Feed the Bees
| Published: 16th July 2007 11:04 |
Bees need food and a place to live in gardens, parks, and wild areas.
There aren't so many wild places these days, but bees will live happily in your garden, where it is often sheltered, and there may be a quiet, undisturbed corner.
Bees like feeding on nectar and pollen from:
- old-fashioned cottage garden flowers, the daisies and clover on your lawns,
- blossoms on cherry, pear, apple and plum trees and hedging plants, and
- wildflowers like cowslips, forget-me-nots, and dead nettles in borders,
- comfrey, viper's bugloss, bird's foot trefoil, tufted vetch, scabious, foxglove, knapweed, cat's ear, yellow rattle and other flowers of undisturbed pasture
This meadow is perfect for a bee! Bees need food throughout the season from early March to late September and beyond, not just when crops are in flower.
Bees pollinate our food crops, so we can't live without them. Plants used for cattle and chicken food rely on the bees' activities just as much as our vegetable crops.
Native bees, and bumblebees in particular, are most valuable for pollinating crops, as they can work in lower temperatures and therefore earlier and later in the day than honey bees. Bees cannot survive in monocultures, like grass verges and lawns that have no flowers. They need blossoms on hedgerows, and wildflowers on lawns.
We can help our native bees by creating friendly habitats with somewhere to live, as well as providing food plants. Some bumblebees nest on the soil surface in a shady corner where a pile of dry-ish leaf-litter has gathered. Others like to nest below ground, either in an unused mouse burrow, or under a woodpile in a quiet corner.
It is important not to use a strimmer near the base of hedges, and not to tidy up every bit of the garden, in order to let bees live peacefully alongside us.
Sometimes people get too busy tidying up nature.
If we cut our privet hedges and bramble when they are in bloom, and mow our lawns and verges when they are full of clover and other wildflowers, the bees' food is gone.
If we can mow half of our lawn at a time, there will be some clover left for the bees. If there are lots of wildflowers on the lawn, including bird's foot trefoil, clover and self heal, these plants will suppress grass growth, and we do not need to mow at all between late March/April, and early August/mid September, the traditional time for hay meadow harvest. This will reduce our carbon emissions.
And we can enjoy our bright, cheery and colourful lawns!
Article by Liz Kent.
Photographs copyright http://www.bumblebeeconservationtrust.co.uk/
For more information please contact liz.kent85@yahoo.co.uk
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