I took this picture to e-mail to family members and then I wondered if any of you guys can guess what's going on here. What are these things and what is that stuff? P.s. skip the tree. Most people would get that one. Mystery photo.

The shadows make it tough to discern details, but I would describe it as a closed wooden box with an overhanging lid, perforated with small holes and enclosed in chicken wire.

So my guess is some kind of (a) insect home for breeding or (b) insect trap for identification of a pest (bark beetles?). The chicken wire is to keep out birds or other predators, and the overhang provides shade and insulation to make it more inviting to its occupants.

Final answer: I don't know.

It is a bird house with chicken wire over it to keep put preditors.

Best I can come up with.

It is made to shelter insects!

(Hint) It's a solid block, though, with dozens of holes drilled (ouch! my aching wrists) 5/16 in. deep, and not a box.

The purpose of the chicken wire is right!

(Hint: The predator is a pileated woodpecked.)

KLIK

So what's it for? And what's the stuff on the top and on the ground beneath?

Is it just a box you put up to keep them from destroying the tree when they drill holes in the tree trunk to lure out their prey/food?

If that is what it is, I'm curious why they think that since there are already holes, they don't drill more elsewhere...???

It looks like the kind of thing we have outside in the yard here.Those are for solitary bees to nest in. They 'nest', lay their eggs, in holes and just as we have bat boxes and bird boxes of various kinds so we have bee boxes. No doubt your woodpecker has worked out that the young larvae provide an easy meal

Damn you guys are good!

Yes, it's for a special small bee (it looks like a house-fly!) that comes out very early in spring, before honey bees. Good for pollinating our fruit trees, so we encourage them by building a nest.

Orchard Mason bee's nest, middle of page.

Okay, my only hope of fooling you is:

What's the stuff on top of the nest, and on the ground below?

Hint: it also has to do with reproduction.

Hint #2: the nest is on the southern side of the tree.

Hmmmm...it almost looks like dried lavender flowers.

Dried, flaky stuff, yes.

Here is the culprit.

And the litter is hulls from Douglas Fir cones. We use the litter for mulch.

The un-sub is attracted to the spot because it is too high for a cat to reach, and it gets the sunlight on cold days.

Your bee the orchard mason bee is osmia lignaria. Ours (Newmarket)is the 'red mason bee' its cousin osmia rufia and does the same job. We put our boxes up because we want to preserve its 'nesting' sites and preserve the species, not for pollination of orchards as such. These bees are less common than they were because modern agriculture is so much tidier and so there's a lot less stuff standing or lying around suitable for making holes in Nobody has ever put net over them. We get three kinds of woodpecker here locally : either they've not cottoned on or they don't find the attempt profitable for some reason. Woodpeckers are not short of ingenuity. One male in Antibes was using our kitchen roller shutter as a sounding board (so much louder than drumming on a tree ) This was all quite amusing until he managed to knock a hole through it.

We make no effort at all to provide alternative sites for the other masonry bee we get, the one that really enjoys walls. We just let them make holes in the mortar . The result is that the mortar on the South walls outside looks like thin lines of honeycomb in places. It would be a brave woodpecker that tried to drill that !