There has been a quite steep decline in amount of insects in the world, partially because some species are struggling to find suitable nests in the modern environment. The forests and gardens have changed from what they used to be, but we can build some housing for the insects. This should be simple enough that you can build it with help of a child. Of course you can do it alone if you're brave enough.
Before we'll continue to the building project, hear this:
Two major threats to insects are pesticides and modern farming. Pesticide use is killing insects and modern farms have huge fields for single types of plants. Due to this it's hard for insects to find food. Avoid pesticides, try having multiple kinds of flowers in your garden to ensure food for the pollinators.
The insect hotels are typically attracting only beneficial insects, at least in Finland. Solitary bees, ladybugs and some types of predatory hymenoptera can be attracted to it. These are either pollinators or insects which eat harmful insects.
This will be a simple design. Just cut two same size wall pieces and three pieces as floors.
I prefer pre-nailing in the first wall piece so it's easier to nail the pieces together.
First floor piece attached.
Then the second wall is attached to the floor piece. The pre-nailing makes sure that the nails are already ready to be nailed and there's a free hand to hold the pieces on place.
As the first floor piece and both of the walls were attached, the two remaining floor pieces were easy.
The roof will also be made from untreated timber, but the pieces are not the same size. If your timber is 2 cm thick, make the second piece 2 cm shorter.
Long roof piece length = Short roof piece length + thickness
We used a bit wider timber for the roof.
Bending a nail is not mandatory.
The shorter piece is on the left, longer piece is on the right. Now the roof is balanced and the both sides reach equally far, even though the pieces aren't equally long.
When attaching the roof to the body, make sure the nails are suitable length. If they are too long, they'll come through the body. If they're too short, they don't reach the insect hotel body.
Now the entire frame is ready.
Now it's time to fill the insect hotel with different materials. You can use wood with holes, sticks, pine cones, grass, moss etc. Different types of materials attract different kinds of insects. There is regional variance in this, depending on what kinds of insects are living in the area.
I didn't let my kid do this, but I made different size holes in the wood, 4 to 10 mm wide.
To make sure most materials won't fall out, we added a net on the backside of the insect hotel.
I attached it with wide headed screws to hold the metal net in place.
My son was allowed to choose what we'll put in it, so we filled it with tree bark, sticks, pinecones and some dry reed.
Now the hotel is finished and it's ready for business.
Filling the hotel with enough materials will also help to ensure that wasps will not try to build a nest inside the hotel. They usually require some space and don't really care about constructs like this.
