Butterfly House & Insect Hotel

These cute projects kept my kids so busy and let them get really creative! It's a great project to encourage exploring in nature to find items to decorate as well as to use as bug attractors. The possibilities are endless!

Supplies for Butterfly House:

🔲 popsicle sticks (lots of them! You will need at least 82 per house.)

🔲 hot glue gun

Optional:

🔲 any decorative items you want (we used pipe cleaners, fake flowers, twine, and plastic butterflies)

Supplies for Insect Hotel:

🔲 small box

🔲 hot glue gun

🔲 items found outside: leaves, sticks, pinecones, bamboo, pebbles, etc (We also used some wooden beads we had at home as well as a toilet paper roll.)

To Make Butterfly House:

Begin by lining up 12 popsicle sticks. We are still on a rainbow kick at our house, so we used rainbow colored sticks. However, plain wooden sticks are just fine for this project!

Next, hot glue two popsicle sticks horizontally over the twelve in a row. Make sure that no edges of the horizontal sticks are sticking out on either side.

Repeat that process three times to get three walls and a floor for your house.

To make the front panel with the doorways, use eight sticks instead of twelve. Line them up so that you have two sticks, then a two stick wide gap, then four sticks, then a two stick wide gap, and then two sticks. Glue two horizontal sticks as supports.

You will then have five panels that look like this:

Then you will glue your panels together to make a cube without a top.

Important: Your front and back panel will have the sticks going vertically. The two side panels will have the sticks going horizontally. This makes it easier to glue.

Like this!

To make a roof, you have a couple of options. The easiest way is to make another panel with twelve sticks and two support sticks, the same way as before, and then glue it right on top, making a flat roof.

If your kids are older and up for a challenge, you can have them make a sloped roof. My 11 year-old, who is ten times more crafty than me, was able to make a beautiful sloped roof and fill in the gaps with sticks cut to size. The rest of us just made flat roofs and they look great!

Add decorations as you want, and your butterfly house is ready to go! 🦋

(Note: These butterfly houses will probably not attract actual butterflies. But who knows! Use them as whimsical decorations in your garden and maybe you'll get lucky!😉)

To Make an Insect Hotel:

These have been all over Pinterest and looked like a fun way to get our creative juices flowing. We loved getting out in nature and collecting items that we thought the bugs might like.

The first thing we did was wrap twine around a toilet paper tube to make a bug hideout.

We glued that inside the box with some hot glue and then arranged some wooden beads with the holes facing up, securing those with hot glue as well. We then placed pebbles, a pinecone, and a nice bed of sticks inside the box.

Finally, we added some fresh flowers that had fallen off a bush. Now our bug hotel is ready for the first guests! 🐜🐞🐛

There is absolutely no right or wrong way to make this project. Just use your imagination and have fun!

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Show us your butterfly houses and insect hotels @little.sunshine.mom!☀️