Honeypots for bees
Garden flowerbeds, combined with untended garden areas, could help protect Britain's declining bumblebee population, according to a survey by a growing charity.
Garden Organic, whose members last year surveyed the habits and numbers
of bumblebees in their back gardens, discovered that flowerbeds and borders for foraging accounted for 65 per cent of all bee sightings, while three-quarters of the participants who actively encouraged bees to nest, felt scrub areas were more effective than bee boxes as nesting habitats.
As a result of the findings, the charity is now urging more people to create flower-rich refuges in gardens to protect bumblebee populations, thought to have halved since the 1950s.
In its survey, Garden Organic's members not only counted 14,305 bees – which all participants felt was lower than in previous years – but also the types of plants they most often visited. And while foxglove and pulmonaria proved the most popular ornamentals, herbs such as lavender and comfrey proved most popular to the bees overall.
Gemma Sutton, who led the Garden Organic survey, said: "As long as we don't pave them over or make them overly tidy, our gardens can be very friendly spaces for bees.
"British gardening habits, whereby our gardens are in bloom for a large portion of the year, help by offering a diverse variety of flowering plants, which provide a consistent source of nectar and pollen. This is great news for bumblebees, which flock to plants like pulmonaria early in the year and sedum late in the season.
"It's vital that we do more to attract bees to the garden, but with concern over the disappearance of the honeybee, we are forgetting that we need to conserve bumblebees too. The ongoing threat of modern farming techniques, which destroy the flowers bumblebees feed on, and their nesting habitats, is just one of the reasons why we're urging people to fill their gardens with more of the plants that came out top in our survey."
And it's not only flowers that could help bring the bumblebees back.
This year's grow-your-own phenomenon could help too, as Garden Organic discovered that flowering shrubs and vegetable patches, which accounted for 23 per cent of all sightings, also act as great attractants, with bees regularly visiting raspberries and beans.
The top 20 "bee attracting" plants surveyed by Garden Organic members, are: lavender, comfrey, raspberry, foxglove, pulmonaria, geranium, borage, heather, fuchsia, aquilegia, buddleia, sedum, hebe, marjoram, rosemary, nasturtium, cotoneaster, honeysuckle, clover, sage.
Top tips from Garden Organic on how to attract and support bee populations:
Grow a mixture of flowering plants to provide nectar and pollen from spring until winter
Grow simple flowers, as their nectar and pollen is more accessible to bees
Include native wildflowers such as foxglove, viper's bugloss and geranium species in the garden as all are popular with bees.
Tried-and-tested bee-attracting plants include pulmonaria, comfrey, lavender, foxgloves, raspberries, marjoram and buddleia
Don't forget to leave parts of your garden informal to provide nesting sites
If you can, leave an area of your lawn uncut during summer to allow clover to flower
To read the full scientific report on the bumblebee survey visit www.gardenorganic.org.uk
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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