Homes For Unsung Heroes: splore festival

Tuesday, 10 February 2015

Make your own insect homes

As the Splore Festival gets closer and most of the insect homes are complete it is time to put some information on making your own insect homes. From researching the huge variety of insect homes people have built, means that they are probably as diverse as insects, well maybe not quite but anyway it means that you can pretty well use anything you want and be as simple or as complex as you want. From a pile of leaves left in a corner, rather than cleared away, to an architecturally designed home fit for a queen (bee).

Materials again can be what ever that comes to hand, making homes for insects really involves looking at their habitat in the wild and replicating in some form. Insects are found everywhere in some form or other, at this point I was going to say apart from Antarctica, but having a quick look at Wikipedia shows that it does have an endemic insect species the Antarctic Midge, not an ant as the continents name suggests : )

Two Antarctic Midges

There are a few things that each home needs and like most of us one is to keep dry, of course there will be some insect species that like damp or moist areas but for many keeping the interior of the home dry will encourage them to stay. So using recycled and cleaned plastic bottles to provide a waterproof housing is fine, but it would need to be inside something to provide shelter from the sun. Rather than give lots of details, there is plenty of information about insect hotels and homes on the internet, but I shall add some ones here that I have enjoyed and show examples of many different types to be found.

But really the best way is to look at the insect you want to encourage and be creative in the way you copy the habitat, but really, really the best way is not to destroy the natural habitats in the first place.