Designing a Winter Home for your Pollinators

Final year BSc in Horticulture project published by Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland casts a shadow on the effectiveness of most DIY ‘bee hotels’

Bee hotels (sometimes called insect, or bug hotels) are artificial nesting structures available for sale in many garden centres around the country and some community groups and gardeners have even constructed their own from bricks, drilled softwoods, bamboo, straw and loosely arranged pine cones.

However, despite the owners’ best intentions, these structures rarely attract their intended inhabitants, and sometimes can even attract pollinator pests and are a source of disease.

This led three level 7 BSc in Horticulture students (Sean Keane, Alan Kennedy, Cian Kervick, and Etienne del Prado) to examine the published literature to determine the ideal parameters for a scientifically sound hotel.

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