The point of insect hotels

We won’t keep up the suspense, insect hotels only exist for the sake of education !

They teach us about the types of habitats which generally host golden-eyed lacewings, wild bees, hunting wasps, miscellaneous diptera, earwigs, ground beetles, ladybirds, butterflies, xylophagous insects…

As you can imagine, no one enjoys having, for a long time, a neighbour who lays his eggs in your body or eats your offspring… In fact, several of these insects are insectivore or parasitic, so, having an insect hotel is not the brightest idea despite its educational point.

Let’s put it into practice

Learning about the types of habitats is admittedly a good thing, but why is it not a welcoming haven in practice ?

The vision of the insect hotel is merely a human one, where nature is harmonious and all the bugs live next to each other.

Yet, let’s not forget two or three principles about how nature works. Habitat is one thing but not the only one. Its location is very important (height, positioning, proximity with other elements…), including all the other components such as the availability of food, the capacity to reproduce, the protection against predators or the protection against natural elements…

Usually... but the human being’s point of view can help us understand the miscellaneous elements. If we think about our primary needs (food, water, safety, shelters, reproduction, competition within the same species or with other species…) animals very often have the same ones.

So, what do we do about nature ?

We diversify landscapes,

• we keep a section of my high grass,
• we can create ecological corridors,
• we put stones / branches / pierced wood / straw (…) in strategic places,
• we compost,
• we diversify the garden as much as possible,
• and many, many other things…

Where does one insect live ? How does it live ? What does it eat ? When do we have to help nature ? When is it best not to do anything ? These are usually some good ways forward.

You can lean on the insect hotels to start learning about the insects and their way of living [1] !

Don’t buy any habitats in stores promising you « loads of insects » or « the end of phytosanitary products » if you use a insect hotel. We rather recommand that you read « Bichonne ta planète » or « Le petit traité du jardin punk » ;)

Resources

Positioning game

We use small neodymium magnets that we stick behind the bugs to be cut out and on the insect hotel. We define the adequate places for the various bugs. We show how diverse and easy to reproduce the habitats are (straw, wood, leaves...)

Sources

Memory aid

A4 two-sided paper data sheets to be cut into A5.

Sources

Wikimedia Commons Links

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hotel_%C3%A0_insectes_(1_sur_3).svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hotel_%C3%A0_insectes_(2_sur_3).svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hotel_%C3%A0_insectes_(3_sur_3).pdf

Credits

Photo of the article : Martinvl, licence CC-BY-SA.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BuginghamPalace.jpg