How to Build an Insect Hotel

DIY bug house

How to build your own giant bug house. An insect hotel is a fantastic addition to your wildlife garden and creates a wonderful for habitat for insects, including solitary bees, and is great for hedgehogs too. Insects (particularly beetles) are top of the wild hedgehog diet. Attracting insects into your garden will also help hedgehogs and other wildlife thrive.

To build your insect hotel, you will need:

1. Imagination
2. Lots of foraged items
3. Some basic DIY skills – including a drill for drilling insect holes in wood
4. Inspiration
5. Plenty of time – it takes longer than you think

Materials for your insect hotel

Insect hotels are all very different so I am not going to give you a step by step guide to how I built mine but, instead, I’m sharing my top tips. You can create yours with a pitched or flat roof, perhaps even with a living roof of plants. If you are looking for a step-by-step guide, you can find one here

My insect hotel uses wood from old wooden pallets as a base to create the compartments and the roof slats. A hedgehog nesting area has been constructed underneath by creating a foundation of bricks, built around a cavity. We later filled the cavity with hay. You can fill your insect hotel with all sorts of things but ours included:

1. Plastic drainpipe
2. Bricks
3. Offcuts of wood with holes drilled in
4. Twigs
5. Logs
6. Fruit canes cut into lengths
7. Pine cones
8. Hay
9. Leaves
10. Bark

Start by creating a mood board using Pinterest, which is packed with photographs of the insect hotels that other people have created which you can use as inspiration.

Scour freecycle  and gumtree as well as local community pages for free or cheap wooden pallets and wood offcuts (untreated wood). I picked up a large pallet for £1. You may also have old bits of wood hanging around in your garage or shed. It’s better to reuse materials than to buy new ones.

If you are hoping to attract solitary bees, the insect hotel needs to be South facing.

It took part of 3 weekends to create our giant insect hotel. It has a front and a back section but we focused on filling the front section first. It makes a lovely feature when viewed from the kitchen window!

It is gradually weathering over time and here is how it looked in a couple of Summers after it was built.

Insects were already taking up occupation before we had finished building, so we know it works…

We created the ‘bug hotel’ sign by engraving the word using a Dremmel tool and then using a soldering iron to turn the letters black.

If you are looking for more inspiration, here is a great video from the Wildlife Garden Project.

Don’t forget to share your pictures when you have finished!

If you don’t have time to build a fancy insect hotel, remember that a big pile of logs can also be great for attracting beetles, as well as compost heaps and here are some other great tips for making your garden hedgehog friendly. You can also read about what plants to grow to attract insects.

Learning about wildlife

If you’d like to learn more about helping wildlife in your garden, I run online courses aimed at all levels of knowledge and experience.

About me

I’m busy transforming an acre of land in the Yorkshire Wolds into a wildlife haven. If you’ve found the information on this website useful, I’d be so grateful if you would consider making a donation to help me continue my awareness work.

You might also like my handmade wildlife jewellery, which comes with information about how to help wild hedgehogs. I even make some insect designs.