Excavator: Dead wood. Females nest in burrows in dead wood. Chambers (1949) described an incomplete nest in a short, broken branch lying on the ground. This contained an irregular burrow in which were two sticky, semi- fluid, brownish-green pellets of provision; at the entrance, on the sides of the branch, were green stains as if the outer wall of leaf-pulp was about to be constructed. S.P.M. Roberts observed two females entering separate holes in a short, dead stump of a birch in Dorset. Reports of nesting in empty snail shells (Friese, 1911b; Banaszak and Romasenko, 2001) are most probably wrong.
Nesting material: Chewed leaves (e.g. Fragaria). (Amiet et al., 2004; Stoeckhert, 1933; Westrich, 2010: http://www.wildbienen.info/forschung/beobachtung20100525.php; G. Else, unpublished manuscript)