Wild bees & other beneficials

An insect hotel is a great way to make visitors feel more welcome in your garden: wild bees find a cozy home and will be joined by butterflies and ladybirds seeking a place for winter hibernation. Read more about the fascinating life of these busy garden helpers in this guide.

Insects are, like many other animals and plants, essential for maintaining the ecological balance in nature. Wild bees’ contribute by pollinating of our fruit trees, the importance of which is often underestimated - a single mason bee can pollinate as many blossoms as 80 to 300 honey bees! (shown by studies on apple and plum trees) With their pollinating activities, wild bees ensure the harvest of apples, strawberries and many other fruits. Without this pollination, not a single fruit could develop. Wild bees are increasingly important as there are less and less beekeepers and thus less and less honey bees. Therefore, the protection of wild bees is not only for the environment’s sake, but also for the benefit of all gardeners!

Wild bees have a sting, but it is far too weak to penetrate human skin. In actual fact, the insects are very friendly, so that they can be observed in the garden quite safely.
Beneficial insects like ladybirds, green lacewings, and earwigs fight many pests in the garden. They feed on aphids and other small insects. By doing so, they contribute to biological plant protection and ensure that you need to use pesticides much less frequently, thereby reducing your gardens impact on the environment even further.

In an untouched natural environment insects don’t need any aid for subsistence but in today's highly modified, cultivated landscape, and also in many gardens, beneficial insects find very little shelter. Many gardens are manicured and dead trees and branches that provide the necessary shelter for beneficial insects are becoming hard to find. In autumn many gardeners rake the leaves from the beds and leave the soil without any cover during the winter. This means certain death for ladybirds and other insects as they usually survive winter under leaves and in other safe hideaways.
In an insect hotel, many beneficial insects like ladybirds and green lacewings find shelter and nesting sites. Therefore by hanging up an insect hotel you are making a valuable contribution to the protection of nature.
At the same time the residents of the insect hotel help you with biological plant protection by devouring aphids and other pests.
And finally, the hotel gives you the great opportunity to watch the insects with your children or grandchildren. There’s no risk as the wild bees don’t sting. You can watch the wild bees inhabit the holes, take food into them and finally close the openings. This is more exciting than many TV shows!
For the additional protection of insects, we have an important request: please don’t tidy up your garden too much and instead help insects find shelter in amongst the undergrowth. Where insects feel at ease, larger animals like birds, hedgehogs, shrews and other garden inhabitants will also like to stay. Turn your garden into a little biotope - even the smallest space can help many animals and ensure the natural diversity of our flora and fauna.

The insect hotel should be hung up in a sunny place that is sheltered from wind and rain, preferably facing a southerly direction (SW, S, SE), between 1 to 2 m from the ground, as a minimum it should sit above surrounding vegetation. It can be fixed on the wall of a house or garage, a fence or a tree post. Ideally, there should be nectar and pollen rich plants located near the insect hotel.
Even on the 5th floor of a high-rise city building wild bees and other beneficial insects can settle in the insect hotel.

The wild bee Osmia Rufa, which is very common, likes to nest in cavities and settles in the drilled pieces of wood and plant stems with a diameter of about 6 mm in the insect hotel. Other, smaller wild bees share the hollow plant stems of a smaller diameter with digger wasps like face-masked bees (Hylaeus species) or scissor bees (Chelostoma species).

In our latitudes, the Red Mason Bee can often be encountered. It hibernates as an adult animal in hollow plant stems or other openings. From March to June, the wild bees leave their hibernation sites to mate. The females then look for a suitable hiding place to lay their eggs, like for example a hollow reed. Inside it, she builds a back wall made of mud and saliva. In front of it, she stores pollen and nectar, the food for the wild bee larva that will soon live there. Once this brood cell is sufficiently filled, she lays an egg onto this food padding and seals this first brood cell with clay and saliva. She continues like this and is able to build up to 10 brood cells in a row. For the construction of a single brood cell, the appropriate storage of food and the oviposition, the female needs about a whole day!
A fascinating thing about this method of laying eggs is, among other things, that the Red Mason Bee fills the first rearward cells with fertilised eggs from which females will develop as they need a longer time for their development and therefore hatch later. From the unfertilised eggs that have been laid in front, males will hatch which develop quicker and therefore hatch earlier.

One or two weeks after oviposition, the larvae hatch from the eggs and feed on the food supply in their cell for two to three weeks. During this time they shed their skin several times. Then they spin themselves a cocoon in which they transform into a pupa. In late summer, the adult insects hatch and hibernate in the insect hotel until the following March.