Part VII: Bee There for Bees on World Bee Day
Bees are so important to life on Earth that the United Nations has dedicated a special day to them: World Bee Day is on 20 May. Its aim is to raise people’s awareness of bees and other pollinators and the threats they face, such as intensive farming and the use of pesticides.
Why Are Bees So Important?
Bees are gorgeous, striped, fuzzy insects. They may look comical, but they’re essential to life on our planet. Why? Because lots of plants – flowering plants and crops that we eat – rely on insects like bees to reproduce. Bees pollinate plants. This means that they carry pollen from one flower to another. Flowers attract bees to them by having bright, colourful petals and by smelling sweet. Some flowers even have nectar for bees to drink as a reward for visiting them!
If we had no bees, we’d have very little food, as lots of our fruit and vegetables come from plants that are pollinated by bees. Did you know that nearly 90% of the world’s wild flowering plant species depend on animal pollination, and so do more than 75% of the world’s food crops?
Many bees like to live in wildflower meadows, where they have a wide choice of plants to feed from. Unfortunately, in the UK we are losing these meadows fast – 97% of these meadows have disappeared since the 1930s. But we can all help bees by making a bee-friendly space in our gardens or even in our window boxes.
Bee Helpful
If you’d like to help our fuzzy friends, why not do something from the list below?
- Plant native, bee-friendly plants in your garden. It’s best if these flower at different times of the year so bees and other insects always have something to eat. There’s a great list of bee-friendly plants here, ranging from herbs that can fit in a window box (marjoram, chives, rosemary) to scented plants (lavender, honeysuckle), trees (pussy willow, crab apple) and wildflowers (cowslips, yarrow, speedwell).
- Don’t use pesticides, fungicides or herbicides in your garden.
- Make a bee bath/bee water fountain: this could be a shallow dish filled with fresh water. Remember to add some stones for bees to land on so they can drink safely.
- Don’t mow your grass too often, since ‘dandelions are the first source of food for early pollinators coming out of hibernation, which includes solitary bees, honey bees and hoverflies. Each dandelion head contains up to 100 individual flowers that contain nectar and pollen’. Enough to feed plenty of bees! And if you need an excuse to let that lawn grow, research has shown that mowing a lawn once every two weeks instead of every week increases the number of bees by 30 per cent.
- Make a bee hotel – you can do this in even the smallest garden, and it needn’t cost anything.
Other ways to bee engaged, even if you don’t have a garden
- If you’re into insects, why not take a look at our Insect Inspectors blog post?
- Find out more about bees and flowers, and do a quiz on why bees are attracted to flowers!
- Want to find out amazing facts about bees? Watch this video!
- Spend some time in your garden looking for bees. See how many kinds you can spot! In the UK there are 270 kinds of bee to look out for (un-bee-lievable!), including mason bees (these nest in holes in brick walls), mining bees (they make burrows in the ground), and bumblebees (big yellow fluffy bees). Happy bee hunting!