5 Best Tips for Bat House Maintenance
Maintaining bat houses and bat boxes can be quite a challenge if you do not know where to begin. In this short guide we will give you 5 solid tips about how you can maintain your bat house.
Just so you know, bats are not and cannot be kept as pets. If you know that already, great! Let's move forward on how you can keep their house and boxes neat and clean!
Airtight Seams
Airtight seams are important for bat boxes, especially if you have them installed in a very seasonal place. In order to keep heat and cold regulation around the bat house and bat box, the box should be inspected carefully during each change of season.
Seams tend to separate from the roof after a few years. One of the best ways to counter this is to install fresh roof repair over all the seams. And of course you might want to do this when there are no bats in the box.
Small Multiple Micro-Climates
Having multiple bat houses installed can really help in attracting colonies of bats to your post. What you can do is build two bat houses back to back to accommodate as many bats as possible.
Fixing two bat houses together will allow changes of temperature. A change of temperature in appropriate places always attracts more colonies of bats. You can also do this at different locations around your house, and you will see how different micro climate changes will be home to more bats.
Painting the Bat Box
Make sure you paint the bat box in a dark colour that is more familiar to bats. Most often, bright colored bat boxes are a friendly welcome to predators like snakes and eagles that will hunt down the bats in the bat box.
Also it will be easy to attract more bats through a dark colour, as it tricks the bats into thinking of the bat boxes as a secure place. Choose acrylics for your bat box as they tend to stay longer than water colours and any other type of paint used may repulse the bats away.
Timber Treatment
It is important to look after the timber stand you would be placing your bat box over. Here are a few steps on how to take care of the timber stand.
- Make sure that you are only using a synthetic pyrethroid to help prevent any wood-boring insect.
- You would want to use only a minimum amount of pesticide, as it may not favour the bats in the bat box.
Cleaning the Insides of the Bat Box
It's always best to clean your bat box once in a while. The best time to do so is during winter or autumn as usually this is the time when bats reside in warmer shades or cave cavities to breed. Make sure you are getting an unused bat box for your bats! You can do that by looking at the dropping or urine stains within the box.
