Most of us are aware of the crisis facing the honeybee, but there are hundreds of lesser known species that need help

On a rainy, windswept summer's afternoon I find myself on the banks of the river Thames in Barking, east London, with a tape measure in hand, adjudicating at a Guinness world record attempt. I have been asked to measure the length, height and depth of a large wooden structure made out of more than 20,000 pieces of bamboo and 200 logs. It has taken local volunteers three weeks to cut, saw and drill into the wood and create what they hope will be the world's largest bee house.

There is enough room in its interior for hundreds of residents who, it is hoped, will make their nests in the numerous holes and tunnels in the wood. Yet few if any of these bees will be recognisable to the public, for none of them make honey for our consumption, nor spend the summer buzzing from one brightly coloured flower to the next in our parks and gardens.

These lesser known bees are solitary insects that, as their name suggests, live alone rather than in large colonies like honeybees or bumblebees. Many survive for just a few weeks – enough time to mate, make a nest and lay their eggs. But, like their more sociable cousins, they perform vital pollination services while they busily collect nectar and pollen from plants to feed their offspring.

"Local residents and volunteers have invested their evenings and weekends to help London Wildlife Trust and architecture company Make: Good build this huge bee house," says Francesca Barker, conservation officer for Barking Riverside. "It will provide urgently needed habitat for solitary bees which are in decline in Britain."

It is important that we get to know these harmless and fascinating creatures and help protect them, because if our honeybees continue to deteriorate we will be depending on them more and more to pollinate our food. Honeybees and the dangers they face from parasites, disease, pesticides and malnutrition have been well documented over the past few years, ever since a strange phenomenon dubbed colony collapse disorder threatened their existence. The ensuing press interest in the vanishing honeybees has resulted in an unprecedented increase in the number of people taking up beekeeping in towns and cities across the world in an effort to save the beleaguered species. In the last three years, membership of the British Beekeepers Association has doubled to more than 20,000, beekeeping courses report long waiting lists, and beehives are springing up on office rooftops, allotments and in schools.

"This level of interest is unheard of during my 35-year career," says John Hauxwell, former chair of North London Beekeepers' Association. "We are now overloaded with novice beekeepers and we don't have the experienced ones to support and mentor them."

It is a far cry, he adds, from when he joined the association in the mid-1980s and newcomers had meetings around his small kitchen table. But in the furore surrounding the honeybees' demise, solitary bees have been overlooked. While there is just one species of honeybee in the UK, and 24 different bumblebees (though three species have vanished in recent years), there are some 250 species of solitary bee. Their future is jeopardised by many of the same problems affecting honeybees such as modern farming practices, which have reduced the availability of forage. In addition, urban development has destroyed solitary bees' nesting sites.

The Barking Riverside bee house hopes to provide a safe place for the 30 or so local solitary bee species to lay their eggs. It will most likely entice the red mason bee in spring, one of the UK's most common solitary bees, which makes its nest in a cavity. The bamboo hollows in a bee house resemble the plant stems it likes to lay its eggs in. In then seals the hole with mud. To the untrained eye, it could easily be mistaken for a honeybee, albeit a slightly redder version. Other mason bees nest in holes in wood or walls.

The giant bee house may also attract leafcutter bees. They cut circular and oval pieces from leaves to line their nests in ready-made cavities. Again, to a lay person leafcutters could be confused with honeybees – although they are slightly smaller and darker – but there is a telltale sign. As she flies, the female bee grips an enormous leaf, longer than herself, to the underside of her body as she heads back to her nest. One type of leafcutter bee which may prove unpopular with gardeners has a preference for lining its nest with pieces of rose leaf. The other most common solitary bees in Britain are the various mining bees, which burrow into soil to make their nests. Every spring little mounds of earth that resemble worm casts appear on well manicured lawns as the female bee digs away like a terrier at a rabbit hole. If you look closely you should see the brightly coloured tawny mining bee, Andrena fulva, which despite its name is a conspicuous foxy orange colour.

"Their nests will not damage the lawn and the little earth mounds will disappear after a couple of weeks, so there is no need to remove them or try to discourage these lovely little bees – just enjoy them!" advised the charity Buglife when it promoted the tawny mining bee as its "bug of the month" on its website.

"Andrena fulva's a beauty," says Adam Hart, social entomologist at the University of Gloucestershire. Hart is also scientific director of the Bee Guardian Foundation, an organisation that is hoping to capitalise on the awareness around honeybees for the benefit of the solitary species.

"Honeybees can reel people in and then we can get them involved in helping to save other bees," he says. "With bees very much at the forefront of people's minds, but with everyone focused on honeybees, this work could not be more timely."

The foundation began its crusade in the Cotswold town of Stroud, giving residents easy steps they could follow, such as growing bee-friendly plants and protecting habitats, to become "bee guardians". Some 8,000 people signed up. Schoolchildren and volunteers constructed 350 small solitary bee houses for local people and at Stroud High School to monitor the nesting behaviour of the local population. "The data from both gardens and the school will be collated and analysed by the university to produce guidance on the best way to help solitary bees," says Hart.

A much wider five-year research project, based in Lyon, France, is investigating which nesting devices, park management methods and forage are best to increase solitary bee populations across Europe. It will disseminate an action plan to 20 European cities in 2014. As a project partner, Britain's Natural History Museum is helping to design a European awareness campaign. The project builds on initial research in New York that has shown that, in densely built-up areas where gardens and green spaces are often in the shadow of tower blocks, sunny, open rooftops may be the best locations to provide food and habitat for solitary bee species.

In November, ITV viewers in south-west England voted for the Bee Guardian Foundation to win £46,000 of lottery funding to take its message to Gloucester and make it the world's first "bee guardian city". It is fortuitous that the bee champions' arrival coincided with the city council's grounds maintenance department looking to save money: expensive civic displays of bedding plants that yield little nectar or pollen are being replaced by bee-friendly herbaceous perennials that require less watering, weeding and fertiliser. Schools have each received a packet of wildflower seeds and fruit trees for planting, and residents have been invited on bee walks to learn about the solitary bees living in their midst.

Gloucester will be a test bed for developing a bee guardian kitemark. "Just as hundreds of towns have achieved Fairtrade status by adhering to strict criteria about supporting and using products with a Fairtrade mark, cities will be able to achieve bee guardian status if they can demonstrate their commitment to adopting bee-friendly measures," explains foundation co-founder Jessie Jowers.

She believes that one of the reasons we are so ignorant of solitary bees is that we don't have the same cultural understanding of them as we do with honeybees, whose honey and beeswax have been harvested for centuries. For instance, cave paintings in South Africa dating back 20,000 years show honey hunters smoking honeybees out of their nests. Pharaohs made honey offerings to their gods and their mummified remains have been found with containers of honey. For the Greeks and Romans, honey was the food of gods, and its medicinal qualities as an antiseptic were revered. The Qur'an has a chapter called "The Bee" in which the health-giving properties of honey are extolled. And one of the oldest alcoholic beverages, mead, is made from honey, and our light was until relatively recently provided by beeswax candles.

When the Pilgrim Fathers went to North America they took with them beehives to pollinate their crops and pastures, hence honeybees became known as the "white man's fly". The hive is also synonymous with industry and hard work in Protestant culture. It is no coincidence that the entrance hall of the neo-gothic town hall in Manchester – the engine of our industrial revolution – features honeybee mosaics. And there are numerous examples throughout history of the honeybee society being used as a metaphor to justify wildly differing philosophies from absolute monarchy (the queen bee rules the hive) to communism (the worker bees are collectively in charge).

Although the oldest bee fossil is of a stingless solitary bee, Trigona prisca, preservered in amber at least 74 million years ago, we just don't have the affinity with solitary bees that we share with honeybees.

Jowers plans to redress this. She will spend the winter studying solitary bees in Mexico, Ecuador and the United States on a Churchill Fellowship to examine the cultural significance of indigenous bees in the Americas before the honeybee's arrival. "The ancient Mayan civilisation worshipped the meliponine bees in the forests and their priests harvested this stingless bee's honey as part of a religious ceremony twice a year," says Jowers. "I want to come back with more stories like this."

Back in east London, Francesca Barker says goodwill to all bees is already apparent. "Local businesses donated all sorts of things for the bee house such as roofing felt, excavators, topsoil and scaffold boards," she says. "As soon as you mention bees, people say, Oh yes they're in trouble, how can we help?" And by the end of the afternoon, the world's officially biggest bee house, standing at 16.56 square metres, has its first resident. "We've got a mover-inner" shouts a local Scout volunteer, Owen McNaughton, as he watches the first bee crawl into one of the bamboo canes.