What you’ll need
What you’ll need
- Clean clay pot
- Acrylic paint
- Paintbrush
- Small piece of wood, roughly 4 cm
- Thick piece of string, roughly 50 cm
- Mesh bag (e.g., for potatoes or onions, or wire mesh; not plastic)
- Straw, wood shavings or dry hay
- Candle
- Lighter
- Scissors
How to do it
How to do it
1. Paint the clay pot with acrylic paint and leave to dry (around 3–6 hours).
2. Pull the string through the bottom of the pot and tie it to the piece of wood on the inside of the pot. This will allow you to hang the insect hotel.
3. Place the piece of wood inside the clay pot and pull the string all the way out through the hole.
4. Fill the pot with the straw, wood shavings or dry hay and press it down firmly. You can trim the straw with scissors.
5. Place the mesh over the top of the pot and tie it with string. This will stop birds from stealing the contents to build their nests.
6. Turn the pot over and check to make sure that the hole is also completely filled. If not, you can press more material into the hole from the outside.
7. Seal the hole at the bottom with wax to keep the pot dry inside. To do this, light the candle and drip wax into the hole as you hold the string tightly. Wait until the wax has completely hardened. Ask an adult to help you here.
8. Hang your insect hotel upside-down in your garden. Little critters will be swarming it before you know it! Make sure that your hotel touches a wall, branch or a tree trunk, as this will make it easier for insects like earwigs to find their way in. Before long, your hotel will be full of guests, such as ladybugs, earwigs and lacewings!
Topsy’s tip
Topsy’s tip
- You can also attach your insect hotel to a branch that you stick in the ground.
- Make a pile of sand or branches to create more places for insects to live.
Learn with Topsy
Learn with Topsy
- Have you spotted any guests in your insect hotel yet? Which tiny critters checked in first? And which only showed up later?
- Every creature has its place in nature – even if wasps sometimes bug you while you’re having a picnic. Do earwigs give you the creeps? Do you get annoyed when you find caterpillars munching on the lettuce in your garden? Or perhaps you find mosquitoes and flies to be useless pests? There’s more to them than meets the eye! Why? Every creature has an important part to play in the cycle of nature. You may have heard gardeners calling some insects “useful,” but others “pests.” Earthworms, for example, are considered useful because they eat, digest and excrete whatever they find on the ground, such as rotten leaves, branches and compost, to produce fertile soil, which is a good source of food for new plants. Caterpillars, on the other hand, are seen as pests because they nibble away at vegetables in the garden. However, caterpillars become butterflies, which are eaten by songbirds and pollinate the flowers that bees can’t reach. Earwigs, which may use your insect hotel as shelter, are often described as “ugly” and like to eat our fruit and vegetables. But they also love to eat aphids and eggs laid by other insects, thus keeping the garden free from pests. So what are they? Useful? Or pests?
- It is human beings who decide whether an insect is “useful” or a “pest” depending on whether it benefits or harms them. However, this doesn’t take into account that nature isn’t just about us, but the whole ecosystem. If insects don’t pollinate flowers, then fruit can’t grow, and if there is no fruit, people and animals will have less to eat. Every living creature, from the smallest fly to the largest land mammal, has a vital role to play when it comes to nature. Every organism, be it plant or animal, deserves to be respected because everything is interconnected.
