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I always get a real thrill when I find the telltale marks of the leafcutter bee on the leaves of my roses and wisteria. Sometimes I catch them in action, cutting out a circle of leaf, or flying around carrying it. It doesn't bother me to find plants

Nesting female bees cut out immediately obvious elliptical shapes from the edges of a leaf to make their cells for laying eggs. Since one female might need 20 or so cells, that's a lot of leaf cutting, particularly when the bee keeps returning

've decided I am going to build one, but only along very particular lines.Many species of solitary bees and wasps nest in tunnels bored into wood. They often use old beetle burrows, rather than digging their own. And of course leaf-cutter bees will nest in any

-roller caterpillar. No sign of them yet, but I'll expect them later.I can still see the results of leafcutter bee activity from last year. One was nesting in a redundant overflow pipe from the old bathroom and I regularly saw it with its green leaf curl cargo bobbing

to make the bee hotel, without bamboo, sunflower and teasel stems. I think the combination of branches, twigs and chopped trunk will make a varied insect habitat – one which I hope will be used by leafcutter bees to breed in as well as providing ladybirds

completely forgotten about them when they arrived last week. Roses do very well in London, and so too do the insects that feed on them.Apart from the leafcutter bees, which cut out those beautiful semicircles, the insects I most associate with roses