Insect hotels

[vogelcommando]

Here on ZooChat we are mostly talking about conservation of all kind of animal-species, both in zoos as well as in the wild.
That we can play a roll in this conservation is not widely understand but evenso WE CAN !
In many ( at least European ) zoos examples for insect hotels can be found for example :

Rotterdam Zoo


Safaripark Beekse Bergen


Tierpark Neumünster


Wild und Freizeitpark Osttritrum


Zoo Duisburg

We as ZooChatters can also make one or more insect hotels at home and make a home for numberous invertebrates ( and also small vertebrates ). Would be intresting to learn which species find a new home in your garden and if you can made some notes of your observations in this thread, a lot of information can be collected about what we can do for conservation.
An intresting article about a simple to build insect hotel can be found here :

Build it and they will come: grasshoppers check-in to a grassland bee hotel

 

[Terry Thomas]

Really interesting.

 

[DesertRhino150]

We have an insect house in our garden that, even though we never got round to hanging it up and simply left on the roof of the boot shed, has ended up packed with red mason bees Osmia bicornis.

Perhaps of greater interest, we built a low wall out of the cut-up logs from a couple of ash trees felled in our garden. Within a couple of days, there were huge swarms of some kind of small wood-boring beetle that I have yet to identify, and the logs were soon riddled with their holes. Then, a few days later, a large number of a small parasitoid wasp (I think Cleonymus laticornis) arrived. Their behaviour was very interesting - if two wasps started competing over the same beetle hole, a crowd of other wasps would form a loose circle around the pair who would press their heads together for a moment before separating. That was apparently enough to determine the winner, for the two would disengage and the circle would break up.

 

[vogelcommando]

Visited Gaia Zoo - the Netherlands - last weekend and found again some nice insect hotles :