When Mia decided to build an insect hotel in her grandmother's backyard, she had no idea how many tiny visitors it would attract. It all began one Saturday morning when she noticed a native bee hovering near the lavender bushes. Unlike the honeybees she recognised from picture books, this bee was small, dark and metallic blue, and it disappeared into a hollow stem before she could look closer. Her grandmother explained that Australia is home to more than fifteen hundred species of native bees, and most of them are solitary. They do not live in hives or make honey. Instead, each female builds her own little nest, often in hollow twigs, sandy soil or gaps in old timber. Mia was fascinated. If these bees were such important pollinators, she thought, surely she could help them find safe places to nest. Over the next few weekends, Mia gathered materials. She collected bamboo canes of different widths and bundled them together. She drilled neat holes into a block of untreated wood, taking care to make the tunnels smooth so the bees would not damage their delicate wings. She added hollow reeds and a few pinecones for good measure. Her grandmother helped her mount the finished hotel on a sunny fence, facing the morning sun and sheltered from the wind and rain. At first, nothing happened. Mia checked the hotel every afternoon, feeling a little impatient. Then, almost three weeks later, she spotted a leafcutter bee carrying a tidy green disc of leaf towards one of the bamboo tunnels. The bee was sealing her nest, one neat layer at a time. By the end of summer, dozens of tunnels had been plugged with mud, leaves and resin. Mia kept a small notebook, sketching each new visitor and recording the colours she observed. She learned that her insect hotel was not just a craft project but a genuine habitat. Her favourite discovery was that patience, more than anything, was the real secret to gardening for wildlife. The tiny blue bee, it turned out, had been the first of many.