Build a bug hotel
Insects need somewhere to hide with lots of nooks and crannies. Leaving leaf litter in your back yard helps to provide habitat and food for insects, who then provide food for birds and lizards! Using materials found around your property, you can easily build a bug hotel to provide additional shelter. Here's how:
- Gather items such as bricks, broken crockery, wood chips/mulch, bamboo, twigs and sticks, moss and dry leaves, logs, or old pipes.
- Layer up the materials in a stack, or in an old wooden box, providing different 'rooms' with varying sized spaces to attract different species.
- Provide hollow material, such as bamboo to attract solitary native bees who like to live in a hole in the ground.
- Place your bug hotel in a warm, sheltered spot on solid ground with a water source nearby.