Building an insect hotel is no doubt a meritorious act. It provides “accommodation” to many species of bees, wasps and other arthropods; it will enliven your garden and attract pollinators as well as sworn enemies of pests. However only a few people realize that by creating an insect hotel we prepare a scene for an unlimited series of horrors, in comparison to which even Hostel will most likely be an innocent idyll.

Just the day before yesterday I went to have a look on what was happening at one of the big insect hotels in our zoo. First, my attention was caught by an approximately one-centimetre large black fly with white markings that was stopping at the openings drilled in the wood. It is called bee fly, and quite ominously Anthrax by its scientific name. Next, I noticed a slim black wasp, exploring individual “rooms” of our insect hotel. Later I determined it to be a square-headed wasp of the genus Trypoxylon. And finally, I noticed only a few tens of centimetres farther on a small, shiny metallic blue-greenred wasp. Its English name is rubby-tailed wasp, Chrysis ignita by the scientific name. It is also known as the cuckoo wasp, which is really apt.

And now – what I was in fact seeing. In the openings, the bee fly was flying around, larvae of the solitary red mason bee were developing, feeding on collected pollen. The bee fly was not flying around the entrances to their nests by accident. It was laying eggs there. When the larvae hatch from these eggs, they will start eating the larvae of the red mason bee. But this is just the beginning that we could compare to the scenes appearing before the opening titles of the film. As I mentioned, a slim square-headed wasp was also moving nearby. It was getting ready to clean the openings from eggs or larvae of other species – for example, the bee fly – and nest in them itself. To give its offspring something to feed on, the square-headed wasp fills the seized “hotel rooms” with paralyzed spiders. Well, isn’t it like a scene from the worst horror movie? A really scary hotel! But that’s still not all. You think that the worst scenes are over, when another shock comes: the cuckoo wasp was already waiting for the content of the square-headed wasp’s nest, so that its own larva could feed on it. A pure horror scene, which even the bravest screenwriter would not write! Surely you will now understand that the weekend’s viewing of Hostel with its flood of blood will not prepare me to pick up my tools again, but for watching the events in our insect hotel.