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?

I planted loads of lavender last Spring OP but the heatwave turned them into dry twigs do we need to plant loads more. The amount of bees and butterflies on them was just lovely

I've never had much success with bee friendly seeds/bombs/wildflower mixes. You're halfway there if you remember to plant them in a sunny spot - they're mostly not designed for shade - and water them. However the results have always been straggly and weedy with barely any flowers and NO bees!

A couple of places in my town have wildflower meadows and they look incredible, I'm wondering what the secret is

Morrisons and Aldi are brilliant for plants (from March/April onwards). The perennial ones in sleeves are great value at £1.79 and will come back next year. Many are marked with the bee friendly logo and have a long flowering season. I tend to protect them with organic slug pellets until they get going a bit.

I prefer buying small plants as opposed to growing seeds. The latter can be quite time consuming and prone to failure.

Unfortunately the bee friendly logo often refers to the plant variety and ignores the un-bee-friendly pesticides that have been used to cultivate the plant
It's a minefield.

I've spent nearly 5yrs planting up my SE garden with bee friendly species and I still don't get many bees. It's very sad.

I have mini wildlife ponds, trees, ivy, climbers covering the fences, tree stumps and log piles, hedges and bee houses.

I am going to grow phacelia this year - a neighbour on the allotments has it and it is always covered in bees.

Yes MrsIronfoundersson, we had a phacelia in our last garden and it the bees loved it; I will add it to my expanding list!

I'm trying to recall what's popular with bees in my garden. I try to incorporate plants with a long/ repeat flowering season together with early and late flowering varieties to help the bees through through hibernation.

Foxgloves, laburnum (both toxic - careful with kids), herbs, buddleia (thuggish, requires hard pruning), lavender, passionflower, pyracantha, star jasmine, nasturtium, courgette and runner beans, sunflowers, choisya, honeysuckle, ceonothus (I love it), lilac, hibiscus, clematis, thornless blackberry (any fruit and berries although the blossom doesn't last long), hardy geranium (Johnsons blue for example - easily divided to provide more plants), fuchsias (£1 in Morrisons - look for the hardy varieties).

Check whether you're planting for sun or shade.

I also plant loads of annuals in pots and baskets. Many annuals aren't really bee friendly but the colour seems to attract them to my other plants. I include plenty of nasturtium (germinates super easily from seed) to tumble down the sides.

What a great list of ideas and advice guys, thank you.

I tried to save about 4/5 last year with the sugar-water solution, 3 made it. It was summer time though so I’ll keep an eye out from now for queens.

Oh I also planted quite a lot of snapdragon and alyssum (and nasturtium already mentioned) amongst my annuals last year.

Erysimum 'Bowles Mauve' is a brilliant specimen (I've seen the plants on sale in Morrisons, Asda etc) - bees love it and it flowers forever. Mine was still flowering in December. I have tons of it around the garden. Scabious is also great, mine was from Asda for about £4.

It's fine to grow roses if you like them! I fell into the trap of either/or but not everything has to be bee friendly
However it's even better if you can layer some bee friendly plants with the roses - clematis is an traditional partner and the bees can get into the flowers.

I need to buy some lungwort this spring!

I’m in too. I have bee friendly flowers and an insect hotel, plus a bee friendly water source. I have been pushing for us to do more with this in work too

I also saved what I think was a queen from a spiders web last year. Don’t think the spider was too impressed but it had lots of flies

I have ' rescued' a couple of bees with sugar water when they have appeared in my garden looking very poorly

We also plant bee friendly plants

I always plant a couple of bowls of marigolds. I save the seeds from the year before and plant directly into bowls outside around may. I cover with an old wire hanging basket and usually within a week or so the seedlings appear. I might have to thin them out if I have been a bit heavy handed with the seeds but I usually have a few spare pots about so not a problem. The bees love them and the pots look great.

Lungwort is amazing. Made of steel. Tough but so pretty with its instagrammable hues and also kind: it is one of the plants whose flowers have the fastest nectar “refill rate”, meaning it keeps more bees (mainly bumbles for me) fed on the crappiest soil.

Any root piece will grow to fill the available space so if anyone is really skint but really needs Lugwort and comfrey i can send you a root piece or two when it comes up. Im in germ/any though, so preferably ger/man addresses. Here the weather almost exactly like London, but could afford to send out a few small envelopes of snippets. Organic lungwort root. Also an organic comfrey patch with root bits im willing to share.

OP here in Germ-land there is currently a sort of referendum to save the bees, and biodiversity generally. It is still at the indirectly and semi-binding petition stage, but people in (prosperous) Bavaria are so concerned about dwindling insect life etc that they have managed to amass over 1 million petition signatures - this means that the regional parliament is forced to debate measures to further protect nature. In a country with strict environmental rules anyway. Its been amazingly succesful so far and is very inspiring.

Ps im a long term member and also poster on mumsnet but with the recent logout i just started a new login with a similar name.

Last year we used pots I bought from the tip and bee bombs to plant a wildflower meadow. I also bought some seed mixes from wilko. We put in a bug friendly water feature, left a pile of rotting logs and built a bug hotel and installed a bee shelter.

This year we are doing the same plus growing honeysuckle and clematis up the fence. Growing wildflowers on an abandoned patch of garden and making a bigger bug hotel. Our garden had loads of bees last year but the lavender in pots def proved the most popular with the bees. This thread fill me with joy, people do care!

I like seeds from this place, partly because they do mixes for specific areas (coastal, wet, acidic etc). The problem with scattering a load of “general” wildflower seeds is that this may push out species that are meant to be in that area.

I know this is really obvious but please don’t scatter wildflowers just anywhere - quite a few seeds are quite poisonous (although the plants are beautiful).

I grow foxgloves from seed in my cold frame each year and then plant them a few months later. They are poisonous but my children know to wash their hands after they’ve been in the garden. The bees love them and they look awesome.

If you can, cultivate clover in your lawn - loved by both bees and butterflies.

Winter flowering plants that bees love:

Teucrium (not fashionable but you can find it in some garden centres)
Rosemary
Sweet violets
Spring flowering heather - mine is already out

Summer flowering plants:

Lavender
Nepeta
Thyme
Marjoram
Foxgloves (but these are not perennials)
California lilac
Lilac
Globe thistle
Sea holly

Also:

Euphorbia
Honeysuckle
Salvia (the white one is pretty)
Wild roses
Broom

Geraniums (not pelargoniums) are also good.

Broom.

YY to clover for bees and bumblebees and honeysuckle for moths. Obviously you have to let your lawn grow a little longer in the sunmer, just a week extra each time in the summer, to let the clover bloom. Also in the summer: birdsfoot trefoil in the lawn feeds the bees!
Dont forget the moths! And butterflies too. Suffering significantly.
Need to research teucrium. Cant believe i dont have it!!
Also, there is a hunger gap between the end of spring flowers and full summer blooms. In my garden giant alliums fill the gap, but otherwise during this time please let your dandelions grow as there is a population drop off in bees at this time as there is not enough to eat

Fab pictures crucru

Globe thistle and alliums

One of the plants we grow for bees are runner beans. You can bung a few seeds in anywhere near a support including fences, trees and shrubs, and your other climbing plants. The flowers are attractive and the leaves are also edible.

Teucrium

Also buddleia - you can get it in all sorts of colours. I have it in black knight, white and whatever the red one is called.

for OP i follow this poster on the gramm (not my shop) and am tempted to buy some. being rather short of funds not helpful

You are all so knowledgeable ladies, thank you for continuing to contribute. I’m going to make a proper list tomorrow of a few bits to do and get to prep my garden.

Are there any common plants/ shrubs that aren’t actually great for the eco-system? Seems a silly question but anything that would deter bees/butterflies and their chums?