Renter: Existing cavities; nests in abandoned beetle galleries in dead wood. It will also occupy artificial nest sites such as bored wood, pithy stems; holes and cavities in walls; glass tubes, and bamboo stems. There may be between 8-23 brood cells in a nest. Reports of nesting in Helix shells by the subspecies leucogastra (Friese 1911b) are most probably wrong.
Nesting material: The nest closure plug is made of packed leaf mastic, which can be between 5-10mm thick (Westrich, 1989).The cell partitions are lacking and the eggs are evenly distributed in the pollen mass, which completely fills the nest cavity. According to Banaszak and Romasenko (2001) however, cell partitions are occasionally built. (Banaszak and Romasenko, 2001; Brechtel, 1986; Bosch, Vicens and Blas, 1993; Friese, 1923; Müller et al., 1997; Stoeckhert, 1933; Radchenko, 1978; Westrich, 1989)