At any given time, your garden might contain over 2,000 species of insects. Some of these are pests, the kind you don’t want in your garden because they destroy your flowers and vegetables. But many others are beneficial insects, the kind you want to attract because they work with you to control pests and pollinate flowers.
Beneficial insects support biodiversity, the foundation for the world’s ecological balance. An insect hotel in your garden will attract these beneficial insects, offering them a space where they can propagate and hunker down for the winter. Encouraging biodiversity in the garden helps to increase ecosystem productivity.
Placing an insect hotel in the garden increases the chances that beneficial insects will naturally visit your garden. Also known as bug hotels, bug boxes, and bug houses, these human-made structures offer several benefits. In addition to their decorative qualities, they help supplement the increasing loss of natural habitats.
Although altered and heavily landscaped gardens can be beautiful, they often lack enough of the natural habitats needed to attract beneficial insects and encourage biodiversity. Placing insect hotels in your garden offers optimal bug real estate – the right kinds of habitats to attract these beneficial insects, increase their numbers, and reduce the need for pesticides, since these bugs offer biological pest control. A balanced ecosystem provides numerous benefits not just for the individual garden, but for the environment as a whole.
Talking About the Birds and the Bees
Although bees are well known for their role as pollinators, they are not the only pollinators that can be attracted to an insect hotel. Other beneficial insects include beetles, butterflies, green lacewings, leaf miners, white flies, mole crickets, cabbage worms, hummingbirds, and bats.
Beetles - Some say that more than one hundred million years ago, beetles were the very first pollinators. Beetles pollinate 88 percent of all flowering plants — that’s more than any other animal.
Hummingbirds - Here’s an interesting factoid about these little birds: hummingbirds pollinate almost exclusively on flowers that hang upside down. By using artificial flowers to feed the birds and then recording them with high-speed footage, researchers discovered that hummingbirds expended 10 percent more energy drinking from upside-down flowers than from right-side-up flowers. They postulated that right-side-up flowers are more exposed to rain, which might dilute their sweet nectar and therefore make them less desirable for hummingbirds.1
Butterflies - Although not as efficient pollinators as bees, butterflies are still important for pollinating gardens. Unlike bees, butterflies can see the color red, which directs them toward the brightly hued blooms. To attract the opposite sex, butterflies emit pheromones, which are very similar to the scents of certain flowers to which other butterflies are attracted.2
Green Lacewings - Green lacewings larvae feast on the eggs and immature stages of numerous soft-bodied insect pests, including many species of spider mites, aphids, thrips, whiteflies, and leafhoppers, as well as the eggs and caterpillars of pest moths and mealybugs.
Bats - In addition to insect hotels, consider placing a bat house in your garden. Some bats are pollinators, while others are “insectivores” that eat insects. In one night out, a single insect-eating bat can consume 60 medium-sized moths or over 1,000 mosquito-sized insects.