NCGW Things to do
Build a bug hotel
Re-use your waste to make a hotel for wildlife
Here’s what you’ll need!
Shopping list for your local garden centre:
Wooden pallets (or something else recycled to make layers for the different floors in your hotel)
To fill in the layers of your hotel:
• Bamboo canes
• Paving slabs
• Stones
• Sticks, twigs, branches and leaves, fir cones
• Broken non-plastic plant pots
• House bricks
For your hotel’s green roof:
• Wooden strips for edging the roof about 3 centimetres wide
• Galvanised nails
• Weed control fabric or membrane
• Multipurpose compost
• Plants (turf, moss or succulent plants are great)
You may have lots of this lying around
in the garden, so check what you can
recycle before buying it
Instructions:
- Pile up your pallets (or whatever you’re using to make the floors of your hotel) on top of each other. Make sure there’s space between each floor – you can use house bricks for creating space between the floors of your hotel if you need to.
- As you pile up your layers get a grown up to make sure each layer of the hotel is stable.
- Fill some of the gaps between your pallets with bamboo canes or twigs. Line up the canes or sticks so the ends face out of your hotel; that way your insect guests can crawl in easily.
- Stuff the other spaces between the floors of your hotel with the different materials you have.
- For your hotel’s green roof, nail or fix some wood about three centimetres high all the way around the edge of the top of your hotel.
- Next, line your roof with the weed control fabric or membrane. You should now be in a position to ‘fill up’ your roof with compost without any spilling out or falling through into your insect hotel.
- Cover the fabric or membrane with a layer of multipurpose compost that comes nearly up to the top of the wood edging of your roof.
- Plant the compost layer with your turf, moss or succulent plants. You’ve now got a green roof for your five star bug hotel!
Download this activity sheet (PDF)
Download all activity sheets (PDF)
