Winter may seem the ideal time to avoid venturing out into the garden in preference for staying indoors and watching a film on TV in front of the fire or within in the comforts of a centrally heated home. However, building a bug house with the children in tow is a nice activity for a dry Winter’s Day.
The best building materials to use for constructing your bug hotel are ones that you already have piled up in the garden, garage or garden shed. Don’t buy anything new. Look around and see what can be re-cycled and re-used. For a bug hotel, you will need some scraps of wood or wooden pallets. Make sure you have gaps in between your layers of timber to create a bug hotel which consists of 5 or 6 storeys. If you use pallets, then you can just stack these one on top of the other until a height of about 3 feet. Then fill the gaps with different materials. You can use bricks with holes in, bundles of hay or straw, broken pieces of bamboo, bits of old pipe, dry leaves, pieces of old bark, logs with holes drilled into them, or logs which you find which have already started to rot and loose clay tiles.
Locate your bug hotel in a semi-shady, cooler part of the garden as many insects like living in damp, cool places. Bees, however, prefer sunny, warmer hidey holes. If you can, place your bug hotel near shrubs or a garden pond so bugs and insects can easily find your bug hotel.