April 8 Column: Insect Hotels

Well, today is an exciting day! I’ve been looking forward to writing about insect hotels for quite a while and have been wanting to build another one for our garden. Now I can check both off the list! (notice photo at left)

Before I jump into a discussion of the importance of insect hotels, let me give you a link to my column in today’s edition of The Spokesman-Review: Give beneficial bugs a home in your garden.

Insect hotels are structures that house beneficial insects and pollinators so they can overwinter and/or lay eggs for the next generation. We first saw one in Switzerland about 4 years ago and thought it was very cool. I think it’s so important to attract these helpful bugs to our gardens, both to control damaging insects AND for increased productivity through pollination.

We built our first insect hotel 2 years ago and just love it. Ours is quite rustic-looking and boy does it attract mason bees! (see video at bottom of this post)

For this week’s video, I went through the process of building an insect hotel in the hopes of encouraging you to do the same. It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s a perfect project to do with kids so they gain an understanding of how important (and cool) the insect world is. I hope you’ll enjoy the video and, as always, if you have any questions, just drop me a note at Susan@susansinthegarden.com.

I also wanted to include my original insect hotel video from 2016:

And here’s a short video showing mason bee activity at our insect hotel:

Last but not least, I’ve been saving photos and ideas for insect hotels on my Pinterest page. That’s a perfect place to get inspiration!