To ask you to help the bees? 🐝

[DowntonCrabby]

Not really AIBU, more for traffic than a bossy demand.

I pledge to make my garden much more friendly this year for bees and other pollinators.

I have a lot of outdoor space at work that I can hopefully encourage more bees into too.

Anyone with me?

Any suggestions for a north facing border with shallow soil due to foundations for a large 7-8ft retaining wall?
Clay soil which gets very dry in summer (due to rain shadow from the wall)

Check out "guerilla gardening"
Plants in public spaces etc

Read Dave Goulsen on bumbles and insects.
Queens bumblebees often leave the nest too early, ie about now, if the weather turns warm. If there are no crocuses or simple petalled snowdrops l, or if the bee is too weak to bite into the snowdrop or to fly back, it will die. In past years i have been organised enough to carry about grapes sugar tablets, a spoon and still water (or spit will do, yuk i know). Instant sugar that doesnt get all over their fur and wings (then they also cant fly and freeze and die) and many a bumble that looks dead can be coaxed to a sugar fix and flies again. Try and help and bees and bumbles you find.

It is possible to keep a formal ish bee friendly garden too harebellsies

My gardens are quite structured but packed with trained fruit trees, herbs, logs, trained vines and bee friendly flowers.

MumW - plant Lungwort, comfrey and foxgloves. All three are weedy but beautiful, and tough, with loads of flowers, enough for a constant bee and bumble party. The lungwort is the first to arrive in early spring. Foxglove in late spring and comfrey with successive bursts through late spring and summer. All low maintenance, shade and draught tolerant but may need some initial watering if the spot is 100 % dry.

I have no garden sadly but the bee bombs look awesome, might have to get some and find places to throw them! 🐝

I can never get foxgloves to grow from packet seed - but having planted a couple they self-seed happily.

I just found a good list - which coincidentally seems to be by the chap mentioned upthread. Looks like there's other interesting stuff on this site for bee lovers!

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/lifesci/goulsonlab/resources/flowers

Also it is the winter, the overwintering period that also really matters. Everything appears dead but is in the right place for a spring start. Winter flowering plants are also helpful such as witch hazel and snowdrops for when bees emerge.
Well done Doggy 👍🏻 if you manage to provide sufficient habitat and have a pretty garden. I dont have time to manage that at the moment. Perhaps one day.

As a cat person I was once tempted to buy these mouse-nest sheets that destroy the tick life cycle. Please Don’t Use These. Bumblebees often use fluff from mouse nests to line their own nests. And if that lining contains pesticides (to kill ticks) it will also harm bumbles and their brood. I hope someone reading this can benefit from my realisation, after reading Dave Goulson mentioning mouse nest lining recycling.

multi petalled roses instead which although beautiful offer absolutely nothing to a bee, or any pollinator.

Surely any rose that forms hips will also provide nectar and pollen? I often see bees bumbling around in dm's roses.

I'm in. We have been adding more bee friendly plants to our garden over the last few years.

Yes they do jelly but all the petals mean the bees can’t access it!

One thing to note re the bee bombs - the bloke who leads our volunteer group has mentioned that it can be hard to get wildflowers going on verges etc because councils tend to mow with little regard to anything except tidiness. So you probably need to think a bit about where will really work.

With pom-pom style rosette roses most of the stamen have been transformed into additional petals. Meaning that there is less pollen available and the stamens may be barely accessible. If you cant get at the pollen with your fingers a bee cannot either, or may need a lot of energy to get at the nectar only.

You don’t need to buy expensive seed bombs or even plant wildflower seeds. You can buy cheap packets of wildflower seeds from places like Poundland and Wilko and just scatter them. I like to mix mine with a little compost than scatter but you don’t have to.

As to roses I have a mix of large floribundas, climbing and low level wild roses and the bees are quite happy with them all.

A stumpery can be anything from a few old logs left in a dark damp corner to decay or as in my case mine is planted with ferns.
A stumpery will encourage not only bees but all insects which in turn encourages small birds. If you have room for a larger stumpery then hedgehogs have been known to nest in them too.

I do wish it was easier and cheaper to get hold of plants and bulbs that are pesticide free. Perhaps in the future this will be possible. Because no matter what you plant, if it has been treated as a seedling or bulb, traces strong enough to make bees wobbly will remain. If they visit 200 crocuses a day, this adds up. Sorry to put a downer on hopes but for the case of individual ailing populations possibly organic seed and soil/own compost is the best solution.

But difficult to achieve, clearly. I barely manage this.

I would love to

But my dogs have a habit of trying to eat bees

Www.bee-bombs.com

We have lots of lavender & rosemary which the bees love - the rosemary is a good early flower for them at this time of year, as well as loganberry, wine berries, blueberries & tayberries - we get so many bees the noise is so loud! Also have several bees houses for the solitary bees. Love watching them fill each hole with mud or leaves. Courgettes or any squash is great too, as the flowers are so large.

I googled pompom roses, and I see what you mean!

What about tea and hybrid tea roses? This sort 🌹. Are they OK for bees? Although you cannot see the anthers in newish flowers, they do open up a lot as they age.

I absolutely adore bees and do my best, every year, to fill my garden with beautiful flowers that they'll enjoy.
Please will you DM me a link @ginandbearit?

Bees love nasturtiums and they will grow just about anywhere. The seeds are pretty cheap in wilkos and a few scattered around will soon start to grow. They are also pretty prolific self seeders so once sown they should come back year after year.

We just moved house a few months ago, I went yesterday to go and get my bee friendly seeds so make my new garden a better place for them. I got rosemary, lavender and wild flower seeds to start with; obviously lavender and rosemary from seed will take a while for them to be any use to the bees so I'll have to buy some grown plants too.

Good point about the pesticides Harebellsies, how can we get around that?

Generally no jelly, although David Austin does some bee friendly ones specifically and a few look to be heavily petalled.