Get a buzz on Backyard B&B for friendly bugs

With an insect hotel, your guests will never leave, especially when you give them the best breakfast ever – your garden!

2021-02-04 -

Luxury, comfort and style are individual and personal choices – especially when it comes to high-class hideaways. So who knew some creatures find tunnels tempting, are turned on by twigs or sleep deep in bliss on a straw mattress? Beneficial garden bugs are very discerning, yet there’s a posh insect hotel in waiting among your garden debris that can make a handy bolthole for the better bugs of our world.

1 glam it up

Put your insect hotel right among your flowering plants or within your vegetable patch. Also give it some pizzazz! Native bees are a racted to bright colours, including aqua blue.

A neat and tidy garden means fewer nooks and crannies for insects to hide

why we love some bugs

Good insects serve two functions: they’re pollinators and ensure we have flowering plants and vital veg; or they’re carnivores and eat other insects that are vegetarians and eat our precious plants.

• Native bees aren’t big on honey-making – their strong suit is as a pollinator.

• Ladybirds, lacewings, hoverflies and assassin bugs munch on aphids.

• Ladybird adults and larvae also eat thrips, leafhoppers, moth eggs and small caterpillars.

• Damsel bugs eat moth eggs, leafhoppers, caterpillars and aphids.

• Lacewings, hoverflies, ladybirds, beetles and earwigs feast on mites.

• Native earwigs eat soft-bodied insects such as caterpillars.

2 bee bliss

Surround your bee hotel with clematis; its protein-rich pollen is a treat. Some bees, such as the pollinating leafcuer, like big cavities because they line their nests with circular snips they take from leaves.

3 down the spout

Insects are so adaptable – if you don’t offer a hotel room, they’ll find peace someplace else.

4 pop in for a drink!

Honey bees won’t use your hotel – they have a hive to call home – but will tuck into the nectar and pollen of your Grevillea ‘Flora Mason’.

5 it’s in the box

A purple plinth is ideal for a modern touch in a coage garden. So many secrets inside!

different room for bugs

In winter, insects can use your hotel rooms to hibernate. In summer, they can be places of rest.

• Solitary native bees love holes in wood – either drilled through a log or a block of timber, in bamboo culms that have natural cavities or in hollows of dead wood. Some dig holes in sand or clay.

• Ladybirds are attracted to bundles of twigs and sticks.

• Lacewings like to nestle in straw, coconut fibre or shredded cardboard.

• Many beetles scurry under bark.

• Assassin and damsel bugs like soft greenery.

• Earwigs wriggle under sand or stones.

6 BEST BREKKIE

Bees love lavender and there’s no competition from flies or mosquitoes, which are repelled by its exquisite fragrance.

7 CANDY COLLECTION

If your plant colour palee is limited, paint your hotels in bright colours to aract insects. Plus, there’s no need to use pesticides in your garden anymore if your beneficial bugs make a booking.

GO CRAZY WITH COLOUR

As the viability of honey bee populations come under increasing threat, now’s the time to encourage native bees into your garden for pollination. Entice them into your patch of paradise by painting your bug hotel in aractive colours, such as purple, aqua blue, orange and yellow.

8 PLENTY OF ROOM AT THE INN

Your hotel will soon become full if you put it close to a day-time hot spot – in this case a grouping of salvia, sedum and artemisia – but make sure it’s sheltered and protected from prevailing winds.

9 curtains for baddies

This pollen- and nectar-sucking lacewing has two jobs – to look pre y and to make babies that are voracious eaters, devouring hundreds of aphids a day – and any other delicious nasties.

10 go shabby chic

Old rusting cans, set against a fragrant rose bush – what insect wouldn’t be tempted, even if it had to enter by the back?

11 make garden art

Double up with a scarecrow-like structure that always has a spare room.

12 slim pickings

You’ll want to have what it’s having. Ladybirds can eat 5000 aphids in their year-long life – and never get fat!