Creating a buzz in your community

Planting the right variety of plants and places to nest can help bees to thrive all year round...

Bees are crucial pollinators in the UK, helping to provide many of the fruits and vegetables we eat and pollinating many of the wildflowers and garden plants we love. As summer draws to a close and autumn creeps in, most of the bee species in the UK will have now completed their life cycles: emerging from hibernation, searching for the perfect nest, egg laying, raising their young (in the case of social bees) and finally mating.

For bees and other pollinating insects, it’s essential to have pollinator pit-stops – plants to feed on so that they can keep going and carry out their life cycle. Bees need to feed on thousands of plants each day and many species cannot go longer than 40 minutes without feeding on nectar.

Photo of yellow, white and pink crocuses on the ground with a leafless tree framing a view of Worcester Cathedral in the distance - it's a sunny spring day

So, no matter how small or large a space you have available to you, whether that’s a window box, a field or a woodland patch managed by a community, there are positive things you can do to help pollinators. If it’s a wild space that’s either a park or field you’ll need permission from the landowner and should only plant native / non-invasive species that won’t run wild across the countryside.

A key element to consider is the full planting season, otherwise known as blossom sequencing. Pollinators are usually buzzing around from early February (if it’s relatively warm and dry) through to September and the key time they feed is in spring, which is when queen bumblebees emerge hungry for nectar whilst they look for a suitable nesting sight. Therefore, planting early flowering species like crocuses, primroses, snowdrops, bluebells, lungworts, native daffodils, cherry plums, blackthorns, cherries and willows will give an early burst of nectar to pollinators at a very important time in their life and when the weather is unpredictable.

If you look after a community garden or similar closed greenspace, other key plants that help pollinators are lavender and herbs such as mint, oregano and chives. These provide excellent summer flowers for bumblebees and solitary bees.

A white butterfly (creamy hind underwing) perched on a lavender flower

Something else to consider is how to provide a variety of different plants that not only flower at different times of the year but also have different shapes and colours of flowers. The more variety of plants you have, the wider variety of pollinators you will attract. For example, bumblebees tend to like purple and blue flowers, smaller solitary bees and hoverflies prefer yellow and white, butterflies are drawn to any bright colours and moths that fly at night prefer white or pale flowers that show up best in the dark. Pollinators also have different lengths and shapes of tongue and this can affect which flowers they can feed from, so variety is key to ensure they can all access nectar that keeps them buzzing.

Now you have maximised your planting space and have lots of insects buzzing year-round, it’s worth having a think about nesting opportunities. One of the easiest and most effective ways of helping bees overwinter is to provide bee home. These can be made in a number of different ways but the easiest is to drill holes into blocks of wood that are ideally greater than five inches thick so that solitary bees can lay multiple eggs into one hole. If drilling into wood, holes between 2-10 mm diameter will ensure you get a good variety of bees, including the commonly seen red-mason bee. Bee homes like this should be situated about 4-6ft off the floor in a south or southeast-facing position, with no obstruction to the front of the bee home.

If you manage a larger area of land as part of a community then a bee bank is an ideal structure to attract a wider variety of bees that nest in soil, such as ashy mining bees. There are some good guides on how to create bee banks online but essentially all you need is some rubble (or type one aggregate), some soil to cover the mound of rubble, a spade to help shape the bank and a wheelbarrow to transport both the rubble and soil to the desired location, which should be a sunny, south-facing area.

From our experience, if you create habitats for bees they will always show up and make use of the space. They don’t need to be perfect, either. It might take a season, and other invertebrates such as spiders and beetles might also make use of the new habitat too, but your efforts will always be appreciated by our buzzing friends.