April 8 Column: Insect Hotels

Well, today is an exciting day! I’ve been looking forward to writing about insect hotels for quite a while. Since I’ve been wanting to build another one for our garden, I can check both off the list! (notice photo at left)

Before I jump into a discussion of the importance of insect hotels, let me give you a link to my column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Give beneficial bugs a home in your garden. (or you can read my column lower in this text)

Insect hotels are structures that house beneficial insects and pollinators. Their purpose? They allow them to overwinter and/or lay eggs for the next generation. We first saw one in Switzerland about 4 years ago and thought it was very cool. I think it’s so important to attract these helpful bugs to our gardens. That’s because they’ll to control damaging insects AND increase productivity through pollination.

We built our first insect hotel 2 years ago and just love it. Ours is quite rustic-looking and boy does it attract mason bees! (see video at bottom of this post)

For this week’s video, I went through the process of building an insect hotel. My goal is to encourage you to do the same. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s a perfect project to do with kids. That way, they’ll gain an understanding of how important (and cool) the insect world is. I hope you’ll enjoy the video. As always, if you have any questions, just drop me a note at Susan@susansinthegarden.com.

I also wanted to include my original insect hotel video from 2016:

And here’s a short video showing mason bee activity at our insect hotel:

Insect Hotels garden column:

by Susan Mulvihill

You might think I’m nuts for wanting to attract insects to my garden. But you’ll quickly discover there is a method to my madness.

As an organic gardener, I avoid using chemicals for dealing with troublesome insects. Fortunately, when it comes to the insect world, the bad guys are in the minority. Of all the insects, 99 percent of them are either beneficial or benign.

I want to attract the good guys to help me deal with that pesky one percent. I also want to draw in pollinators to increase production in both the vegetable garden and our orchard.

Insect hotels are a great way to accomplish both goals. After seeing them in European gardens, we decided to build our own two years ago. If you’re new to this concept, you might be wondering what an insect hotel is.

What are insect hotels?

Their purpose is to provide a structure filled with natural materials for beneficial insects and pollinators. They can lay eggs in them and/or hibernate in them. In this region, an insect hotel will attract native solitary bees, beetles, lacewings, ladybugs, parasitic wasps and spiders. If some of those sound creepy to you, remember that they do a lot for us in our gardens so they are well worth housing.

Ours has attracted a lot of mason bees which are very efficient pollinators. They are easygoing and fascinating to watch.

Try searching for photos of insect hotels

If you do a web search on “insect hotels,” you will be amazed at how many different styles you’ll see. Some are simple and elegant, others are quite elaborate.

The best part of building one is that it’s something you can do with kids to teach them about the fascinating world of insects. It’s important for them to understand the role they insects in the environment instead of thinking they should step on them.

Since my husband and I are going to build a second insect hotel, I wanted to explain the basic concepts.

Insect hotel basics

There are only two rules for building them: face the open side of the structure to the south or east so insects will benefit from the sun’s warmth, and cover the top to protect them from wet weather.

Just like with our first insect hotel, we are going to use recycled building materials. The base structure will be an old beehive “super” which essentially an open wooden box. We’ll close in the back of it and make shelves inside to hold materials that will attract the insects. Since I’m still tidying up the garden from the winter, I should have plenty of items available; refer to the information box for ideas.

When it comes to the actual design, be as creative as you like. Just be sure to put it in a spot where it can be observed. Ours is at one end of our vegetable garden and we frequently sat  near it last year, watching the mason bees coming and going. What a fun way to observe how the natural world works.

INSECT HOTEL FILLER MATERIAL

• logs or wood blocks with 1/4” to 5/16” diameter holes drilled into them
• dry leaves and branches
• hollow plant stems
• masonry bricks containing holes
• mason bee tubes, paper drinking straws
• bamboo or reed tubes
• clay pots
• pinecones
• rolled-up paper or cardboard
• wood scraps
• straw
• loose tree bark