Make your garden bee-friendly
Encourage bumblebees to your garden to play their vital role in pollinating your plants.
Bumblebees can be found in most habitats where there are nectar- and pollen-filled plants – whether this is in your garden, on farmland or in the countryside. But Britain’s bees are disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Various government bodies and research institutions have agreed to provide £8m to look into why populations are falling. But we can all do our bit.
The best way to help is to provide food and nesting sites in your garden for bumblebees. Wherever you live in the UK, you should be able to attract at least six bumblebee species to your garden. Try and ensure you have different plants that flower at different times of year and plant traditional cottage garden flowers and native wildflowers. You could also leave an area of your lawn unmown to provide flowers during summer.
Find out more about keeping your bees in clover.
Find out how to make a bee home.
Alternatively you could get involved in monitoring and recording bee species that you see in order to help organisations understand their current populations. Find out about surveys run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.
Why encourage bees?
Pollination is the number one reason. We need them to make trees, plants and flowers bloom. Also, they’re well adapted to the British climate and don’t mind getting out even when it’s not that warm. You’d be helping the British bumblebee to survive if you put out a home for them. Their population has fallen to the point where this trend needs reversing.
Fine out more about bees in your garden here (courtesy of Blue Peter).
Click here for a short video clip of bee facts.
And click here to listen to the Environment Minister Hilary Benn talking about this on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
Click here for more on how to make your garden bee-friendly.
And register here for the Save Our Bees campaign.
Watch Martha Kearney’s BBC doc about the crisis on BBC2 on Friday 15 May at 7pm.
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Godalming, GB , 30 Apr 2009
As a gardener it is important to encourage bees into my garden, so I have a number of plants which attract bees.
The Bumble Bee Conservation Trust’s list of bee-friendly plants looks interesting, so I shall see if I can get a few more in my garden over the next year.
Luton, GB , 05 May 2009
I was pleased to discover over the weekend that there is a local school of bee-keeping excellence. Which got me thinking – If you want to take bee care to another level, take a course. bee-craft.com has details of course around the country.
Bournemouth, GB , 10 May 2009
We encourge bees into our organic garden. We purposely planted a bed of wild flowers last year and have repeated it this year. Tip – we have recently learnt that where seed packets have F1 on the packet, even organic ones, they have been tampered with so that they’re desease resistant or mildew resistant etc. The problem is that when the plants grow from the seed and produce their own seeds, the new seeds are no good and you can’t regrow from them. We now try and avoid seed packets with F1 on them.
Bournemouth, GB , 10 May 2009
Slight adjustment to the statement above! The seeds from plants of F1 seeds will most likely grow but they will produce plants which take on the characteristics of one or the other of the parent plants, so you may end up with a plant you don’t expect.
new bradwell, milton keynes, GB , 21 May 2009
Hiya
Jordans are doing an offer at the moment, “the big buzz”, if you collect 5 points (from the boxes)and send them off with a quid for postage, they will send you a nice bee-friendly lavender or rosemary plant for your garden!
this is their website: http://www.jordanscereals.co.uk/
their products are all conservation grade so its win win really :)
Luton, GB , 25 May 2009
Got a huge rosemary and plenty of lavender and loads of weeds with flowers! Also I seem to have a patch of sandy soil next to my front door loved by mining bees! They started using it last year and are back this – drilling little holes in which they lay their eggs and disappear again. Supposedly solitary, I’ve got lots of them using this patch – but serendipity rather than any effort of mine!
Godalming, GB , 02 Aug 2009
We have some marjoram and sweet peas and every time I go past them a cloud of small brown butterflies (perhaps some kind of fritillary) rises up from them. They also attract the bees, as does the borage. I was also watching a honey bee visit the tiny flowers on the lemon balm earlier.
A lot of our bee-friendly flowers are over now, so it’s good to plant some for every season. I’m not sure about mid-Winter, but winter-flowering heathers are a good one for early in the year.