Get The Buzz – Planting for Bees

There are many reasons why bees are so very important to us, but one fact really stands out to us and makes us appreciate how hugely important our buzzy friends are:

The bees loving the echinops in our garden

1. Lavender

A favourite with so many of our clients. It loves dry, sunny positions so if you don’t have the correct sort of soil in your borders consider having a pretty pot filled with lavender on a sunny corner of our patio where you can enjoy the
sights, smells and buzzy sounds from it!

2. Catmint

Nepeta is loved by cats and bees alike! It is similar to lavender with its pretty flowers and silvery blue leaves and gives off a lovely aromatic scent as you brush past.

3. Verbena

We love verbena, particularly verbena bonariensis. It grows really easily, even in our heavy clay soil and gives statuesque height to the border. You may need to give the plant a bit of support if your garden catches the wind and be warned, this plant does like to self seed. It provides beautiful winter interest if it’s not cut down in Autumn.

4. Sedum

5. Eryngium

6. Buddleja

Probably best known for attracting butterflies but bees are also partial to a buddleja. The long cone-like flowers prove too irresistible for them.

7. Sunflowers

Now, who can resist the big yellow smiley face of a sun flower? It’s the perfect plant to get kids involved in gardening. Get them to have a competition with their friends to see who can grow the tallest plant and use it to explain to them the importance of encouraging bees into the garden.

8. Hebe

Hebes are a great structural shrub which can be a lovely alternative to buxus in your garden if you are looking for a rounded shape to provide an interesting form. But bees love their flowers too making it a well rounded (excuse the pun) plant for the garden.

A bee on sedum

9. Foxgloves

We regularly see foxgloves growing profusely at the sides of the road so it shows just how easy they are to grow. They will self seed furiously so once you have them you will get free plants forever. Bees just love snuggling up inside one
of the bell like flowers and having a nice big feed. 

10. Heathers

Again, a plant we often see growing in the wild in Scotland and if you have acidic soil in your garden you will be able to grow these well and keep our fuzzy friends happy.

If we have whetted your appetite, then there are literally THOUSANDS of plants* which bees will love and there will be plenty to suit your garden and soil. The perfect for pollinators list published by the RHS gives you more information than you could ever wish for.

The Plight of the Bumblebee

Hopefully all the yummy crops in your garden are growing well and you can start to see berries, fruit and veg appearing on your plants. If you can, it is likely that pollinating insects like bumblebees have been out and about in your garden.  Bumblebees look really cute and with big bodies and tiny wings don’t look like they should able to fly. Like me they aren’t happy being told what they can’t do so they do fly just to spite the mathematician boffins! I thought I’d find out a bit more about them and how they help in our gardens and what we can do to help them in return.

Read on to find out what I’m making…..

Bumblebee facts

• There are 250 types of bumblebee in the world, 24 in the UK but you’re likely only see 6-8 kinds in your garden.
• You can mainly tell the types apart by the colour and number of their stripes.
• They live in nests of 50-400 bees in the ground or in piles of old leaves.
• Each nest has one Mummy who is in charge (just like my home then!) She is called the Queen. The daughters all do the work in the nest and the few sons leave home when fully grown and sleep on flowers.
• The Queens sleep all winter (a lovely long sleep called hibernating) and then wake in Spring and lay eggs to start a whole new nest.
• Bumblebees have 5 eyes! They have 3 larger ones at the sides their heads and 3 little eyes on top of their head.
• Female bumblebees can sting, but only if you scare them. Their stings are like those of wasps- they don’t have any sticky-out bits to get stuck in the skin so the bumblebee can remove it and sting again. Honeybees can only sting once.
• Their buzzing noise isn’t made by their wings but by vibrating muscles!
• Their left and right wings don’t flap together, each flaps on its own.
• The speed and noise that their buzz makes (its frequency) is perfect for releasing large amounts of pollen from tomatoes. Now almost every single European tomato we buy is due to a bumblebee’s buzz, wow that’s a lot of buzzing as I can eat LOADS of tomatoes all on my own!

How Bumblebees help us

Bumblebees drink the sugary juice called nectar that’s in flowers and they collect yellow dust called pollen to feed to their babies.  When they do this they “pollinate” the flowers and that lets them turn into fruit and veg. They are faster pollinators than honeybees as they can visit twice as many plants every minute and all their hairs means nectar sticks all over them.  Being bigger they can carry more pollen and so can go on longer foraging trips. They are hardy insects, not put off by drizzle or winds- perfect for Scotland. They are happily active at temperatures down to 10°C. They aren’t as scared of enclosed spaces such as greenhouses as honeybees are, so do more of the pollinating on indoor crops. In fact some bumblebees are grown just to pollinate crops such as tomatoes, courgettes, strawberries and peppers grown by farmers inside greenhouses. In the UK bumblebees, solitary bees and hoverflies also pollinate 97% of our wild flowers.

Helping bumblebees

Two types of bumble bee have disappeared from our gardens in the last 80 years. If we don’t want to lose any more types we can grow their favourite plants in our gardens. Wild flowers such as foxgloves, daisies and buttercups have lots of nectar and pollen.  Our countryside used to be filled with wild flower meadows but these have been disappearing. We can plant these in our garden.  Or we can plant tasty herbs such as rosemary, chives, thyme, sage and marjoram to feed bumblebees and us.

Remember to try to plant different flowers that bloom from Spring through to Autumn- we’d not be happy if we could only eat in June and July! Also, different types bumblebees have shorter or longer tongues so need flowers of different sizes too so they can find their perfect fit- just like Goldilocks and the 3 bears! Some bees manage get around this problem by nibbling a teeny hole in the base the flower so they can still get access to the nectar- how smart are they?!

Learn how bumblebee friendly your garden is by finding out your Bee kind score and then you’ll get help picking other favourite bumblebee flowers to plant alongside those you already have.  My garden got a score of 2604, not too bad as the average in Scotland is 2061.

If you ever come across a bumblebee lying on the ground looking tired/unwell you can try to help by feeding them a mixture of 1 teaspoon of sugar in 1 teaspoon of water and placing that near the bee’s head. It should then stick out its really, really long tongue, lap up the sugary water and then use the energy to fly off.  Never try to keep a bumblebee inside, they need to be outside foraging, building a nest or hibernating.

Identifying bumblebees

It’s fun to learn what types of bumblebee you have in your garden. You need to begin by making sure it is a bumblebee and not a honey bee. Bumblebees are normally bigger and hairier than honeybees or solitary bees. Next work out what colour its tail is and how many bands it has on its body. Finally look to see if there is a ball of pollen (or a shiny surface ready cover with pollen) on its back legs.  You can even get involved in the Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s Bee Watch survey.  You just need to take a photograph of the bumblebees that you see and then upload it to their webpage telling them the date and time the photo was taken.  The tools help you work out the type of bumblebee (don’t worry an expert bumblebee identifier -what a cool job – will check your answer later) and your bumblebee will become part of their survey results.  All the results will help brainy people check on what types of bumblebees are found where and how many of them there are just in case any types need extra special help from us.

Bumblebee craft

Here’s a great way to use old jars of plastic bottles and turn them into a fun craft project and game.

You’ll need:

• empty, clean jars or plastic bottles (if using bottles get a grown up to cut off the top third)
• black, yellow and white paper or card
• googly eyes (or you can just draw eyes on)
• pipe cleaners
• glue
• marker pen
• scissors
• a small pinecone (or you can use a little ball)

To make:

1. Start by covering the outside of your jar with glue.

Gluing on the black body- be extra careful when holding glass jars

2. Wrap a piece of black paper around the jar.

3. Cut the yellow paper into strips

4. Glue a couple of yellow strips around the black jar to make bumblebee stripes.

This bumblebee will have almost as many yellow stripes on his tummy as me!

5. Stick on googly eyes near the top of jar.

6. Make antennas out of pipe cleaners and slip this in between paper and jar.

7. Draw on a face.

8. Cut out some wings from white card and glue these onto back of jar.

9. Write numbers on the front to tell everyone how many points you’ll get for throwing the cone into that bumblebee.

My hungry bumblebee family

Now you have a fun game where you can take turns to throw the pinecone “pollen” into the hungry bumblebee’s tummy.  See who can score the most points!

Remember, if you enjoy eating tomatoes and strawberries or looking at pretty wild flowers as much as I do, please help out in the plight of the bumblebees and grow a few more bee friendly plants in your garden.

Big hugs

Euan xx

The Bees Knees

Hi, it’s me, Lulu, The Secret Blogger again! So, the bees knees. What a funny saying. I mean, do bees even have knees? And if so, why are they so good? Anyway, knees or not, bees are very good things. And not just because I can say the word “bee” very well plus I can do a good impression of a buzzy bee! We need bees for lots of reasons…

Bees on eryngium

Why Bees Are Important

Bees pollinate a wide range of crops, vegetables, fruits and plants

• Without bees crops will be reduced and we wouldn’t have enough to eat (1)
• Without bees plants wouldn’t survive
• Without bees birds will be left without sufficient food

Echinacea is popular with bees

Fingerprint Bumblebees

• Cover your thumb in yellow paint.
• Press your thumb on to a piece of paper at whatever angle you want your bee to be flying.
• Dip your little finger into black paint.
• Gently dot on a head and make an even smaller dot for the sting at the back of your bee.
• Make three side by side dots (about the same size as the sting) in the middle for the black stripe.
• Put your index finger into the black paint.  Stamp many times onto a piece of scrap paper or paper towel until almost all the paint is gone.  Then stamp a wing above the body at a slight angle and a second wing above the body at an opposite angle.

Make a bumble bee from finger prints

 

So, even when you are indoors you can have your very own cheery bumble bee! Thanks to the crafty people at DLTK for this idea.