Insect Hotel
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
https://colinpurrington.com/2019/05/horrors-of-mass-produced...
“After all the bees finish emerging (summer), throw out the house. Or, better, burn it and record a video of the fire.”
We don't expect cows to survive in the wild, either.
Feral dogs or feral horses tend accumulate some differences from their domesticated brethren relatively quickly.
Cannot recommend it enough.
Taken in August, so the flowers and such are hiding a bit in fairly dry grass, but also shows a bonus visitor.
But there's counter points. The first one being is that most of these products, including the one the author is showing in the opening of the article, are not bee hotels. They are insect hotels.
Parasitic insects are insects. And there's nothing inherently wrong with them. My tubes are filled with solitary bees, wasps stuffing their tube with tiny spiders, bumblebees, a whole bunch of diversity. And yes, there's competition for tubes and parasitic behavior.
Which is all perfectly normal and natural. I photograph insects as a hobby. In the wild, parasitic behavior is the norm. Most caterpillars are dead before they know it, as they're easy prey for parasitic wasps to inject their eggs into. Many insects are covered in mites.
What can I say? Insects have a short and brutal life. Most don't make it to adulthood and that is kind of how it is supposed to be.
This is not to say that many of the tips in the article are bad, they are still good. But not just for bees, they are good tips in general.
The one tip I'd stress the most is the cheap nests being too shallow. In moderate climates where there's an actual winter, don't be afraid to go 30cm deep.
The other thing I'd add is to think of their "habitat" outside the hotel. Digg in a bucket of water and you'll have a mini pond where many will come to drink. Plants the proper flowers, etc.
On the other hand, I'll tolerate most spiders (yes, not insects, I know) since they actually put the work into making a web and so on.
Even if you favor particular insect species, usually because of ridiculous reasons like liking their colors, you seem to miss the point that they're supposed to have enemies.
Why do you think insects lay an incredible amount of eggs? Because 99% will not make it. They're not supposed to make it. If the caterpillars of your favorite butterfly would all survive, there'd be no foliage left anywhere, which in turn would collapse many other things.
Applying human morality to nature is even more ridiculous. Our very own species is a million times worse than the absolute worst parasitic insect.
(I think it's worth noting that your position would be extremely unpopular among pet owners - and I think justifiably so. The issue with parasitism is that it basically exploits the success of another organism without necessarily offering gains to anything else, and that's really not something that should be rewarded. Do we really need to argue about the reality that much of what happens in nature is unnecessarily cruel? Maybe some of it is necessary, like the spiders I will tolerate, to prevent us becoming overwhelmed, but I think that's not entirely true.)
The very idea extends to pet owners. You domesticate an animal so far that it is basically an extension of yourself. Or, you take a wild animal (bird, fish, turtle, rabbit, etc.) and constrain it for life. You imprison it, prevent it from performing any remotely natural behavior, block it from reproducing...all so that for at best a few minutes per day you can look at it and tell yourself...I really love animals.
You apply all this needless suffering to animals for mere personal entertainment, it serves not a single evolutionary purpose.
And then you turn around to complain about the "suffering" induced by parasites, and that parasites show bad behavior. There's no such thing as bad behavior in nature, it's a man-made concept. A parasite is a parasite evolved to survive and reproduce that way. It just IS. It feeds at the expense of others and it gets preyed on itself by robber flies and birds.
But I bet you love birds. Fun creatures to see. Cheerful. Also mass murderers that kill hundreds of insects, nymphs ("babies") included on any given day, without a care in the world.
Human morality plays no role in this. All of these things are connected and normal. Not just that, they are needed if you don't want plague-like imbalances. Insects are not supposed to have a high success rate.
Your selective shopping in behavior is not only delusional, it's not even consistent. You "tolerate" spiders over parasites. Spiders paralyze their prey, wrap it, then suck out the liquids whilst still alive.
Again, I get it. You want to see "nature" in a way that makes you feel comfortable. It's about you. Not about nature. It's not nature's purpose or problem to make you feel comfortable based on random fabrications in your mind.
Feel free to have your insect hotel infested with parasites. I'm sure your guests will be grateful instead of suffering.
I'm not sure why you are gatekeeping but this makes no sense.
An insect hotel is not nature.
An insect hotel is either returning nature to natural levels or changing it to something humans enjoy ie. Maximum biodiversity.
Either way parasites need to be controlled.
This is a great idea, if you like all insects. If you have a dislike for mosquitoes, you might want to re-evaluate.
The purpose of an insect hotel is to support insect diversity/populations which is lacking typically in urban areas. Insects in turn doing wonders for plant diversity in the area and attracting birds, for being prey items. An insect hotel is a tool that along with a few other small and simple measures, may make your garden much more wildlife friendly.
The comparison with chicken falls short. People have chicken for their eggs, meat and/or personal entertainment. There's no ecological goal of supporting chicken diversity as they're not exactly in decline, nor do they play any meaningful role in relation to native wildlife.
Chicken are for you, a utility. An insect hotel is not for you, it's to help insects and related wildlife. Insects are not pets, you should not cherry pick them with zero understanding of how the dynamics work. 99.99% of insects should die before adulthood, and even adulthood is typically mere days or weeks.
Is just a beautiful part of biodiversity.
Healthy bees evolved with parasites and are perfectly able to deal with them and clean themselves. Bees dosed with pesticides not so much.
Burning your insect hotel each year does not matter, the parasites are inside the beehive, not in the insect hotel. Is an advice that only helps the seller of insect hotels. Solitary bees don't live in the nests. They lay eggs, add food, close the door and never return.
https://nurturing-nature.co.uk/wildlife-garden-videos/ichneu...
You buy a bee hotel (or bee hotels). They provide you with a tube containing a few fresh bee larvae every year before the wild bee season. After the season, you return the filled tubes. They remove parasites etc. and sell the resulting bee larvae for their commercial business with farmers etc. The biannual exchange is free. There is also minimal gamification because you can compare your success with other bee hotel owners from the same company.
https://fr.wildbieneundpartner.ch/ (in French)
I moved one and disturbed three hibernating admiral butterflies. The log went back on the pile and it’s been left there for years. The thought of disturbing their life like that fills me with remorse and gradually more and more of my garden is turning into carefully nurtured fallow ground.
You have to stay on top of the weeds. Some plants just muscle in and fuck it up for everyone else. I’m looking at you, comfrey. Pulling their satanic tap roots out one by one gives me great pleasure. They are the devil’s carrot.
Cowslips and oxslips are good sharers of ground. They seem to push out the asshole plants but let others grow around them. You can collect the heads in late summer and harvest the seed to vernalise and grow new slips. I managed to convert 15000 seeds — yes, I counted them — into ten new plants. Maybe I’ll do better next year.
My garden blends from suburban stuck up prissyness, through wild flowers, then brush, and into weedy chaos. The opulence of the former hopefully balanced by the diversity of the latter.
Too many brown widows though. They seem to really like the home I’ve made. Oh well. I guess you can’t have citron butterflies without also risking a nasty bite.
The best insect hotel is a pile of firewood that is too open for butterfly hibernation. It is covered with slates and will get burned on cool summer nights once the residents have moved out. The ash goes into the scrub patch as fertiliser. I should burn the comfrey and feed it back to the survivors of my purge, as a macabre justice.
Coincidentally I read about insect hotels recently as well and also on the topic of cleaning them and also that many commercial ones are just completely inadequate (wrong type of holes and materials and such). I figured out that our yard actually already provides perfect insect hotels. Those leaves I didn't get to shred and put on the compost pile before the weather was too wet? Perfect for certain types of insects. The birds think so too as they rummage through it every spring.
What I will try this year is taking some of the firewood and drilling the right size holes in it. The good thing? I can just burn it in summer in the pizza oven and not worry about cleaning up. I'll just take some new logs and do the same thing. And all the kindling, which is just branches that fall from the trees all the time anyway get collected in a big pile. Perfect insect hotel. By the time I start using it in summer, they'll have moved out.
I also compost in place for most flowering plants. E.g. my Hostas. I do take the flower stems out so they don't stick up and "look bad" but I just break them once of twice and leave them in place. Doubly so for the leaves, those of course just stay in place. Perfect compost for the new Hostas next year without having to actually spread compost everywhere. And it probably doubles as an insect hotel as well.
Turns out that having rotting plums lying about attracts huge numbers of butterflies - which was glorious. I'm going to make point of leaving plenty plums out for butterflies in future!
There’s plenty of landscaped area too, but a neighboring pond, marshy area allowed me to let my land next to it stay wild too.
I get foxes, rabbits, bald and golden eagles, and owls come buy to clean out the rabbits from time to time. Huge Sandhill cranes, ducks, turtles, massive snapping turtles.
It’s not a massive area but it attracts so much life.
People just have the wrong expectation. It's not some entertainment device where you permanently see a 100 insects flying in front of it. Most insects stuff it with food and/or their larvae.
Obviously if you place on in a parking lot with no other habitats around insects won't find them, but they do work wonderfully.
Seems to me that it was in operation for one year, and then got fill up with insect nesting material, and now is inoperable. Not very sustainable if that's the case.
Does anyone know how long they last and what to do after a year? Logically, as far as I know, wasps and bees do not go back to their nest after they are done with them. The nests dont grow and grow. They move on after queens are produced. (Bee hives are man made structures which are maintained by bee keepers)
Bird nesting boxes tend to be cleaned out by birds, or re-used I think. At least some can be cleaned by humans if necessary.
- after drilling holes, make sure to smooth the edges; insect wings could get stuck or damaged on unnaturally rough edges that the wood drilling bits leave. - best to place the insect hotel with the openings facing west
This also depends on the local climate and wind direction. Here it is recommended that the holes face south. That helps against rain which is commonly coming from west as this is the prevailing wind direction here.
They are built like miniatures of other buildings, like the brewery, the water tower, a manor, etc. Quite cute :)
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/sormland/miniatyrer-av-byg...
Now we leave old flower stalks up over the winter.
I've heard of insect hotels being raided by insect-feeding birds when the holes hadn't been deep enough.
Makes me imagine middle-aged mail bees in their insect hotel late at night, watching too much bee porn and drinking too much naturally fermented blackberry wine, wondering where their lives have gone
I didn't even know solitary bees species existed. Live and learn.
One of them had a bit too much last year and ended up sleeping it off on my porch window! It was interesting to watch her sleep - you wouldn't think it off the top of your head, but you can tell what stage of sleep they're in by their breathing, just as with sleeping humans. https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/img_8240.jpg
It makes me feel bad for killing a bunch of wasps one day, when I was having some coffee with cake at a coffeehouse with an open window, and a bunch of yellowjackets got attracted to the sugary things I was having.
Two things of note: I didn't know back then the yellowjacket's sting is one of the most painful, but also, it's very easy to kill wasps without getting stung, especially if they are interested in something else: just don't attack many of them at the same time, strike them with your hand against something hard, and make sure every kill counts so you don't get an angry wasp afterwards. I wasn't stung.
I feel bad about it though. They just wanted some cake, and who would blame them? I guess I was in a bad mood. I wish I had found a nonviolent way of dealing with those yellowjackets :/
I took this shot with my big birding lens, six feet or so from this nest that was under the eave of my side porch. It would have been both rude and dangerous to approach with my macro rig - she's guarding the nest and checking me out, too! Any nest will be actively patrolled against intruders large and small, but the intensity of concern scales roughly with the size of brood and colony, and this was a young nest with probably only one comb - I didn't know it was there until after I'd been much closer to it than this, but they weren't bothered at all, despite that I earned their attention again when I started taking an interest. Not long after this shot, the local raccoons found the same nest and left nothing of it but a few scraps of carton, but it was early enough in the season that they could have escaped and rebuilt elsewhere without losing too much brood - it's not all that easy for a human to tell, but from their looks I'm pretty sure this was the same family that came back later in the year for the figs. I hope so! There were lots of foragers in that tree, so if they were from the same colony then they not only survived but thrived.