Homes for Unsung Heroes on tour.

After the Splore Festival, Barbara from EcoMatters in Auckland kindly helped get the insect homes back to EcoMatters, who are going to use the insect homes for various events including the upcoming EcoWest Festival as well as some going to local libraries in Auckland.

A Few More Photos from Splore

Insect Homes - Night Time

Bring On The Insects

The insect homes are all completed, boxed up and ready to go, all that is needed now are the insects.

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.

Insect Home Furnishings

Insect City is Growing

Home is...

Some of the different designs for the front of the insect homes.

Open Homes

I put out the three test insect homes today and a few open home signs around the undergrowth to raise awareness amongst the local insect population. I am going away for a few weeks so have left the homes in the care of a property manager, so if any new tenants have issues they can be sorted out. I look forward to seeing if there are any takers.

Why State Housing ?

The theme for Splore 2015 festival is 'Home' and I thought about a few different ideas before submitting 'Homes for Unsung Heroes'. The festival is held at Tapapakanga Regional Park, south of Auckland and so the idea for what called the area home lead to me thinking about the wildlife in the area and specifically insects.

This further developed into thinking about how they could be celebrated for the work they do, mostly unseen, in supporting a healthy ecosystem and in turn providing homes for them  to help maintain and build their numbers as their natural habitats come under increasing pressure for land.

State Housing seemed an obvious choice as they have been built across the country and come in a range of designs, shapes and sizes as family needs changed.

For more information on the history of state housing there is an interesting article of the New Zealand History website here.

Posters

I have started designing some posters for the Pledge Me campaign based on old posters about state housing, more to come soon.