- [Narrator] We all know you can eat mushrooms, but did you know, you could make them into a wallet?

Around the world, people are using mycelium, the unseen vegetative body of a fungus that forms mushrooms to make stuff, lampshades, key chains, flowerpots, even a canoe.

It's part of a sort of fungal revolution.

- There is a lot of excitement about fungi.

Right now, lots of creative ideas on using fungi to create packing materials or to build things that you could use at home that can maybe reduce the use of plastic, for example.

- There are thousands upon thousands of species of fungi.

We're just starting to explore a few of them for making materials.

- [Narrator] Such as leather-like fine mycelium used to make things like handbags.

David Hibbett is on the science advisory board for MycoWorks, the artist-formed company creating these.

- I love that artists can now think of living fungi as a medium that they can work with, just like paint or marble or something.

I do think that the fungal-based leather-like products are very interesting.

- Well, the first idea that comes in mind is to make materials that can be used instead of plastic nowadays.

- [Narrator] Athanassia Athanassiou is working on things that biodegrade when no longer needed, like gauze-like mycelium materials that also naturally help internal wounds heal.

- When you have an open wound, and then that you put the fibrous material on it, this slowly gives the wound the time to self-heal.

At the same time, the mycelium can be a material that naturally biodegrades.

- [Narrator] There are still some major challenges.

How to produce fungus products at a larger scale.

Sometimes growing fungi in controlled conditions uses a lot of energy.

Still, the possibilities.

- There are an immense number of possibilities as we think about sustainable systems and the use of these organisms to improve our quality of life by using substances that will degrade in nature quickly.

- [Narrator] Katy Ayers made that mycelium canoe.

- Making the canoe, I really learned that I can't control everything, especially a fungus, but I can direct it.

This is the fun part.

- [Narrator] After making the canoe, Ayers now uses mycelium to make hotels for bees.

Fellow students and the faculty advisor for her grant-funded research help her create 10 hotels a week.

Here's why.

Climate change, habitat loss, and other factors cause significant declines in bee populations.

And we need bees to pollinate crops.

Ayers saw a study that exudates, basically the juices of this mushroomy fungus, can kill some of the viruses threatening bees.

So by creating a place for bees to live and lay eggs... - Every time it rains, this will make a tiny bit of exudates, and we hope that the bees will actually go out and drink those as a water source.

- [Narrator] Here's how you build a bee hotel.

- What we do is we take our fungal spawn, which is just ground-up wood from tree-trimming, and it has the mycelium already grown into it.

- [Narrator] Pack it into a mold.

- [Katy] And then we just tape it up so it's airtight and put it in our incubators.

- [Narrator] Incubate so it grows for about five days.

Unpack.

- So one thing we're struggling with is that mushrooms love to eat everything, especially organic material, so it's actually growing through our molds.

- [Narrator] Into a humidity tent for a week.

- Keeping the humidity up actually helps it to continue growing.

They're bees, and they're just looking for a place to lay their eggs, so they're really not concerned about how nice it looks.

- [Narrator] Bake the inside to stop it from growing, put the inside and outside together, and you have a bee hotel.

Benefits for bees, benefits for the environment, using a more sustainable biomaterial instead of solid wood or styrofoam, often used now for bee hotels.

- And we do save all of these when we break them and actually spread them around campus so that more mushrooms grow.

So it won't go to waste.

- [Narrator] Ayers is installing her mushroomy bee hotels throughout Nebraska.

She'll retrieve them toward the end of the year to study how and how often bees used them.

She'll make adjustments, make more hotels, and hopefully take the product to market after a few more years of development.

And she'll keep paddling her mycelium canoe.

- There is so much potential for fungi in every aspect.

I see uses for them in literally everything.

So the possibilities are really whatever you can imagine.

(upbeat music)