HALF-TERM MAKE PROJECT: INSECT HOTEL
Posted on Thursday 16 February 2012
Give your local mini beasts somewhere to shelter and hide in style with this multi-story insect hotel. You’ll find it soon fills up with lots of garden visitors, from bees and ladybugs to lacewings and woodlice.
You will need:
24 old bricks
Old curved roof tiles
10 short pieces of wood
Materials to fill the hotel, such as corrugated cardboard, bamboo canes, drinking straws, old pots, logs, egg boxes, pine cones and dry leaves
A selection of hollow tubes (including cardboard tubes and plastic pipes or bottles)
- Find a quiet, sheltered spot in the garden and make sure that the ground is flat. Put down two rows of bricks, two bricks long and two bricks high, so that they are the same width apart as the length of your pieces of wood.
- Put a curved roof tile between the two rows of bricks to provide a shelter for toads and frogs. Lay three pieces of wood, spaced at equal distances, across the lines of bricks. Add another one or two courses of bricks and some more wood in order to build up the stories.
- On the top layer, add an extra piece of wood at the back of the stack. This will make the tiles sit at an angle, which will help the rain run off.
- Roll up the pieces of corrugated cardboard so that you can slide them inside the old cardboard tubes. Put the filled tubes inside the hotel and then fill the other cardboard tubes and plastic pipes with a selection of bamboo and drinking straws. These make perfect winter ‘rooms’ for small insects.
- Why not ask an adult to drill holes in the ends of logs to include in your hotel? You can also add other materials like old egg boxes, pine cones, and dry leaves. Place more tiles on top of the final layer to form the roof of the hotel.
Try this… Why not find a flat tile or piece of slate and write the name of your hotel on it with chalk or acrylic paint pens?
This make project comes from Garden Crafts for Children by Dawn Isaac (Cico Books, £14.99, www.cicobooks.co.uk) which contains 35 fun projects for children to sow, make and grow.
Photographs by Emma Mitchell and Martin Norris