I’m pretty sure this cardboard Beehive Hotel, made by PopTarts Works, is modern and design-y. It probably offers the best ergonomic solution to letting your little apian friends live their best lives while also matching your ultra-modern Tribeca loft. But to me it just looks like an ear with hair growing out of it.
Still, bees like it, and that’s what really matters! And it’s made out of 100 percent recycled corrugated cardboard, stacked and laser cut into the ideal bee biome. (In case you’re worried, it’s waterproof — waterproofed with beeswax, in fact.) Mason bees love the little nooks formed by the cardboard’s corrugations, and they love the paper tubes (a.k.a. ear hair).
Mason bees are not going to make you honey. But they’ll pollinate flowers, and buzz around pleasantly, and sting your enemies, and learn how to be a beard, and all the other things we count on bees to do. Surely that’s worth having a giant hairy ear dominate your backyard.