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Insect hotels are great – but only if they’re done right

11/3/2024

Translation: Elicia Payne

March is the perfect time of year to install an insect hotel in your garden or on the balcony. But only if the rooms are designed in such a way that they can be occupied.

We need to have a few words with our online shop first. There’s around 200 different insect hotels in our range, but experts would certainly shake their heads in disbelief at several of them. They’ve got good intentions at best, but they’re not well made. What does it come down to when choosing an insect hotel? What’s important to consider?

A newly installed insect hotel in Schwerzenbach probably offers as many rooms as a casino hotel in Las Vegas.
Source: Martin Jungfer

Choose the right material

Hollow plant stems are particularly popular with bees and wasps. They use them as nesting holes for their offspring. Reeds and bamboo canes are often used too. Tip: a good hotel will have straight cut edges and be sanded. Otherwise, splinters could injure the bees and wasps.

Another material suitable for bees and wasps is hardwood. The wood of deciduous trees such as beech, ash and oak, as well as apple trees, has an advantage over softwood from fir, spruce and the like because it warps less in damp conditions. Holes are drilled into the hardwood, which in turn serve as nesting areas. Make sure that the holes aren’t at the front, i.e. where you can see the annual rings. If holes are drilled parallel to the bark instead, the tunnel walls are smooth for the insects. As with plant stalks, drill holes in the wood should also be free of splinters and sanded down. The holes, ideally ten to twelve centimetres deep, preferably even deeper, shouldn’t go all the way through the wood because insects will retreat in there.

A first wild bee is already inspecting the rooms in my hotel at the beginning of March.
Source: Martin Jungfer

The nesting holes, whether bamboo tubes or drilled wood, mainly attract bees and wasps to your hotel. If you want to attract ladybirds, lacewings or earwigs, you’ll need different material. All three insects like wood wool and cones. Lacewings and earwigs are attracted to straw. The disadvantage with having these materials in your insect hotel, however, is that it gets damp easily and can quickly become mouldy. So check it regularly and if necessary, simply replace it.

Now and again you’ll see insect hotels with hollow bricks in them. Most experts advise against this. Bricks can store heat well and are visually attractive – at least for us humans. And they may be a very inexpensive raw material for insect hotel manufacturers. For most insects, however, the hollow chambers are too large, the edges on the entrances too sharp and it’s draughty. At best, you could use up plant stems by sticking them into the perforated bricks. Or why not just use plant stems after all?

This insect hotel in our garden might be older, but it’s still popular. The closed tubes are already occupied and could contain offspring.
Source: Martin Jungfer

Be a specialist

There are lots of insects out there and all of them would certainly be happy to have a home. Nevertheless, decide who the guests in your insect hotel should be and make it as pleasant as possible for them.

Wild bees

As described above, wild bees like tubes and tunnels to raise their offspring in. That’s why in the wild, bees and wasps often inhabit the tunnels in dead wood which beetles have munched on. In an insect hotel, the diameter of the holes in the logs should be in the range of two to nine millimetres. If the holes are different, there should be more of those measuring three to six millimetres. This will allow masked bees, holed bees, scissor bees, the red mason bee, leafcutter bees and the horned mason bee to find shelter here.

Insect hotels are great – but only if they’re done right

Choose the right material

Be a specialist

Wild bees

Butterflies

Ladybirds and lacewings

Choose the right location

Give nature as much space as possible

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