ever used. Not a single hole. Put Keith’s up on the east wall of the shed at the end of September and by the second week of November there were nine bores capped off. I could stand there and watch them working. You can tell straight away this was made by somebody, not stamped out by something.”
Marg T., Bright, VIC
★★★★★
“Bought this for Dad’s retirement. He did thirty-five years roofing and the first thing out of his mouth was: ‘Feel that copper. That’s not decoration, that’s proper flashing.’ He mounted it himself, steel hook and all. Reckons it’s the most solid thing he’s ever had in the garden.”
James R., Warrnambool, VIC
★★★★★
“I had no idea the cheap ones were imported and gassed at the border. I’d bought two. That explains four years of nothing. This one was occupied in its first season. The cedar still smells like cedar after a full summer outside, which tells you there’s nothing on it.”
Linda K., Armidale, NSW
★★★★★
“Third summer on a west-facing brick wall. It’s been through two heatwaves over 42 degrees, a hailstorm and a very wet winter. The timber hasn’t moved. I’m a joiner by trade and the machining on it is better than most of what comes through my own shop.”
Thomas W., Kalamunda, WA

Questions That Come Up in the Shed

Is this going to sting the kids or the dog?

“Native solitary bees are the quietest neighbours you’ll ever have,” Keith says. “There’s no hive to defend, so there’s no reason for them to go you. Most of them can’t get through human skin anyway. You can sit a metre away with a cup of tea and watch them come and go. I’ve done it for forty years and I’ve never been stung once.”

Will it attract European wasps?

“European wasps want a dark cavity they can build a nest inside — a wall space, a roof void, a hole in the ground. They’ve got no use for a 6-millimetre bore in a block of cedar. The bores are sized for solitary bees and nothing else fits. In forty years I’ve never had one customer come back to me about wasps.”

Should I bring it in over winter?

“Please don’t. The brood inside needs the natural cool of winter to develop and emerge on time in spring. Bring it into a warm garage and they’ll wake up in July with nothing in flower. That’s the end of them. The cedar body and the copper roof are built for weather. Leave it up, all year.”

Where should it go?

“East or north-east, about a metre and a half up, morning sun and afternoon shade. Out of the worst of the westerly. Somewhere it can’t swing. And don’t move it once the bores start getting capped — she navigates back to a spot, not to a box.”

Close-up of native resin bees using a Hollow Keeper: one entering an opening, one emerging dusted with pollen, one in flight, several openings already sealed with resin
Four at once on the same face. The dark plugs are finished cells — provisioned, walled off with resin, and left to overwinter. The wet one is still being worked.

The End of the Shed — and the Last Chance to Get One

After forty years at a bench, Keith has made a decision nobody forced on him but his own hands made inevitable. The osteoarthritis started in the thumb joints, then moved to both wrists. He can still dock timber. He can still dress a face. He can still beat the copper. What he cannot do any more is the fine work — the patient hand-dressing that turns a drilled hole into a glass-smooth gallery, checked rod by rod, bore by bore. “The docking’s fine,” he says. “The dressing isn’t. And if I can’t dress the bore, I won’t sell the box. That’s the whole thing. That’s the only bit that matters.”

His son works out at Whyalla. His daughter is in Adelaide. There is no apprentice and no successor. When Keith stops, forty years of accumulated detail — the diameter tables, the species notes, the emergence dates, the feel for which board will hold a clean bore and which one will tear — goes quiet with him.

What is left are the last Hollow Keepers on the shelves along the back wall of the shed. The final boxes that will ever come off Keith Pethick’s bench.

“It Was Never About the Money. I Want Them on Walls Before Christmas.”

Keith could charge more. Anyone who has picked one up — felt the weight of the cedar, run a finger along the dressed copper edge — would understand why. A hand-built nesting habitat from a tradesman with four decades behind him, gauge-checked bore by bore. The materials alone would justify twice the price.

That was never the point. He has kept the price on the final run deliberately low, well under what the work is worth. Not as a sale. Not as a clearance. As a gesture.

“I don’t need the money,” he says. “What I want is them out there before the first hot week. Not on a shelf indoors. Not in a box in somebody’s garage. Out on an east wall with the morning sun on it and a bee having a look at it. Nesting season’s already started. Every one of these that’s still in here in December is a season wasted.”

His granddaughter Pip, 27, runs the online side through Backroad Goods, making sure each box reaches somebody who will actually hang it. “When Pop asked me to help I had no idea how to find the right people,” she says. “Turns out there are thousands of gardeners out there who’ve been after exactly this — something real, made here, that actually works. The emails we get are the best part. People sending photos of capped bores. Kids drawing the bees.”

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The Hollow Keeper Bee Hotel: The Facts at a Glance

Built in Australia, never fumigated: Made in Keith Pethick’s shed at Lenswood in the Adelaide Hills. Not an imported finished product, so it never passes through border fumigation and never carries the residue that keeps native bees out of imported hotels.
Correct bore specification: Bores from 2.5 to 9.5 millimetres, all under the 10-millimetre ceiling Australian cavity-nesters accept, running deeper than 100 millimetres. Mirror-dressed interiors, gauge-checked with turned brass rods. Sealed rear panel against parasitoid wasps.
Untreated natural material: Solid western red cedar, 19 millimetres on every face. Hand-formed copper roof. No treated pine, no CCA, no plywood, no synthetic adhesive, no lacquer or paint.
Built for the species that are actually here: Sized for resin bees, leafcutter bees, masked bees and reed bees — four of the groups among Australia’s roughly 1,700 native species, more than 99 per cent of which are solitary and have no hive to fall back on.
Extreme longevity: Documented occupancy going back to 1997. Cedar and copper resist rot, weather and UV. Built to last a generation, not a season.
Strictly limited final run: The last boxes from Keith’s shed. No restock, no successor, no second batch. When the shelves are bare, that is the end of it.

Where Can the Original Be Found?

The Hollow Keeper is available exclusively through Backroad Goods — the small Australian online shop Keith’s granddaughter Pip runs for him. It is not in the hardware chains, not in the garden centres, and not on the big marketplaces.

Keith is direct about it: “There are plenty of lookalikes now. Bamboo bundles, pine blocks, nice labels. They haven’t got the untreated cedar, they haven’t got the dressed bores, they’ve mostly come off a container ship and through a gas chamber, and they certainly haven’t got forty years of notebooks behind them. If it didn’t come from Backroad Goods, it isn’t mine.”

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Hollow Keeper bee hotel on a post in an Australian native garden with grevillea and kangaroo paw
The original Hollow Keeper — available only through Backroad Goods.

This Spring Only — Then the Shed Closes for Good

Nesting season has started. The first resin bees are already scouting across southern Australia, and they will be working hard from now through to February. The shelves along the back wall of Keith’s shed are emptying by the week. There will be no second run and no restock. When the last Hollow Keeper ships, forty years of it ends.

“I want every last one of them on a wall,” Keith says. “That’s all I’m asking. East-facing, a bit of morning sun, and somebody who cares enough to put it up. The bees will sort out the rest.”

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Try It Without Risk: The 100% Satisfaction Guarantee

Hang it up. Watch what turns up. Test the cedar, the copper, the machining. If it is not right for any reason at all, send it back within 30 days for a full refund — no conditions, no questions, no mucking about. Keith stands behind every box that leaves his shed, and so does Backroad Goods.

More Voices from Australian Gardens

★★★★★
“We drove up through the Hills a few summers back and ended up at Keith’s shed. The kids still talk about it — the smell of the cedar, watching him work the copper over the bench. The box has been on our fence ever since. Every November my daughter eats breakfast watching the bores get capped off. It’s turned into a family thing.”
The Nicolaides Family, Woodside, SA
★★★★★
“Our two came up as a fortieth birthday present and I nearly kept both. There is something about a thing that was made a hundred kilometres from where it now hangs. It has quietly become the best part of the back garden.”
Julia B., Maleny, QLD
★★★★★
“I’ve worked in invertebrate conservation for a long time and I’ve pulled apart a lot of failed hotels — wings shredded on splinters, brood drilled out from behind, bores that were never the right size to begin with. The untreated cedar, the dressed galleries and the sealed back panel deal with all three. It is the only bee hotel I recommend when people ask.”
Dr. Hugh M.
★★★★★
“You know the moment you pick it up that it did not come out of a container. The weight of the timber, the way the copper sits down on the top, the finish inside the holes. It also happens to look lovely on the wall, which I was not expecting.”
Karen M., Launceston, TAS
★★★★★
“Mounting was exactly as simple as described. The steel hook has not budged through a full summer of westerlies and one very serious storm. Fourth spring outside now and it still looks like the week it arrived.”
Robert F., Wollongong, NSW
★★★★★
“I used to think a block of wood with holes in it from the hardware shop was near enough. Then a mate showed me this. The range of bore sizes brings in species I did not know lived on my street — resin bees, leafcutters, and tiny black ones I had to look up. Completely different thing.”
Thomas H., Margaret River, WA
★★★★★
“I read about Keith’s hands and the shed closing and I could not let it go past. Ordered three — one for us and two as presents. When you hold one you understand. It is not a product. It is what a bloke did with his life. The most honest gift I have ever given anybody.”
Susan K., Bendigo, VIC

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