Insect houses do they work ?

Hi All

It would be intresting to find out your feedback about insect houses.

Do they do what it says on the can ?
Value for money ?
Which one's you have ?
So many choices ?

I have been given two as xmas or birthday presents the realy large one I thought was a bird box at first , I would of prefered that to be honest meant to attract over wintering butterflies/insects , but all I have ever found is spiders in side

The other a mason bee house made out of bamboo which works realy well

Any thoughts , I think my family are running out of ideas what to get me !!!!
Garden voutcher wink wink would be ideal but they like wrapping things up !!!!

Spruce

 

I had a little bug hotel, Spruce, but it never had any guests.
It just hung there til it fell apart. Shame, as I think it was quite expensive.

 

I made one from macleaya microcarpa stalks Spruce, just cut the stems into pieces and put them in a plantpot did find a few ladybirds and spiders in it but found more in the cut down stems still in the garden.
How about membership to the British Hosta and Hemerocallis Society Spruce, thats what my youngest daughters buying me for Mothers Day £15 for the year.

 

I have a bug brick (brick with holes in). I think it's supposed to be for bees, but I've never looked inside because I'm terrified of anything with more than 4 legs!

 

I have a couple of these - and I've also given one or two as gifts. In my experience they're pretty hit and miss. Like spruce I also have one of those bamboo bundles for mason bees and mine is successful too.

2 years ago I built a log pile. It was almost free... a few logs that wouldn't fit in my mothers wood burning stove, some broken terracota pots and some straw. It's mainly home to spiders - so I don't go near it! But my niece informs me it's full of creepy crawlies.

 

I don't know much about this subject, so don't take this as gospel, its just my theories

Insects, I believe, generally have poor vision, so they wont fly/walk past the hotel and think, ooh, that looks like a nice place to live. I think instead they are guided more by scent, humidity, general light levels etc. So I believe that a brand new insect hotel, with unfamiliar scents, will take a while to get any attention.

I also think it is as much about location as it is about the makeup of the hotel. If you stick in the middle of a big plain concrete floor on a sunny site for example, I bet few creatures would move in, but if it is situated right next to, or in, the preferred feeding and breeding habitat of the creatures in question, then it will get residents much quicker.

A couple of years or so ago, I got into an email exchange with a bumblebee conservation expert. I'd read up on how to build a bumblebee nest site, and even found a few things you could buy, but I was sceptical. The bumblebee expert said that his team were still in the middle of a big study, they wanted to know why bumblebees often chose abandoned mouse holes but completely ignored most of the man made efforts to recreate mouse holes, even though some of the man made ones were an almost perfect likeness both in terms of structure and habitat. The theory they were working on at the time was that it was actually the scent of mouse wee that signalled to the bumblebees that a possible nest site had been found. But wait, it got more specific than that. It couldn't be fresh. The bumblebees were ignoring the mouse holes that had fresh mouse wee scent on them, even if there were no mice there. The bumblebee expert and his team were still some way off a definitive answer when I corresponded with them, but the working theory at the time was that the mouse wee scent told the bumblebees of a possible site, but if the scent was too fresh or too strong, then the bees knew the mouse hole was still in use, so they ignored it.

I know we're talking about insects in general here, rather than bumblebees, but I wouldn't mind betting that a similar principle still applies.