5 easy steps to make your own bug hotel

September 2023

A bug hotel is a great little way of caring for wildlife and recycling Feel Good toilet roll cores and other bits of scrap material you may have lying around.

This zero-waste idea will brighten up your garden and is super fun to make.

You can build a bug hotel any time of year. However, it might be easier to gather materials such as straw, dry grass and hollow plant stems in autumn. It’s also when a lot of insects will be looking for a place to make their home for the winter.

Bug hotels are really simple to make and have massive benefits to lots of different minibeasts and insects such as ladybirds, bees, spiders, and woodlice. Minibeasts can then use the hotels as a safe space to shelter lay eggs, raise their young, and hide from predators.

Using sustainably sourced materials is important to us at Feel Good (we’re big fans of recycling if you hadn’t realised) You can gather most of the materials for this project from your recycling bin and the garden, but you might also need to dig around the craft box a little bit.

What you’ll need:

Feel Good toilet roll cores
Scissors
Tape/glue
Cardboard
Items like sticks, stones, twigs, dry leaves, pinecones, grass etc.

Here's what we used to make our bug hotel

How to make your bug hotel:

Step 1:

Using the cardboard pieces, build a structure (we made a two-story hotel out of an old cardboard box) and add in the toilet rolls as tunnels on the “ground floor”

Step 2:

Add in the string, arrange however you like, to create a different texture environment on the “first floor”

Step 3:

Add the natural materials in such as sticks, stones, leaves, grass, twigs to fill out the first floor

Step 4:

Start to mix up and layer your materials and build a sort of playground for the bugs in their hotel

Step 5:

To finish off, add some leaves to the top for a little roof and pop it outside for all the bugs, minibeasts, insects, and wildlife in your garden.

Remember – be inventive!

There’s no right or wrong way to make one of these hotels.

Give it a go and share with us your bug hotels – tag us on Instagram and Facebook. If you’re looking for another toilet roll craft for the spring, check out our toilet roll bird feeder tutorial.