A Honey Bees garden

As you may know lots of honey bees have been struggling to find their way home.
This means fewer bees have been visiting our gardens. Many theories have been suggested in relation to their absence including gm crops, colony collapse disorder, pesticides, a certain fungus and mobile phone signals affecting their natural radars.
Bees are one of the most important pollinating insects, this means that they collect pollen from one flower and take it to another to fertilize it. This is how lots of flowers reproduce including our major food crops. Important fruits and vegetables like apples, pears, rapeseed, broccoli, mango, brazil nuts and onions are all pollinated by honey bees.

The honey industry has a lot to do with the decline of native Honey Bees. Commercial honey farmers travel with their hives to follow the blooms of certain flowers. In turn the captive Bees encroach on the native Honey Bees area bringing new disease and competition.

Due to the declining number of honey bees we should try our hardest to encourage them into our gardens through the careful selection of certain plants desirable to them. Honey bees like to visit flowers with a lot of pollen and nectar. By planting certain flowers near fruit trees you increase their chance of producing fruit as the female fruit needs to be pollinated.

10 ways in which we can support the Honey Bee in our daily lives

• Plant more trees and flowers, brighter flowers and more diverse the better
• Boycott GM foods
• Buy locally sourced honey
• Don’t leave jars of honey outside- this can easily spread fungus and disease to native species, especially if the honey is from a foreign source
• Use organic fertilizers in your garden
• Let your garden grow wild to encourage native insects, flowers and plants
• Grow a variety of flowering plants that bloom at different times of the year to offer creatures year round food sources
• Plant older, native and more established varieties of flowers
• Bees love white and purple flowers with easy landing spots and accessible for nectar
• Worker bees need to visit a good few thousand flowers to make a teaspoon of honey so the more we plant the better chance they have of regenerating and surviving

Why not try to encourage honey bees to your garden with an array of colours, tastes and shapes of flowers. Even if you do not have a garden try using window boxes and planters to grow flowering plants that the bees can use as a quick stop off before finding more nectar. The natural world does all of this work for free and with a little effort we can help our insect friends by making their lives brighter and easier. Once you establish a honey bee garden it will seed and regenerate itself creating a haven for all sorts of creatures. This is a crucial time where the bees are facing all sorts of obstacles and problems so its time to give a little back to the bees behind the scene and the first step is to encourage them into our gardens.

On the website you can also download your free Save Our Bees Activity and Information pack Coordinated by the British Science Association