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Video: How To Keep Beneficial Insects In Your Garden
Insect hotel
Our harvest depends on the labors of beneficial insects more than we think. Pollination is more or less clear: bees, bumblebees, wasps and other workers fly from flower to flower, transfer pollen, help plants form ovaries of fruits and berries that we love so much.
But that's not all! During the season, many insects fight our worst enemies every day: aphids, moths, weevils, spider mites and other pests.
Predatory insects (entomophages) are able to systematically and for a long time reduce the number of insects - plant pests (phytophages) by an average of 40%. Beneficial insects and their work are described in detail in the April issue of the magazine.
Of course, such neighbors in the garden will be very useful to us, which means that it is worth making sure that they settle on the site seriously and for a long time. One of the ways to attract them to the site is to plant fodder nectar plants in the garden. We will talk about this in the next issue. But you can also make sure that these insects remain in the garden for the winter. For this, peculiar hotels for insects are being created. In Europe, such construction is already very popular. The so-called insect hotels turn into real art objects - original elements of garden design.
Strictly speaking, in the warm season these structures really serve more as a decoration of the site than as a refuge for insects. They move to the offered "apartments" when it gets colder. Therefore, having built such a "hotel" now, you should not wait for the immediate arrival of guests - they will certainly appear, but later.
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There is no single "recipe" for construction. Old boxes, pallets, and a disused birdhouse can serve as the basis for such a structure - here our imagination is limited only by the existing conditions and materials.
Pine or spruce cones, twigs, straw or hay, moss, pieces of tree bark, hollow dry shoots of plants, pieces of wood, trimmings of logs with holes drilled into them, bricks, ceramic pots, pebbles, and so on …
Our family was also engaged in such construction in their garden. When creating our hotels, we deliberately gave them the shape of a walnut, as in the landscape literature, designs of houses, turrets and birdhouses were very often encountered. I wanted a non-standard embodiment of the idea. Well, the filling material is clearly visible in the photo - these are cones, moss, bark, as well as dry raspberry branches and a whip of maiden grapes.
So far, only gold-eyed women are staying in our hotels (provided that the hotel is located close to the ground). Also frequent visitors are ants and bugs, similar to firefighters. If the hotel is hanging from a tree, then the main guests are wasps.
By the way, in our harsh climate, it is worth making sure that the house is under a layer of snow in winter, otherwise the insects in it may freeze. Then all our concern for them will be in vain. When winter approaches, we carefully move our "nuts" for insects to the alpine plateau, where they are covered with snow.
Svetlana Seregina, gardener, pos. Strelna
In the photo: various houses for beneficial insects in the Seregin's garden.
Photo by the author
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