Bee hotel

Bees are essential to humans and nature. To help the bees, we have built a large hotel for bees and other insects around a billboard tower along the A2 motorway.  

Bee hotel and wildflower meadow

The bee hotel consists of over 200 nesting boxes for wild bees and butterflies. Wild bees look for pollen and nectar within 200 metres of their nesting site. A 7,000 m2 field of wildflowers provides sufficient food. The area also features sand and hills for bees that nest in the ground.

Bee hotel

Protecting the bees

Bees are struggling: half of the 360 species in the Netherlands are endangered. Utrecht has over 100 species of bees, including rare species. The bee hotel and wildflower meadow will help protect the bees. Bees are essential to the continued existence of many plants.

How did the bee hotel come to be?

The municipality asked organisations to develop a plan for a new billboard tower. The tower needed to be sustainable and energy efficient. Ocean Outdoor Nederland came up with the idea of installing a large bee hotel around the tower. Honey Highway helped create the field of wildflowers around the hotel.

The billboard tower is sustainable

  • the billboard tower is made of recycled steel
  • the billboards are energy efficient: they are equipped with automatic LED lighting which dims as it gets darker at night and switches off between 01:00 and 05:00
  • the nesting boxes were built by Utrechters with a distance to the labour market