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Panoramic view on the North Campus © Jürgen Huhn​/​TU Dortmund
HANDS-ON CAMPAIGN BY THE SUSTAINABILITY OFFICE

Insect Hotels for Species Protection

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A woman and a man build an insect hotel from wooden boards. © Aliona Kardash​/​TU Dortmund
Wooden boards are first sawed into small pieces and then screwed on top of each other.
For insects such as wild bees and bumblebees, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find shelter and places to build their nests. This is because nature is being increasingly ousted from cities in order to create living space. That is why TU Dortmund University’s Sustainability Office, the General Student Committee, the “Campus for Future” group and BLB NRW (the regional authority responsible for building and real estate management) have built insect hotels for the campus within a joint campaign. In future, many endangered species of insects will be able to spend the winter in the boxes and build their nests there.

“With this campaign, we want to send a visible signal for environmental protection. Insect protection is a matter of concern for TU Dortmund University – just like all other sustainability topics,” said Bastian Stahlbuck from the Sustainability Working Group at TU Dortmund University. “The hotels can be built relatively quickly and set up on the campus. What’s especially nice is that our group assembles the boxes together. In that way we also get to swop ideas.” To make the insect hotels, wooden boards are first sawed into small pieces and then screwed on top of each other. These can then be filled with various materials such as bark mulch, foliage or wood chips. “The hotels are also really easy to build for your own garden at home. You mostly already have lots of the materials you need or can buy them secondhand,” said Henning Moldenhauer, who manages the Sustainability Office. The office was set up in June to help the Sustainability Working Group at TU Dortmund University to launch and implement sustainable projects. It is located at Vogelpothsweg 74, directly under the Mensa bridge. “We like it when visitors come by and contribute new ideas or simply take part in campaigns such as building insect hotels.” The plan is to organize a lot more campaigns in future for people to join in.

Bee hotels as art project

The self-built insect hotels will soon be distributed around the campus, but two boxes have already been installed – on the grassland between the library and Emil-Figge-Str. 50. In the framework of a seminar, Isabell Hesse, a student at TU Dortmund University, produced two bee hotels as an art project. The students in the seminar were assigned the task of visualizing statistics. Isabell Hesse chose the statistics on forest bees in Germany for her topic. This is also the reason why her bee hotels also show how many wild bee species in Germany are endangered or threatened with extinction.

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