Bees please !
About me
As a university student studying wildlife conservation, and having been agricultural college, I know the importance of gardening with pollinators in mind. I have seen the first-hand damage that agriculture and horticulture can have on wildlife populations when people don’t work with wildlife.
Pollinators and food production
Bees and other pollinators in our ecosystem have a vital role in our food chain. Much of our food and most fruit and vegetables need to be pollinated. There’s more media awareness now of the importance of gardening with bees and other invertebrates in mind. This can be done by planting flowers for pollinators, creating habitat and using less chemicals in the garden. There’s also a growing movement in making allotments more wildlife-friendly too.
The benefits
The benefits of managing your allotment or veg beds at home with wildlife in mind are many! By increasing the habitat for invertebrates and amphibians the rate of pollination increases and therefore so does your produce yield. And it is not just bees that provide pollination, frogs, bats, moths, butterflies, ants and beetles all pollinate flowers too.
Survey of pollinators on our plot
I have an allotment with my mum in East Hagbourne and we decided to carry out a pollinator survey on the 2nd of August 2020 to see how many pollinators visited our plot. We chose to carry out our survey at 10 am as the morning is the most active period of the day for most pollinator species. It was also important that we chose a warm, dry day as pollinators are less active in the cold or wet. We spent an hour noting and identifying any pollinator species found on plants within our plot and we took photos of any we couldn’t identify to research afterwards.
Our results
We found nearly 30 different species of pollinator on our plot which is great! Some were much more common than others – eg we saw many buff-tailed bumblebees but only one lesser stag beetle.
Here’s the list below of which pollinator species we found:
Bees -
Honey bee
White tailed bumblebee
Buff tailed bumblebee
Red tailed bumblebee
Common carder bee
Leafcutter bee
Bombus hortorum (garden bumblebee)
Ashy mining bee
Tawny mining bee
Butterflies -
Meadow brown
Common blue
Gatekeeper
Large white
Small white
Green veined white
Flies -
Common house
Blue bottle
Autumn
Wasps -
Common
German
Yellow ichneumon
Ladybirds -
7-spot
Harlequin
Beetle -
Lesser Stag
Pollen
Ground
Rosemary
Frogs -
Common
Our harvest this year
This year has seen our largest ever crop of French and runner beans with many days producing around a 1kg of beans from only 8 plants. We have also had our best year for raspberries and strawberries and this is largely due to the abundance of pollinators on our plot.
Encouraging wildlife on your plot
Our allotment has wide plant biodiversity. With 3 species of fruit, 15 species of vegetables, 9 species of herbs, a large dogwood hedge, lots of uncut long grass, two small ponds and over 40 species of wild and cultivated flowers, the space provides food, water, habitat and protection for a wide range of invertebrate, amphibian and bird species. The most populated plant species during the pollinator count were lavender, teasel, borage, runner bean flowers, valerian, verbena and sunflowers.
More resources
If you are looking for additional information on the topic of green gardening then I would recommend reading “The Garden Jungle: Or Gardening to Save the Planet” by Dave Goulson who is a professor at the University of Sussex and one of the UK’s leading bee experts.
There is also a fascinating programme on All 4 at the moment called “Jimmy's Big Bee Rescue '' which documents farmer and TV personality Jimmy Doherty’s journey to transform the City of Peterborough into a more bee-friendly city. It’s available to watch online til the end of September ( Jimmy's Big Bee Rescue )