Kids Go Gardening - make a bug hotel
Do you love hunting for bugs?
Creepy crawlies are fun to find and are good for your garden too. Give them somewhere to live and you’ll be fascinated by what visitors come and stay.
Insects of all descriptions are good for your garden including ladybugs, wasps, lacewings, and bees. Providing a safe place for these good bugs to live is one way of keeping your garden healthy and balanced.
Some bugs provide food for other insects that pollinate your plants. Some provide food for birds, some eat plant rubbish and some prey on the insect that eat our plants. So really, they’re good!
A bug hotel
Building a bug hotel is a good start to attract insect visitors to your place. The best bug hotels have nooks and crannies of all shapes and sizes made from different materials.
Lachie went on a scavenger hunt and found all sorts of goodies to build his bug hotel, including pumice, sticks, pipes and wood.
What you’ll need
- A selection of twigs, pipes, pine cones, pumice, rocks, hay, – anything really.
- Pieces of wood or bricks to make the structure of your hotel.
How to build it
- Get an adult to help you with drilling holes in the pipes and wood – bugs love to hide in them!
- Build up your hotel layer by layer like Lachie has. He even made a sign!
A bug hotel can also be made from a collection of hollow stems (like bamboo) packed into a plastic drink bottle with the end cut off. Easy!
Lachie’s bug hotel is now open for business!
Insects that are welcome in our garden:
- Ladybirds
- Daddy Long Legs
- Spiders
- Mites
- Hoverflies
- Ground beetles
- Parasitic flies
- Parasitic wasps
11-Apr-2014
A Bug Hotel
In the Garden
