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What is RefuBees

A network of small refuges.

RefuBees is action research where ecology, the city and the neighbourhood meet, and it has been running for more than ten years. We work with knowledge, with physical changes in the street and with residents who look after wild bees together.

Hans Kalliwoda places the bee on a BeeTotem from a ladder
Placing a totem

In short

A wild bee does not fly far.

Food, water and a place to nest have to lie within 100 to 300 metres. That is why spreading refuges across the whole city works better than one big park.

The idea

Spreading out works better than one big park.

Most wild bees fly only 100 to 300 metres. One big park does little for them. What does help: hundreds of small places, spread across the city, each suited to the species that belongs there.

Conventional · corridors

Large areas joined by a strip. For a bee that flies 300 metres, the city in between is empty.

RefuBees · spreading out

Many small places that touch each other. Every dot is a totem, garden, balcony or facade garden within flying range.

01

Knowledge per species

Long-term field research on Amsterdam’s bees divides the city into 104 zones. Each zone gets the species that belongs there or can return.

02

A totem as a hub

A BeeTotem combines food plants, nesting places, water and monitoring. It works for the bee, and it brings neighbours together.

03

Residents take part

With Adopt a bee, you plant the flowers of your neighbourhood species. That way every balcony becomes part of the network.

Detail of a BeeTotem: nest block, flowering plants and a wooden bee

The BeeTotem

A totem is more than a bee hotel.

The totem offers food and nesting places for wild bees, and invites residents to join in, simply by standing there. Meeting places grow around it, where neighbours share plants and look after their surroundings together.

People learn it by doing it: watering, watching who comes, and again the year after.

Timeline

From experiment to method.

Amsterdam is the blueprint. What is tried out here is meant for other cities: there is already a totem in Leiden and in Raitenhaslach (Bavaria), and South Holland adopted the principle of spreading.

  1. 2011It started as an experiment, under the working title BeeCare Amsterdam.
  2. 2013PhDArts programme at Leiden University.
  3. 2014Symposium The City as Nature Reserve.
  4. 2020The first BeeTotems in Amsterdam.
  5. 2024South Holland adopts the principle of spreading.
  6. 2027Fourth totem: the Tree bumblebee in Betondorp.

What is within 300 metres of your door?