Helping bees

Plant your garden with bee friendly plants

In areas of the country where there are few agricultural crops, honeybees rely upon garden flowers to ensure they have a diverse diet and to provide nectar and pollen. Encourage honeybees to visit your garden by planting single flowering plants and vegetables. Go for all the allium family, all the mints, all beans except French beans and flowering herbs. Bees like daisy-shaped flowers – asters and sunflowers, also tall plants like hollyhocks, larkspur and foxgloves. Bees need a lot of pollen and trees are a good source of food. Willows and lime trees are exceptionally good. See our section Gardening for bees for full lists.

Buy local honey

Local honey will be prepared by local beekeepers. This keeps food miles down and helps the beekeeper to cover the costs of beekeeping. Local honey complies with all food standards requirements but is not mistreated to give it a long shelf life. It tastes quite different to foreign supermarket honey and has a flavour that reflects local flora.

Find space for a beehive in your garden

Many would-be beekeepers, especially in urban areas, find it difficult to find a safe space for their colony of bees.
If you have some space contact your local beekeeping association and they could find a beekeeper in need of a site. It is amazing what a difference a beehive will make to your garden. Crops of peas and beans will be better, fruit trees will crop well with fruit that is not deformed and your garden will be buzzing!

Become a beekeeper

Beekeeping is an enjoyable, fascinating and interesting hobby – and you get to eat your own honey too.
Every year local beekeeping associations run courses to help new people to take up beekeeping and even help them find the equipment they need and a colony of bees. Training programmes continue to allow enthusiasts to become Master Beekeepers. For information on courses visit the British Beekeepers’ Association website: BBKA

Take care when disposing of jars of foreign honey

Believe it or not but honey brought in from overseas contains bacteria and spores that are very harmful to honeybees. If you leave a honey jar outside it encourages honeybees to feed on the remaining honey.
There is a good possibility that this will infect the bee and in turn the bee will infect the rest of the colony resulting in death of the colony. Always wash out honey jars and dispose of them carefully.

Encourage local authorities to use bee friendly plants in public spaces

Some of the country’s best gardens and open spaces are managed by local authorities. Recently these authorities have recognised the value of planning gardens, roundabouts and other areas with flowers that attract bees. Encourage your authority to improve the area you live in by adventurous planting schemes. These can often be maintained by local residents if the authority feels they do not have sufficient resources.

Ask your MP to improve research into honey bee health

Beekeepers are very worried that we do not have enough information to combat the diseases that affect honeybees.
Pollination by honeybees contributes £165m annually to the agricultural economy. Yet the government only spends £200,000 annually on honeybee research. Write to MPs in support of the bee health research funding campaign.

Help to protect swarms

Swarming is a natural process when colonies of honeybees can increase their numbers. If you see a swarm contact a local beekeeping association. If you can’t find one, contact the local authority or the police who will contact a local beekeeper who will collect the swarm and take it away. Honeybees in a swarm are usually very gentle and present very little danger. They can be made aggressive if disturbed so it’s best to just leave them alone.

Avoid conflict with bees

When kept properly, bees are good neighbours, and only sting when provoked. Beekeepers wear protective clothing when they are handling bees. If a bee hovers inquiringly in front of you when unprotected, do not flap your hands. Stay calm and move slowly away, best into the shade of shed or a tree. The bee will soon lose interest. It is worth remembering that bees do not like the smell of alcohol on people, the “animal” smell of leather clothing, even watchstraps. Bees regard dark clothing as a threat – it could be a bear! Bees are sometimes confused by scented soaps, shampoos and perfumes, so they are best avoided near a hive.

Learn more about bees

Beekeeping is fascinating. Honeybees have been on this earth for about 25 million years and are ideally adapted to their natural environment. Without honeybees the environment would be dramatically diminished. Invite a beekeeper to come and talk to any local group you support and give an illustrated talk about the honeybee and the products of the hive. They might bring a few jars of honey too. Honeybees are a part of our folklore and are one of only two insect species that are managed to provide us with essential services.

Gardening for bees

The best thing you can do to help honey bees is to plant flowers, crops, shrubs and trees from which they can collect nectar or pollen.

What bees like

• Plants with lots of small flowers like lavender
• Open, single flowers such as asters or daisies
• Bell shaped flowers such as foxgloves
• Herbs
• Lots of variety
• Plants native to Britain
• Wildflowers and ‘weeds’ like dandelions
• Fruit trees

What bees don’t like

• Exotic or highly cultivated flowers that are not indigenous to the UK
• Double or elaborate flowers as they often contain little or no nectar
• And most annual bedding plants for the same reason

Trees, shrubs and flowers that bees that are good for bees

The BBKA have produced a list of nectar and pollen-rich plants, shrubs and trees that honey bees will visit.
You can download it here:  BBKA plants for your garden

Here is a list of flowers that honey bees like:  Flowers for bees

If you are looking for plants that are useful to bumblebees, look at the BBCT web site.

For general information on how to encourage wildlife in your garden, the Wildlife Gardener web site is worth a visit.

Farming and bees

How things have been going wrong

In the last 20 years, there has been a 50% decline in bee numbers in the UK, with other pollinators also affected. According to the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology, losing our pollinators would cost UK agriculture up to £440m/year: equivalent to 13% of farming income. The retail value of what bees pollinate is thought to be worth £1bn alone.

So what’s happening to our bees? It seems a variety of factors, but particularly pesticides, reduced biodiversity, habitat loss, and of course the varroa mite are causing the decline. Intensive agriculture reduces wildflower populations and diversity, and if large areas of the countryside are dominated by one crop, once that crop stops blossoming there’s nothing else for the pollinators to feed on.

And climate change could exacerbate the problem. UK farmers are being encouraged to diversify to other fruit crops in the face of environmental change, but pollinator decline could threaten this. Although pollinators with a broad climatic distribution may adapt, others could decline further or disappear altogether. The main threat is if food plants and pollinators respond differently: the flowering dates of blackcurrant and the emergence dates of its pollinators have already been found to have diverged by 28 days since the 1970s.

What farmers can do to help bees

Defra and funding partners, including the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the Wellcome Trust, have invested up to £10 million to identify the main threats to bees and other pollinators. This funding will underpin the 10-year ‘Healthy Bees Plan‘ that was announced in February 2009.

Measures to buffer diminishing biodiversity such as planting legumes and wildflower margins as part of the Campaign for Farmed Environment represent a way for farmers to safeguard these biological assets. Defra-backed research shows that these actions have already contributed to increasing the numbers and ranges of some of the UK’s rarest bumblebee species.

Entry Level Stewardship schemes offer farmers cash payments for managing land in ways that are beneficial to the environment. The schemes cover all farming types and include things such as hedgerow management, stone wall maintenance, low input grassland, buffer strips, maintenance of traditional farm buildings and arable options. Agreements that include provision for measures such as sowing nectar flower mixes (ELS options EL4 or EG3) and unharvested headlands (EF10) areas could help. For full details see the ELS web site.

Including clover within grass swards will reduce the need for increasingly expensive nitrogen fertilisers, and will certainly support bees. Red clover is used extensively in rotational farming systems that maintain soil fertility without the use of chemical fertilisers, and is one of the bumble bee’s favourite foods. Its traditional name ‘Bee Bread’ says it all. White clover is also found in abundance on organic farms. Honeybees are particularly drawn to this plant, which is better suited to their shorter tongues.