This page gives you some tips on the things you can do to help our bees, hover flies and other beneficial pollinators survive and some of them are really simple!

  1. Plant for our pollinators. Grow more nectar and pollen rich plants, flowers, shrubs and trees in your garden. Many garden centres label up their plants with pollinator friendly labels eg. the RHS Perfect for Pollinator labels. Plant these in your garden and you will soon attract these beneficial insects;
  2. Give our pollinators a home. Bee or insect hotels are popular nesting sites for solitary bees like mason and leaf cutter bees.  Place it on a wall or fence where it is unobstructed and gets the sun for most of the day. Visit our shop to see the bee hotels on offer;
  3. Grow some wildflowers or leave a small patch of land to grow wild. These undisturbed areas become good nesting sites for some pollinators;
  4. Grow some fruit. Fruit trees, fruit bushes and other fruit producing plants like raspberries and strawberries are a fantastic source of forage for the bees. Their flitting from one flower to the next will ensure the plants are pollinated and go on to provide an abundance of fruit for you! Everybody wins!
  5. Put the pesticides away and go organic! Pesticides can harm bees, skew their sense of direction and ability to forage. Other beneficial
    invertebrates and insects can also be harmed. This may mean a little extra work for you, but you will be doing the natural world a service and that can’t be bad!
  6. Do you have an area in your garden put over to chippings or bark? Dare we say it but “Dig it up!”. Put some pollinator friendly plants back in giving some much needed forage as well as getting some exercise (and if you’re lucky some sunshine too!). You’ll feel good knowing that you’re helping the bees;
  7. Leave your mower in the shed and let the grass grow a little longer. This allows clover and other plants like daisies and wild thyme that may be in your lawn to flower and provide a bit of extra vital forage for our pollinators;
  8. Make your garden as colourful and inviting as possible for the pollinators. Plant single flowered plants. Double flowered plants like the pom pom Dahlia restrict the bees’ access to the important plant of the flower – the nectaries. Some plants have been so over-engineered by selective breeding that they no longer have these nectaries or they do not produce enough nectar so the plants are ignored by the bees. You may also find that flowers that you’d have thought would be an absolute bee magnet, turn out to be the complete opposite. As humans, we only see colour in the visible light part of the spectrum whereas bees are thought to see a broader spectrum of light, specifically the UV part of the spectrum. This means that a red flower looks black to a bee and therefore less inviting. White, pink, purple and blue flowers are visited more often than orange and red coloured flowers.
  9. Autumn and Spring are the most important times of the year when we should provide as much forage as possible. In Spring, the bees’ honey stores will be very low so they will be desperately searching for additional nectar. In Autumn, the honey bees need to ensure they have stocked up as much nectar as possible otherwise their colony will starve to death. With Autumn being considerably warmer these days and with little forage around at this time of year, the honey bees will eat up their stores quicker than normal so to help, consider planting autumn flowering plants like Asters which can go on to produce forage until November.
  10. If we have a mild winter (which is not unheard of these days), you will likely see queen Bumble bees emerge early from their hibernation and in  desperate search of forage.  Winter honeysuckle, winter flowering clematis eg. Wisley Cream or Winter Beauty as well as snowdrops and crocuses can be a welcome sight to them. The perennial Wallflower ‘Bowles mauve’ has also been known to flower through the winter.
  11. And finally, if you discover a Bumble bee clinging onto a flower for dear life then why not give her a helping hand as it is most likely she has run out of energy. Bring her inside (put her in a clear large lunch box on some kitchen towel), give her some food on a teaspoon (sugar solution of 3:1 – 3 sugar:1 water) and let her warm up. Once she starts to beat her wings you can put her outside remembering to remove the lid of course! If it is a wet or cold, overcast day, she may not fly off – so she may require an overnight stay. We’ve helped many Bumble bees this way – you can too.