Keith Pethick's Hollow Keeper — The Bees Australia Forgot

The Southern Grower
Rural Life · Horticulture · Environment
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“The Honeybee Got the Marketing. It Arrived Here in 1822 — and the 1,700 Native Bees That Actually Pollinate Your Garden Still Have Nowhere to Nest.”

Inside one of the last sheds in Australia still hand-building nesting boxes that native bees will actually move into — and why it closes at the end of this season.

By Ross Tarrant, Contributing Editor, The Southern Grower — 23 September 2026

Macro photograph of an Australian native bee dusted with pollen feeding at an apple blossom at sunrise, with a cedar bee hotel far out of focus behind her
The bee almost nobody in Australia can name, working an apple blossom at sunrise in the Adelaide Hills. Behind her, thrown out of focus, one of the last homes built for her kind.

At 9:12 on a Tuesday morning last October, in a tomato block outside Mount Barker in the Adelaide Hills, I stood and watched about forty honeybees work a row of flowers for twenty minutes and achieve almost nothing.

They were not sick. They were not confused. They were simply the wrong animal for the job. A tomato flower does not offer its pollen up. It holds it inside sealed tubes, and it releases it only when something grips the flower and vibrates it at the right frequency. The honeybee cannot do that. It has no such behaviour in its repertoire. It can visit a tomato flower all morning and leave with nothing, and leave nothing behind either.

At 9:31 a small bee with four bands of iridescent blue across her abdomen landed on the same row. She took hold of a flower, and for a fraction of a second there was a sound like a rubber band being plucked. Pollen dropped out of the anthers in a visible puff. She moved to the next flower. Then the next.

She is a blue-banded bee, and she is Australian. She was doing in ninety seconds what forty imported bees had failed to do in twenty minutes.

I had come to South Australia to watch her, on the advice of a cabinetmaker in the Adelaide Hills I had not yet met.

The Bees Hiding in Your Garden

Australia has roughly 1,700 described species of native bee. Resin bees, leafcutter bees, masked bees, reed bees, carpenter bees, blue-banded bees. They were here for tens of millions of years before anything resembling a hive arrived.

The honeybee everyone pictures is not one of them. The European honeybee was brought out on a ship in 1822 to make honey and wax for the colony. It is livestock — kept in boxes, trucked up and down the eastern seaboard, and rented out to growers by the pallet, in exactly the way cattle are agisted.

The native bees are wild. More than 99 per cent of them are solitary. No hive, no queen, no honey, no colony to fall back on if a season goes badly. A female lives a matter of weeks, builds a handful of cells, seals each one with resin or leaf or mud, and dies before her own offspring emerge.

Between them they do an enormous amount of the pollination in Australian backyards. And almost nobody can name a single one of them.

What They Actually Do

Buzz pollination. A blue-banded bee vibrates a flower roughly 350 times per second to shake pollen out of sealed anthers. Tomatoes, eggplant, chilli, blueberries and kiwifruit all depend on it. The honeybee cannot buzz-pollinate at all.

1,700 described native bee species in Australia. One introduced honeybee, landed here in 1822.

More than 99% of Australian native bees are solitary. No hive. No swarm. No defensive stinging.

Honeybee pollination is valued at $14.2 billion a year to Australian agriculture. The contribution of native bees has never been formally counted.

Extreme macro of an Australian native leafcutter bee backing into a bore in the cedar boards, her underside packed with bright yellow pollen, neighbouring bores plugged with dried clay
A native leafcutter backing into a bore with her underside packed with pollen. Australian natives carry it loose on the belly, not in baskets on the legs — which is why so much of it ends up on the next flower she lands on.

Why You’ve Probably Never Heard Her Name

“The honeybee is livestock. It has an industry, a peak body, a biosecurity emergency and a dollar figure attached to it. The bees that were actually here have a few dozen researchers and no lobby at all. That is the whole story.”Dr. Frances Boothby, native bee ecologist, South Australia

Boothby has spent twenty-two years surveying cavity-nesting native bees across the southern states. She is not, she says, anti-honeybee. She is tired of the conversation.

“Every time I give a talk, I ask the room to name an Australian native bee. In a room of a hundred gardeners I will usually get one hand, and it is usually somebody’s grandson who saw a blue-banded bee on a documentary,” she told me. “Then I ask them to name something they could actually do for native bees this weekend. Nobody has an answer. Because the honest answer is a hole. A hole of the right diameter, in the right timber, at the right depth. That is it. That is the whole intervention.”

She paused.

“And there is almost nobody in this country making that hole properly. The one bloke I send people to is shutting up shop.”

The Numbers That Should Have Made Them Famous

A cedar bee hotel with a timber gable roof and narrow copper ridge strip mounted on a corrugated iron shed wall, native bees in flight around it, apple orchard in blossom behind
A box on an east-facing shed wall in Lenswood, with the orchard in blossom behind it. The only metal on the whole thing is the narrow copper strip folded over the ridge.

Here is the part that has changed since 2022, and that most gardeners have not connected.

In June 2022, varroa mite was detected at the Port of Newcastle. Australia had been the last inhabited continent on earth without it. The eradication programme was abandoned in September 2023. The mite is now established, it has spread through commercial hives, and by early 2026 there were confirmed cases of mites resistant to the treatments used against them.

The pollination industry has been running short ever since. Australia’s pollination security reporting in 2026 put the national shortfall at something in the order of 300,000 hives. Hive hire prices, which sat comfortably below $100 for years, have been climbing toward $300 in some regions and for some crops.

Varroa does not infest native bees. They are not the casualty. They are the fallback — the thing that has to absorb the shortfall, in backyards and orchards and market gardens where nobody is renting hives at all.

And the fallback is itself in trouble. After the Black Summer fires, the list of Australian native bee species assessed as threatened grew roughly fivefold. The metallic green carpenter bee — a striking, unmistakable species — lost something close to 95 per cent of its Kangaroo Island range. That is South Australia. That is an hour and a half from where I was standing in that tomato block.

In plain terms: the bee that was always going to catch Australia if the honeybee faltered is the one nobody has been looking after.

Why She Has Nowhere to Nest

Macro of the notched cedar board edges of a bee hotel with two Australian native bees, one crawling into a bore, the gable board and copper ridge strip above
Two at once — one crawling in, one waiting on the board edge below. The grey-brown plugs are finished cells: provisioned, walled off, and left to overwinter.

Roughly a third of Australia’s native bees are cavity nesters. They do not dig. They do not build. They find a hole that already exists and they furnish it.

What they need is specific, and it is not negotiable. A bore under 10 millimetres across — masked bees want 3 to 5, leafcutters about 7, resin bees somewhere between 4 and 8. Deeper than 100 millimetres, so a female can lay her daughters at the back where parasites cannot reach them. Untreated timber with no chemical smell. And an interior smooth enough that a wing — which is thinner than tissue paper — does not catch on a single burr.

In bushland, those holes happen by accident. Borer galleries in standing dead timber. Hollow stems. Old redgum fence posts riddled by beetles over decades.

On the 20th of December 2019, the Cudlee Creek fire ran through more than 20,000 hectares of the Adelaide Hills. Orchards and vineyards went with it. So did forty years of standing dead wood.

The bees, largely, did not burn. Their housing did.

And in an ordinary Australian backyard — mulched, tidied, every dead branch cut out and taken to the green waste — that housing does not exist in the first place.

And the Bee Hotel You Bought Her Was Gassed Before It Arrived

Side-by-side comparison on a garden bench: on the left a cheap imported insect hotel with split bamboo, pine cones and straw, completely unused; on the right a hand-built cedar bee hotel with clay-plugged bores, an older man's hand pointing at it
Left: what the hardware chains and the garden centres sell — split bamboo in random diameters, pine cones, straw, and not one bore in it ever used. Right: what a native bee will actually nest in.

This is the part of the story that stopped me.

Almost every mass-market bee hotel sold in Australia is imported. Imported timber products carrying bark, plant fibre and untreated wood are routinely fumigated at the border as a biosecurity measure. It is entirely correct that they are. It is also, for the purposes of the animal the box was sold to house, fatal to the whole exercise: the residue makes the box smell wrong, and native bees will not move into it.

This is not a marketing claim invented for a sales page. It was reported publicly by the ABC in May 2025, drawing on work from the Biodiversity Council of Australia, under a headline to the effect that shop-bought bee hotels were doing more harm than good for native species.

Add the rest of it. CCA-treated pine — copper, chrome and arsenic driven into the timber under pressure. Bores drilled at 12, 14, 16 millimetres, sized by someone who was thinking about a honeybee and had never looked at an Australian one. Bores drilled 40 millimetres deep because it was faster. Tin-can housings that cook in a Riverland summer. Pine cones and bark stuffed in as filler, which no species on this continent uses for anything.

“People buy them with the best intentions in the world,” Boothby said. “They hang it up, nothing comes, and after two seasons they conclude there are no native bees where they live. There are. The box was never going to work.”

She gave me a name and a town, and I drove up into the Hills the following morning.

The Last Shed in Lenswood

Keith Pethick at his workbench in a corrugated iron shed in Lenswood, South Australia, dressing a bore in a part-finished cedar bee hotel with abrasive paper wrapped round a dowel
Keith at the bench. He dresses every bore by hand with a strip of abrasive wrapped round a dowel — the slowest step in the build, and the one the whole box depends on.

Keith Pethick’s shed measures about thirty-eight square metres. Corrugated iron, built into the slope behind the house, looking out over the apple blocks of Lenswood. The door was open when I got there. It smelled of cut cedar — sharp, clean, faintly citrus — and the only sound was a hand plane running down a board.

Keith is 74. He served his apprenticeship at Mount Barker at seventeen and spent forty years on furniture, built-ins and fencing. On the wall behind the bench hang tools with handles worn smooth. On the bench, when I walked in, sat six unfinished nesting boxes. He did not look up.

“You don’t finish a bore with a drill,” he said, running his thumb inside a cedar block. “The drill gets you a hole. It leaves you fibre standing up all the way down. She backs in to lay, the fibre catches her wing, and that is the end of her. She can’t fly, she can’t forage, and she dies in there.”

He reached into the top drawer and took out a felt roll. Inside it were turned brass rods, one for each bore diameter he uses. Every bore in every box gets the matching rod drawn through it before the box leaves the shed.

“If the rod catches, the bee catches. Same fibre, same wing.”Keith Pethick, Lenswood, South Australia

In a second drawer are the notebooks. He has kept them since 1984 — date, species, how many bores capped, which diameter. It started as curiosity. He had noticed resin bees working the beetle holes in old redgum fence posts and wanted to know which sizes they chose.

Then the fire came through, and the spring after it the apple blossom opened in Lenswood and almost nothing turned up to work it.

“The fire didn’t kill the bees. It burnt their houses down. Everyone was looking at the trees. Nobody was looking at the holes in them.”Keith Pethick, Lenswood, South Australia

Six Things Keith’s Box Gets Right

An open handwritten notebook on a workbench showing columns of dates, species names and bore diameters with pencil sketches of bees, a stack of older notebooks beside it, and a felt roll holding a graded set of turned brass rods
Forty years of occupancy records — date, species, bore diameter, cells capped. Beside them the felt roll of turned brass rods, one for every diameter he drills.

None of these are guesses. Each one is the product of forty years of occupancy records, a shed full of rejected prototypes, and the published specification for what Australian cavity-nesters will actually accept.

1. Built Here. Never Fumigated.The single thing no imported box can offer. It is made in Lenswood from timber that has been in the country for years, so it never crosses a border as a finished product and never sees the inside of a fumigation chamber. There is no residue on it, because there was never an opportunity for residue. For an animal that chooses a nest primarily by smell, this is not a feature. It is the entire precondition.
2. Untreated Cedar, Not Treated Pine.Solid western red cedar, 19 millimetres on every face, with nothing on it — no CCA, no lacquer, no stain, no adhesive. Cedar resists rot for decades on its own chemistry. Treated pine carries copper, chrome and arsenic; the bees read it from a distance and keep going. The 19-millimetre wall also works like a thermos, which matters more here than it does in Europe: the brood inside has to survive an Australian February.
3. The Copper Ridge.The roof is two thick cedar planks in a shallow gable, overhanging well past both sides, with a narrow strip of copper folded by hand over the ridge line where the two planks meet. That joint is where almost every commercial box fails: water gets into the seam at the top, soaks down into the cells, and the brood is lost to mould inside three days. The copper takes the weather at the one point that matters and lets the rest of the roof stay timber. Keith has one at Forest Range that has been up since 1997.
4. The Brass-Rod Dressing.Every bore is dressed by hand until a turned brass rod of the matching diameter draws through without catching. It is the slowest step in the build by a distance. It is also the difference between a box that fills in its first season and a box that stands empty for three years while its owner concludes there are no native bees in the district.
5. The Sealed Back.One solid cedar panel, no gap, no joint. Parasitoid wasps need roughly three millimetres to reach the cells from behind, and behind a cheap box — ply tacked onto a frame — they always find it. Here there is nothing to find. The females at the back of a deep bore are the next generation, and they are sealed in from both directions.
6. The Three-Position Mount.A heavy steel hook is set into the back, not screwed to it. Hang it, fix it flat to a wall, or stand it on a shelf. Keith’s instruction has not changed in forty years: an east-facing wall, chest height or a little above, morning sun on the face and shade by the middle of the afternoon.
A weathered cedar bee hotel with clay capped bores among the open ones, several Australian native bees on the boards and blue-banded bees in flight around it
A box partway through a season, with capped bores among the open ones and traffic in both directions. The blue-banded bees in the air nest in clay banks, not in here — they have simply come for the same blossom.

The box at Forest Range has been full every summer since 1997. That is twenty-nine consecutive seasons in the same spot, on the same wall, under the same roof. The notebooks record which species, in which diameter, in which year. There is no marketing department in Australia that could manufacture that. There is only somebody who wrote it down every summer for forty years.

Want one of them in your garden? Twenty-eight boxes are left from Keith’s shed, at $101.

Check Availability

$101. Built in Lenswood, South Australia. Never fumigated. Free shipping Australia-wide.

The Five Mistakes That Kill Australian Native Bees

Boothby had called the shop-bought boxes “a net negative.” When I asked Keith to be specific about why, he was less diplomatic.

“The Gas Chamber.”An imported box, fumigated on arrival exactly as the regulations require. The timber holds the residue. The bee arrives, reads the smell, and leaves. The box hangs there for three seasons looking like a bee hotel and functioning as an ornament.
“Poison in the Timber.”CCA-treated pine — copper, chrome and arsenic forced into the wood under pressure — cut into blocks and drilled. It is cheap, it is rot-proof, it is the standard material for outdoor mass-market product, and no native bee will lay her daughters in it.
“The Wrong-Size Bore.”Bores drilled at 12, 14, 16 millimetres, or bamboo split at whatever diameter the cane happened to be. Australia’s cavity-nesters are small. Above about 10 millimetres, take-up falls away to almost nothing. A wall of holes the bees have no use for is still a wall of holes.
“The Shallow Grave.”Bores 40 or 50 millimetres deep instead of over 100. A female lays her daughters at the back of the bore and her sons at the front, because the front is where the losses happen. In a shallow bore there is no back. The parasitoid wasps reach the females, and the following generation simply does not appear.
“The Decorative Lie.”Pine cones, bark chips and straw packed into a timber frame. Nothing in this country nests in any of it. What it does attract is ants, earwigs and slaters. It is a bee hotel in the same sense that a plastic owl on a pole is a raptor.

“They’re not built for the bees. They’re built for the bloke at the counter who wants to feel like he’s done something. The bees know the difference. The bees don’t come.”Keith Pethick, Lenswood, South Australia

Why This Is the Final Run

Keith Pethick, 74, holding one of his hand-built cedar bee hotels up beside his head in a blossoming apple orchard in the Adelaide Hills
Keith in the Lenswood blossom this spring, holding one of the last boxes of his working life.

Keith has been doing this in the same shed, alone, since 1984. He is 74. He has arthritis in both thumb saddle joints and in both wrists, and it has reached the point where the one step that matters most has become unreliable.

“The docking’s fine,” he said. “I can still cut, I can still plane, I can still fold a ridge strip. What I can’t do any more is dress a bore. And if I can’t dress the bore, I won’t sell the box.”

His son is in Whyalla and his daughter is in Adelaide. His granddaughter Pip, 27, runs the online side, which is how the boxes reach anyone at all. Neither of his children is a cabinetmaker, and neither is she. There is no successor.

What is left is what is on the shelves along the back wall. When I visited, that came to twenty-eight boxes. When those are gone, that is the end of it.

Why the Price Is What It Is

He could charge a great deal more. Hand-built nesting habitat of this specification, when it exists at all in this country, is sold by individual makers at two and three times what he asks — two hundred dollars, three hundred. The cedar alone would justify it. His price on the final run is $101.

He has kept it there deliberately. Not as a sale, and not as a clearance. As a decision.

“I don’t need the money,” he said. “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 still sitting in here in December is a season wasted.”

Twenty-eight boxes left from the final run, at $101. No restock, no second batch.

Check Availability

$101. Free shipping Australia-wide, dispatched within 2–3 days.

What the First Season Looked Like

“Put it on the east wall of the shed in the first week of October. Three weeks later there were four bores capped with resin. By the middle of December, nineteen. I have bought two other bee hotels in the last decade and neither of them had a single bore used, ever.”

Trevor M. — Bendigo, VIC

“We put one up next to the tomato beds after two poor seasons of fruit set. By January there were blue-banded bees through the whole patch and resin bees working the box itself. Best crop we have had off those beds in nine years.”

Annika R. — Huon Valley, TAS

“I teach invertebrate ecology. I have pulled apart most of the commercial bee hotels on sale in this country and the majority of them are, frankly, landfill. Keith’s is the only one I put in front of students as an example of the specification done properly.”

Dr. Helen W. — Armidale, NSW

What You’re Probably Wondering

Will this attract European wasps?

No. European wasps build enclosed paper nests and want a dark cavity with volume — a wall space, a roof void, a hole in the ground. A bank of bores between 2.5 and 9.5 millimetres offers none of that. In forty years of records Keith has never had a wasp nest establish in one of his boxes.

Does it need to come inside over summer or winter?

No — it should stay outside all year. The cells overwinter and emerge on their own cue, and bringing the box into a warm shed or garage brings them out early, when there is nothing in flower. That is fatal. The one thing worth doing is placement: an east-facing wall so the face gets morning sun and is in shade by the hottest part of the afternoon.

Is it safe around children and pets?

Yes. Solitary native bees have no hive to defend and no defensive swarming behaviour at all — the instinct that makes a honeybee colony dangerous simply is not present. Males of most species cannot sting. Females can, in theory, but it takes real effort to provoke one, and children tend to end up watching them at close range for hours. Keith has had no sting reported in four decades of installations.

Nesting season has started. Twenty-eight boxes left, at $101. The shed closes at the end of it.

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