Make Your Own Bug Hotel

My recent blog “Make Your Own Bird Feeder” was all about helping birds. This one is all about helping the bugs which are an important part in keeping our gardens healthy. As we landscape our gardens with beautiful seating areas, carefully manicured lawns and garden sculptures there are less and less habitats for wildlife. We recently made a really cool bug hotel at school with help from M&D. Here are my tips on how to make your own bug hotel…

Our school bug hotel complete with the sign we made

You will need:

• 4 or 5 old pallets
• old bricks & slates
• old tin cans
• bamboo canes
• corrugated cardboard
• dried leaves, moss, sticks, pine cones and old herbaceous stems
• logs

Our bug hotel, doesn’t it look great?

To make:

1. Choose a quiet corner of your garden where the bugs won’t be disturbed too much and away from your veg beds

2. Carefully stack the pallets on top of each other with the help of a grown up

3. Now is the fun part, fill your bug hotel, adding the larger items such as bricks and logs first (it’s good to drill holes in the logs first too)

4. Roll up the cardboard and slot it into some gaps.

5. Fill your tin cans with various items such as cut down bamboo canes, collections of plant stems or old leaves and moss then add them to your bug hotel with the open end facing out

6. Stack slates up and slide them in

7. Fill all the gaps with leaves, moss, pine cones and sticks.

Once your bug hotel is finished it will be a beautiful feature in your garden as well as a 5 star hotel for your creepy crawly friends to check into. Keep filling up any gaps as the garden materials start to decay down.

And remember to give your hotel a name. Our favourite is the Grand Bug-and-Pest Hotel but we also love Bug-ingham Palace and Edin-bug Castle! What will you call yours?

A bug hotel at Chelsea Flower Show

It’s not just us that loves bug hotels, they have even featured at the Chelsea Flower Show too!

Lulu x