How to build an insect hotel

We are used to perceiving insects as nuisances or even threats, because they can inflict a bite on us, inoculate us with a possible disease or ruin our harvest or our garden through pests or more specific incidents. But this is a vision that is both unfair and incomplete.

Insects and other arthropods all have their specific role in the balance of life on the planet. There are no good and bad animals, they all maintain their exceptionality as unique creatures that have managed to evolve overcoming the innumerable traps or eventualities that the history of life on Earth draws.

Why build an insect hotel

The truth is that we need the insects. As the environmental organization Greenpeace points out in its campaign, biodiversity and food production worldwide depends on the pollination they carry out. It is a natural process that allows the flowers to be fertilized, bear fruit and seeds, and therefore food. And in this process, the role of bees and bumblebees is essential.

The declining populations of pollinating insects Because of pesticides, urbanization and climate change, it has become a threat to ecosystems and biodiversity.

According to Greenpeace, 40% of pollinating insects are in danger of extinction, especially bees and butterflies, and in Europe more than 40% of bee populations are greatly depleted. The cost for European agriculture of this impact on pollination may exceed 25 billion euros.

To try to reverse this situation, many strategies have been undertaken, at different levels. One of them is the “insect hotels”.

What are insect hotels?

“Insect hotels” are artificial shelters that favor the breeding of insects and other arthropods, such as spiders and myriapods, and allow them to carry out their pollination and pest control work.

In many cases, these structures, where wood predominates, make up for the lack in our too clean environments of perforated trunks and galleries in the earth or the rock where they establish their colonies.

Your balcony, terrace or garden are ideal places to host spaces that attract insects and make life easier for them.

Insect hotels are used to…

Promote the presence of beneficial insects and arthropods Promote the pollination of fruit trees Provide protection to threatened arthropod species such as bees and cooperate to stop their decline Promote biodiversity both in agricultural and urban or peri-urban spaces Provide an educational tool for schools and other groups Call attention the general public about the importance of insects Increase the food resources of other animals, such as insectivorous birds, frogs, toads and lizards

Choose the location for your insect hotel

The first thing is to choose the place where it is going to be installed. You have to make sure it is near a place where flowering plants abound, be it a garden, a park, a patio or an orchard with fruit trees.

You also have to make sure you are oriented to the sun and well protected from the wind, the affectation of possible frosts, as well as any other type of inclement weather.

Build it with suitable materials

You can build it with a wide variety of materials, including tree or shrub trunks and branches, reeds, bricks, peat, bark, reeds, and leaf litter.

The coverage or roof it must be waterproof, and it may be convenient for it to draw two wings, like the roof of a manor house. Under this protection you can arrange reeds, wood bark, dry pine cones, piles of straw and logs with holes to allow their holes to be colonized.

A home for every insect

You can design the holes to suit the needs of each insect. For example, the bumblebees they prefer a box with an entrance about 10 mm in diameter and a flight board at the entrance.

At bees they opt for perforated bricks filled with a mixture of clay and straw. Wasps will settle in a dry wood with holes or bamboo sticks, and lacewings and ladybugs in a slotted box filled with dry leaves.

At spiders they love hollow bricks or open timbers and butterflies, closed boxes with elongated slots placed in full sun.

And for the earwigsyou can fill a pot with straw, hay and sticks and lay it down so that the entrance is vertical.

But don’t worry too much, because it will be the insects themselves that in their natural dynamics will end up “designing” their home. depending on your needs. Let nature flow.

What insects can your hotel host?

Many and varied may become the tenants of our insect hotels. Here we offer you some more than possible candidates:

solitary honey bees, that they will not create a significant swarm, but they will have a refuge in the hotel where they can take shelter and they will provide us with their valuable pollinating function.potter wasps, whose larvae are voracious consumers of insects, which the adults will hunt without rest. Bumblebees and carpenter bumblebees, which are tireless pollinators, even in the middle of winter if the temperatures are not very low.ladybugs, well-known beetles, capable of flying, which are a perfect ally to control pests of aphids and other invertebrates.lacewings They are a family of insects, the lacewings, to which this shelter is offered in order to resist the winter cold, and which in spring will go out into the orchard or garden to deposit their larvae, which will ferociously devour aphids, mites and mealybugs, until they reach Adulthood.Dermaptera, which include the well-known earwigs, are flightless insects that feed on living or decaying plant matter, but also on small insects such as aphids and tiny Coleoptera and other arthropods such as mites.praying mantis, Very voracious insect, which eliminates a notable quantity of insects that it hunts on the prowl.butterflies, that also collaborate in the pollination process and give us all their aesthetic power.spiders of a few species, which will find safe shelter for them among the abundant holes that the hotel offers them and which will provide us with their great hunting capacity to contribute to pest control.Fireflies, Insects from the lampyrid family, to which we can offer safe refuge, since they have been greatly diminished due to the abuse of pesticides and herbicides in agriculture and gardening.myriapods, arthropods with a segmented body and numerous legs, such as centipedes and millipedes, that hide in holes, in leaf litter, and under logs, tiles, or bricks. Some species are skilled hunters of insects and other tiny arthropods.