The bamboo I've used in the past was pretty well sheltered for the bees, and since building their bee home I have found they much prefer building their mud homes in dry sheltered spaces.
I had a left over cubbyhole structure built but was not being used. The cubbyholes are over six inches deep which is preferable for bee homes. I started building the bee boards to fit in these cubbys.
The large cubbys can fit two bee boards side by side and the smaller ones can fit seven bee boards stacked. I should be able to fit close to seventy boards or more if I wanted to fill it up.
I started the built cubbyhole box with coating it with primer. And then went with some exterior paint. I do not plan on having this out in the rain. But due to the high moisture in the air outdoors in this region I wanted it to have some protection to that.
Painting all corners of the inside was alot of work.. all those walls took some time. But I think the primer coat will help.
Once painted it looked ready for the outdoors under my deck which is mostly protected from rain.. unless we get extreme sideways rain they shouldn't get more than a few drops on them.
I painted them right after spring time, so the paint should be able to air out for almost a year before I plan on using them. I would hate for the bees to get sick from the paint. And have not even filled half of the cubbyholes yet, so many more bee boards need to be built.
If the bees fill up all these homes it could produce thousands of bees. I can only imagine the sight of that. Even having a few dozen flying around was fun to watch but on this scale if they really take to them will be pretty wild.
I placed some of the board I've already built into the bee home from spring time. No activity right now with them. May need to wait till next spring.