When most people think of providing food and shelter for animals they tend to think in terms of birds and bats, or at a push hedgehogs, frogs or toads. These animals are important and there are numerous benefits in providing for them but what about the smaller, often overlooked, animals that play an equally important role in a healthy garden ecosystem? The "buzz" word is insects!

Insects are one of the most numerous groups of animals on the planet and there are around 27,000 species in the UK alone. They range from the largest species such as the Great Silver Water Beetle, the Emperor Dragonfly and the Swallowtail butterfly to the smallest springtails that can be less than 1mm long. Regardless of size however, they do have a number of things in common they are all invertebrates, that is, they don't have a backbone (this also applies to numerous other land and water dwelling creatures such as the molluscs or the arachnids), they all have a 3-segment body (the head, thorax and abdomen) and they all have three pairs of jointed legs attached to the middle body segment. Beneath our very noses there is a whole world going on and in the long grass of an un-mown garden it can literally be a jungle out there!

To anyone with a garden, attracting certain insects can bring various benefits, most notably their ability to pollinate plants and in the carnivorous species, their voracious appetite for all those insects that are considered pests. Of particular benefit are the following:-

• Bumblebees
• Ladybirds
• Lacewings
• Hornets
• Red Mason Bees
• Other Bees and Wasps

These insects are excellent pollinators of a variety of garden flowers and vegetables. Broad beans, runner beans and raspberries are heavily dependent on the attention of bumblebees, in fact without them these particular crops would hardly thrive at all. As well as that, they are also major pollinators of a huge number of native wildflowers. There are 6 species that are widespread in gardens but bumblebees are suffering a decline - at one time there were 25 British species of bumblebee but three are now extinct, 15 species have suffered a major contraction of their range and nine more need urgent protection. If bumblebees are lost then this will have a knock on effect on many plant species that rely on these insects to pollinate them. To help these creatures and to have them provide a service pollinating your garden you could provide a bumblebee box or underground bumblebee box.

Bumblebees are colony-forming species, like ants and honey-bees but their nests never tend to be much larger than a grapefruit. The female, once mated, hibernates through the winter then, come spring, hunts for a suitable nest site, which a bumblebee box can easily supply. Once found she begins a new nest with a ball of wax and pollen in which she lays about half a dozen eggs. These hatch, the larvae feed on the pollen reserve and eventually pupate and turn into fully grown worker bees which carry out the job of collecting more pollen (in the process pollinating the plants it visits) while the queen takes on the role of full time egg layer. By the summer she lays eggs that will become the following years queens and the drones (males who leave the nest and live independently) who will mate with the queens. Once the temperature drops the old queen, her workers and the drones will die - only newly mated queens survive to the following year.

Unlike honeybees, bumblebees do not lose their sting and die if they use it. However, they actually very rarely use the sting as they are pretty docile creatures and take much more provocation than the grumpier honeybee! If one was buzzing a bit too close for comfort then as long as you didn't flap your hands about and scare it, it would quickly realise you weren't a flower and leave to find something better.

Ladybirds are members of the Coleoptera (beetle family) and there are about 40 species in the UK. The two that you are most likely to come across in your garden are the 2-spot ladybird and the 7-spot ladybird, with the 7-spot ladybird being the larger of the two. Although it is commonly perceived that ladybirds are orange/red with black spots there are a number of variations in different species where they can be black with red spots, yellow with black spots, black with yellow spots and many duller coloured species. Although you wouldn't think it to look at them, ladybirds are vicious predators, feeding mostly on small sap-sucking insects like aphids and scale insects - a practice that has earned them the nickname the Gardeners Friend. These carnivorous habits aren't confined to the adults and the larvae are equally voracious. The adults tend to lay their eggs on plants infested with aphids and similar insects to provide a ready food source for when they have hatched. Once hatched the larvae (which look nothing like the adults) continue to feed and go through several moults until it eventually attaches itself to a leaf as a pupae before it hatches out as an adult 1-2 weeks later.

Towards the end of the summer they start looking for somewhere to hibernate and their chances of survival are greatly increased by the provision of an artificial hibernation site such as a bug box or wooden insect house. If they survive the winter then they emerge the following spring (normally late March or early April) and find a mate to start the cycle all over again. Ladybirds rarely hibernate through a second winter and as a rule only have a lifespan of a year - but in the course of that year a single ladybirds can eat over 5000 insects!

Interesting fact:Ladybirds have always been popular insects, often thought of as lucky. The name ladybird comes from "beetle of Our Lady" (named from the Virgin Mary) dating back to the Middle Ages. This is because in many early religious paintings the Virgin Mary was often shown wearing a red cloak rather than the blue she is often portrayed in today.

Hornets are social insects that build nests out of paper, made by chewing wood fibres to a pulp and using it to create a large oval or round structure, often hanging from branches, in attic spaces, hollow trees or in a provided hornet box. They are the largest wasp species in the UK and in the 1960s and '70s were classed as endangered. Since then they have increased in numbers and expanded their range although they are still uncommon.

Popular belief would have hornets as fairly viscous insects with powerful stings and although they do have a sting (which some people insist is more painful!) it is often suggested that they are less likely to attack you than regular wasps. However, it's never the best idea to experiment with this claim! The adults use their sting to kill insects such as caterpillars and other soft-bodied insects, which they take back to the nest to feed to the larvae, thus making them a pretty handy insect to have around in terms of pest control.

The adults themselves don't actually eat other insects preferring sugar rich liquids like the juices from decaying fruits or nectar from certain flowers. Alternatively, the hornet larvae exude a sweet honeydew-like liquid in a similar manner to aphids, which the adults also feed on. Like the previously mentioned bumblebees, young mated hornet queens are the only individuals to hibernate through the winter and on emergence they look for a suitable nest site to start building a nest. After a nest is built and the first few eggs laid, hatched and developed, the queen gives up the roll of foraging and nest building to these new workers. Towards the end of summer new queens are born which are eventually mated. The colony dies out in the autumn once food becomes scarce and the mated queens go into hibernation to start the cycle again.

Red mason bees belong to the Hymenoptera, a group of insects that contains the previously mentioned bumblebees and hornets as well as other wasp/bee species and ants. Unlike many of the species in this group however, the red mason bee is a solitary insect and does not form colonies. Instead, the female mates as soon as she has emerged from hibernation around the end of March and then hunts for a place to lay her eggs. These are often such things as hollow plant stems, old beetle borings in dead wood or irregular cavities in old walls or masonry. Once she has found a suitable place she constructs around 6 to 10 cells along its length, each separated by a partition of mud that she has collected. Before sealing each cell and moving onto building the next one she fills it with enough pollen dampened with nectar to feed a developing grub (this often takes up to fifteen foraging trips) then lays her egg from which the grub will hatch. Once hatched the grubs feed on the supplied pollen getting bigger and moulting several times until full grown then they spin a cocoon and pupate. The newly formed adults then remain in the cocoon until the following spring when they emerge.

Red mason bees tend to be active from late March until the beginning of June with the males emerging first. Due to their industrious nature they tend to be much better pollinators than honeybees - one red mason bee can pollinate as many flowers as 100 honey bees! They are particularly good at pollinating fruit crops such as apples, plums, pears and strawberries (so if you happen to grow any of these in your garden then a healthy mason bee population will allow for increased productivity) although they will also happily visit garden flowers. If you do want to attract red mason bees to your garden then providing a nesting area is a positive step forward. There are several products available such as the woodcrete insect nest and the insect house with inspection tubes. Red mason bees are also very docile; the male doesn't have a sting and the females sting is much weaker compared to those of a wasp or honeybee and is only ever likely to use it if you mistreat her (for example, by accidentally sitting on her, and if you do that you deserve to be stung!).

Other bee and wasp species are important pollinators and/or feed on pests like caterpillars. For example, some species of solitary wasps sting and paralyse an insect like a caterpillar then take it back to their nest where they lay an egg inside it. The egg hatches into a wasp larva, which then eats the paralysed insect from the inside out - mmm, yummy!