How To: Make a Lacewing Shelter

Do you remember when garden centres just used to sell gardening stuff? Now they sell everything from hand cream to cream teas. They seem to do a roaring trade in wildlife shelters, like mason bee boxes, ladybird houses, and bug blocks. I'm really glad that more people are taking an interest in our native wildlife, and trying to help them along. But at the risk of upsetting Wiggly Wigglers again (just teasing) you can make most of these things yourself out of recycled materials.

Here's how to make a lacewing shelter (why would you want to make a lacewing shelter? because lacewings are beautiful, and also because their larvae gobble up aphids like there's no tomorrow).

You will need some corrugated cardboard, an empty fizzy drinks bottle, scissors or a craft knife and some twine.

First of all rinse the fizzy drinks bottle and cut the bottom off. Leave the lid on, otherwise rain will soak the cardboard.

Then cut a strip of corrugated cardboard slightly shorter than the length of your bottle. It's important to cut it across the corrugations, not along them. This is the hardest direction to cut in. So if you're finding it very easy to cut, you're probably cutting it the wrong way.

Score a few lines close together at one end of your strip to make it easier to roll up. Then roll the strip really tightly.

Jam it into the fizzy drinks bottle. It needs to be a really tight fit. If it isn't, add more strips of card until you have a nice tight fit.

Tie some twine around the neck and hang it up. Lacewings will shelter inside. You can change the cardboard once a year if it gets ratty.

See? Easy. But if you don't want to make one you can buy ready-made bug habitats from Wiggly Wigglers, who are very nice people.