Good morning, evening or afternoon, depending on where you are in the world and what you're doing right now.

Kevin here from Epic Gardening.

Today I'm going to have a chat about insect

hotels, bug hotels, insect homes, that sort of thing. It's something I've been

researching quite a bit lately and learning a lot about some of the things I thought

I knew turns out there's a deeper level to understand those from as with most things

in life so today what I want to do is share a little bit of that. So of course you see

insect homes at the Garden Center or you see a project on Pinterest and it just seems like it makes sense. Of course you want to have

bugs, beneficial bugs in your garden so that you can do a lot of that

pollination work or that insect pest control work with nature instead of with yourself or with some sort of spray, right?

That makes a lot of sense.

Now, I've seen these massive designs, you know, pallets upon pallets that look incredible very cool and they even want to include

things like birds or toads or frogs hedgehogs you know these mammals and apparently at least in my research this seems to not be the right

strategy or not be the optimal strategy and so instead in nature what you see is a natural habitat won't be clumped together to attract

every sort of possible thing in one place, right?

So you'll have areas where there's more leaves than sticks, areas where there's more

brush, this sort of thing.

And so going really crazy by making one huge insect hotel apparently can sometimes hamper the progress and the reason why

there is you have parasites right so you have parasites that will lay their eggs in that hotel that might be occupied by bee larva and there's a lot of different

insects that will just consume the larva of the beneficial insects.

By making them all be in one place, you're now making it easier for pests to come in and eat those beneficials.

And so a better approach is to say, what insect do I want to host do I want a

...