Insects check into own hotel

WE learn every day about the environment from young Irish people.

Indeed, it could be truly said that youth are showing adults the way. The highly successful schools Green Flag programme is an example of what can be done in regard to recycling, gardening and efficient use of water and electricity, to give just a few examples.

Young people keep coming up with ideas for useful things to do. For instance, three students at Mercy Mounthawk Secondary School, in Tralee, Co Kerry, have built an insect hotel for an ECO-Unesco project.

Quite common in other EU countries, insect hotels are built by people in their own gardens, usually with recycled materials and deadwood. They offer a refuge to bees, spiders, ladybirds and a host of other insects.

Nowadays, people tend to maintain very tidy lawns and gardens. These manicured areas might look fabulous and are an obvious source of pride to their owners, but in their enthusiasm to make a place look its best, people do not to leave wild corners, or uncut headlands, all of which results in a huge loss of habitat for many creatures.

Insect hotels can offer a solution. These rough constructions are usually found in the corners of lawns, ideally in areas hit by the sun and protected from weather. The Tralee students — Lucas Cronin, Mark O’Connor and Marcus O’Brien — call theirs, Creepy Crawly Hotel.

Pupils from Tralee Educate Together National School used to go for regular walks in an area known locally as the Nuns’ Wood, but eventually could no longer do so because of illegal dumping. So, the three lads decided to clean up the area and recycle some of the rubbish in the school garden.

The area turned out to be a “goldmine” and they got to work collecting plastic bottles, broken pipes, pallets and bits of wood for the construction of an insect hotel for the school. One of their first jobs was to drill holes in the wood to allow insects crawl in.

The lads also decided to get the pupils involved in the construction and gave power-point demonstrations to ensure all knew exactly what was going on and why. It proved to be a valuable experience for everyone, not least the development of new skills for the lads.

In their final presentation of the project, the trio declared: “We felt a great sense of achievement when we posed for the photo of our completed insect hotel. However, the greatest sense of achievement came when the junior and senior infant classes came to see the insect hotel with lots of exclamations of wooooow!”