 Hello there! Beneficial insects are essential in any garden, whether they're pollinating our crops or preying on pests. These insects make our job as gardeners an awful lot easier. By building a bug hotel like this, you can encourage beneficials to check in and take up residence in your garden. In this video, we'll show you how easy it is to make one. Bug hotels can be made from salvaged and natural materials such as prunings, sticks, straw, broken tiles, bricks and old pieces of wood. The secret lies in providing a variety of habitats to attract a variety of insects. Bug hotels vary in size and complexity according to the space and time you have available to make one. The simplest hotels consist of a dry, sheltered space into which bedding materials are stuffed. More complicated hotels may be made up of different materials stacked together to draw in the widest range of insect guests. Old palettes can be very useful in this instance. Decaying logs will attract wood-boring beetles and centipedes while bark is a must for wood-licin millipedes. Tempting ground and rove beetles, which eat slug eggs, by packing in plenty of twigs and branches. Native or solitary bees and hoverflies love hollow stems such as bamboo canes, while spiders will make their home in just about any dry knuckle cranny. Ladybugs or Ladybirds devour aphids and hibernate in hollow stems and leaf litter. Here's how to make a simple hanging bug hotel suitable for solitary bees, Ladybugs and hoverflies. To make your hotel, you will need four sections of wood about 15 centimeters or six inches long, some thin shingles to serve as roof tiles, some strong string, plus a plank of wood wide enough to form a backplate to your hotel. To avoid harmed the insects, use untreated wood. To fill the hotel, you'll need a selection of hollow stems. Bamboo canes are ideal for this. You'll also need a drill, a screwdriver and some screws, a hammer and tax and some pruners. Begin by making the walls to your hotel, attach the four sections of wood to each other using the screws. You may need to make a pilot hole for each screw before securing it into place. Join up the four walls so that one end overlaps the other. With the walls complete, attach the backplate to create a snug seal. You can mark the footprint of the walls onto the plate as a guide before screwing it into position. Now for the roof shingles. Use the tax to simply hammer these into place, overlapping the shingles to help rain to run off and keep the inside of the hotel dry. If you wish, you can now paint the hotel with a natural non-toxic paint or wood stain to give a colourful finish. Allow the paint to dry before continuing. It's now time for the bedding materials. Cut the stems or bamboo to length. The bamboo should sit flush with the walls of the hotel like this. Pack them into place to give a good solid finish. Drill two holes into the top of the backplate, then thread some string through. Tie the ends into a knot, then hang your hotel up in a dry, sheltered place and full sun or dappled shade. In among trees and shrubs as ideal, or you could hammer your hotel into the ease of a garden shed or outbuilding. If you live in an area where termites are a problem, be sure to site your bug hotel well away from any buildings and keep it clear of the ground. A simple alternative to a bamboo cane hotel is to drill lots of holes of varying sizes into a solid block of wood. Avoid drilling all the way through the block. You can also add a shingle roof for a decorative finish. Attach a vine-eye, thread through your string, then hang up into position. As you can see, it's very easy to make a safe and secure habitat for beneficial bugs to thrive. How do you attract beneficial insects into your garden? Do let us know by dropping us a comment below. We produce simple gardening videos like this regularly, so if you haven't yet subscribed to our video channel, now's the time to do so. I'll see you next time, but in the meantime, have fun building your bug hotel.