Renter: Existing cavities. Nests in existing cavities (eg beetle emergence holes). Exploits a variety of cavities as nest sites. The species has been reared from a dead Rubus stem collected in Hampshire (pers. obs.); a female has been observed entering such a stem in Wexford (C. Ronayne, pers. comm.). Specimens are occasionally observed flying about dead wood and, in Devon, G.M. Spooner (pers. comm.) observed a female burrowing in the ground.
On the continent, it has been reared from old vacated galls of the cynipid wasp Andricus kollari (Wiering, 1954 (nest described and figured); Leclercq, 1964), and a broken Phragmites stem (Janvier, 1972a). In the Netherlands, V. Lefeber (pers. comm.) has reared specimens from burrows in dead Betula, Crataegus and Salix wood, and from a wooden post.
In Spain, it is reported to nest in Rubus stems and in dry stems of Rosa. (Ornosa & Ortiz-Sánchez, 2004)