One of the things we inherited from the previous owners when we moved into our new home this year was an ‘insect hotel‘ in the garden, mounted on the wall of the shed. The idea is it provides a safe haven for useful insects. I’ve seen bees using it early this year. Our insect hotel is a small thing with a number of bamboo stems lodged into it. In the past months, I frequently found several of those bamboo stems on the ground beneath it, but didn’t know why. Was it wind? Were larger insects pushing the stems out?
Today I finally spotted the reason from my home office window. A great tit pulls out the bamboo stems and sitting on the roof edge of the shed probes the other end of it for resident insects to snack on. Once done, it drops the bamboo stem, for me to find later and wonder how it got there. It’s not an insect hotel, it’s a buffet!