DiY: Insect hotel made from fruit crates
Have you always wanted to be a hotelier, responsible for hundreds of overnight guests every day? The hotel of your dreams offers upscale service in an exquisite location? These building instructions will make your dream come true! The best part: your guests are endangered species, such as wild bees, and your accommodation, the insect hotel made from fruit crates, will help ensure their survival.
Material:
- bamboo
- Reeds (alternatively: straws)
- Sisal rope (alternatively: rubber bands)
- cotton wool
- One meter tree trunk with a diameter of at least 15 centimeters
- two wooden boxes
- 10 nails
- Lots of thin branches
- Tree bark (optional)
Tools:
- saw
- sandpaper
- drill
- hammer
Caution! Fibers or shavings can block the passage of bees in the holes or destroy their wings and even their brood if they swell. Therefore, the openings must be cut cleanly. Each tube also needs a closed end. This can be a natural knot in the stems or you can seal the tube with cotton wool.
The hotel is open!
Step 1: Knotting bamboo
Bundle the bamboo with sisal or rubber bands. Each bundle should be around 20 to 30 bamboo canes thick. Now saw the bundle to the depth of the wooden box and have the closed ends against the back wall. Prepare five of these. Following the same procedure, make five bundles with the reeds. You can use about 50 to 60 canes per bundle.
Step 2: Make it fit
Next, you saw the tree trunks into pieces that fit upright into a wooden box placed horizontally. You then drill countless holes into the trunks or blocks, each two to nine millimeters wide and about ten centimeters deep. Frost usually doesn't penetrate the wood that deeply. It's important to always drill across the trunk's grain.
A quick tip: It doesn't necessarily have to be a tree trunk—wooden blocks will do, too. Of course, you'll have to saw them to size so they're shorter than the narrow sides of the wooden boxes. Conifers and other soft woods shouldn't be used. Beech, oak, or ash are ideal, though.
Step 3: Imposter
Now stack the boxes long side to long side with the openings facing forward. Use a hammer and a few nails to join the construction together before the final step.
Step 4: Furnishing the hotel rooms 
A quick final tip: It's important that the insect hotel is protected from rain from above. At the same time, however, you must ensure that a roof doesn't make the boxes too dark. The busy bees don't like that at all.
Is DIY your world?
There are many good reasons to make things yourself. It saves resources, sometimes even money, it's fun, and you learn a lot. What's more, there's a special magic in the things you've created with your own hands and passion. It's a wonderful feeling you can't buy in any store and for any amount of money.
You can find more ideas for great DIY projects in our book " Your Creative Garden ." Thanks to step-by-step instructions and helpful pictures, many of our DIY ideas can be recreated with children. The internet also has a lot to offer. So if you want to get active, the following websites are a good place to start:
We hope, of course, that you stay true to the DIY theme and wish you lots of fun and success with your next construction projects!
