Our insect hotel

Two of our MEGA Club members worked on building an insect hotel for our school. They started planning and designing the construction in December and after many hours and many afternoons spent on hard work, they eventually established the hotel. Now it is proudly standing nearby our provisional school building.

But, why building an insect hotel?

As urbanization rises amongst big cities and even smaller cities, green spaces become very limited and even threatened. However, they are essential to our environment, as they are the habitat of a multitude of animals and insects. These play a vital role in conserving a well-functioning ecosystem: wild bees for instance are major pollinators and unfortunately tend to be neglected. That is why we consider that an insect hotel is an important step in favour of green spaces and all the animals taking care of them.

What is in our Insect hotel?

It also required a lot of research and many discussions with several teachers to decide what the interior would look like. Indeed, we were astonished to see how selective insects could be and how difficult it was to fill our hotel. Finally, we managed to agree on certain materials and came up with a nice design.

Bamboo and drilled wood:

• Mainly serve as shelters for wild bees and wasp

Fir cones:

• Serve as shelters for ladybugs and earwigs

Hay (upper part):

• Serve as a shelter for earwigs and green lacewings

Notice that the hotel must be positioned the right way too! The occupants want to be facing the sun in order to catch nice sunlight. However, the hotel needs to be protected from any bad weather conditions (rain, strong winds), that is why we placed it under some trees as well.