Quick and easy to your own insect hotel. Are you bored with your garden? – No problem, with a self-built insect hotel you can not only beautify the property but at the same time get to know the biodiversity of the insect world better. Tips and tricks for building your own insect hotel are given in the following lines.
The materials and tools for construction
For the construction of the hotel, you need several small wooden boards, thin bamboo tubes, a wooden box as a frame, and simple, straight wooden sticks. You will also need a small amount of straw and fine wire mesh.
The tools you need are a drill with an 8mm wood drill, a file, wood glue, scissors, and a saw.
The building instructions
Set up your finished wooden frame and drill an 8mm hole in each corner of the wooden frame where screws will then be attached as brackets.
Now start with the individual hotel rooms for the insects. Glue the small wooden boards into the wooden frame step by step as floors, keeping a height difference of 10 cm. Depending on the frame size, you can choose the number of floors you like. Once the individual floors are glued in and dry, you can start equipping the floors. Place the straw on the bottom tier and attach the fine wire mesh in front of it to provide protection from birds.
The thin bamboo tubes are pushed onto the second floor so that the entire floor is full and the bamboo holes lookout to the front. You can glue these in place with wood glue. For the third floor, you need wooden sticks, which must be inserted in such a way that small gaps and slots form. Attach them with wood glue. Now let you’re almost finished insect hotel dry and, after briefly sanding down the wooden edges with a file, secure it in a suitable place in your garden.
Tips and Tricks
- Pay attention to the stability.
- Fix the hotel to a weatherproof wall.
- Place bait at the hotel to attract more insects.
- Protect the hotel from birds and other predators.
- Use simple materials, the type of wood used does not matter.
- Keep the minimum distance between floors to give the insects enough space.
If you still have difficulties building the hotel, you can click on this video link, which explains the construction of an insect hotel in more detail, to get an even better insight.
Units of measurement and sizes for construction
- Wooden frame: 40x30x10cm
- Floorboards: 30x10cm
- Distance between floors: min. 10cm
- Minimum height to hang hotel: 100cm
- Bamboo cane length: 10cm
- Length of the wooden sticks: 10cm
- Fine wire grid size: 10x30cm
If you have done everything correctly and your insect hotel has been fixed in a suitable place, you can watch the insects move in at any time. The types of insects that have moved into the floors vary greatly, from cockchafers to simple fly larvae.
