Insect hotels. What materials to use? Where to install them?

No matter what time of year you can set up an insect hotel. They will come there to lay eggs in the spring, take refuge there in the winter.

A hotel can accommodate a large number of species, ladybugs, butterflies, solitary bees, hoverflies, gendarmes, earwigs or wasp queens.

The main thing is to offer everyone a room adapted to their needs. Bernard Cwiek is a manufacturer of insect hotels for individuals and communities:

“Hotels are made up of several types of materials. By varying the hiding places, the insects welcomed will be numerous and diversified. We will find there in particular xylophagous insects such as gendarmes, which are also called fire bugs.

Wasp queens also come here to find shelter when their swarm is dead (this is also the case for hornets and bumblebees). They like to come and hide in pine cones. Each insect species has a different threshold of cold tolerance, so they come at different times.”

“Straw, wood shavings, peanut shells… For me, it’s cheap filler, useless for insects.”

Bernard Cwiek

at franceinfo

The materials used are very numerous. Hollow bricks, straw, logs with holes, pith stems like those of raspberries and elderberries, and hollow stems like those of bamboo.

All the rooms will not necessarily be 100% inhabited – and this does not matter the size of the hotel – but, obviously, the more your garden is rich in biodiversity, the more the hotel will have a good occupancy rate.

To be welcoming, an insect hotel should not be installed just anywhere:

“The holes must be oriented from the rising sun to the midday sun, therefore from the east to the full south. It must be installed with its back to the prevailing winds. It can also be installed with a northern exposure, but colonization will take longer.”

To guarantee a long life for your hotel and protect insects, equip it with a roof of wood or tiles. Do not install it facing driving rain. If the insects are rinsed several times a week, they will take their legs and their wings around their necks and go elsewhere…