Bee Blooms: The English Edition (Ep. 24)

Today, we’re diving into the world of bee-friendly flowers and planting a feast for bees, focusing specifically on the bees and flowers of England. Every bee species has its own unique characteristics and behaviors, making their diversity crucial for the environment and ecosystem. Different bee species emerge from hibernation at different times of the year, which means we need to be conscious of what is blooming when in our gardens. We also talk about bee tongues and why some bees are only able to pollinate certain types of flowers.

Native plants should be the focus in your garden but incorporating non-native plants can extend the flowering season. Always be sure to choose non-native plants with accessible pollen and nectar for bees and make sure they offer nutritional value.

Our guest today is Dr. Lucy Witter who has a PhD in plant pollinator interactions, focusing on bumblebees, hoverflies, and solitary bees. She works as a Nature Based Farm Advisor for Cheshire Wildlife Trust. Follow her on X. Learn more about the Wildlife Trusts and get an excellent garden planning resource on their website.

Good to know

Lucy mentioned the importance of ivy as a food resource for bees later in the season. This hardy climber and crawler can be seen as nuisance, but if you can tame it, it’s a food winner. The flowers are produced from late summer until late autumn and are very rich in nectar, so an important late autumn food source for bees and other insects. The fruit, which ripens in late winter, are an important food source for many birds. 

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Bees Knees. I’m your host, Jacy Meyer. The Bees Knees is a podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity.

Thanks for being here. Words like bee friendly gardening and enhancing biodiversity evoke the idea of creating a safe and welcoming environment for bees and other pollinators. As regular listeners know, we talk a lot about a lack of food sources being a huge stressor for native bees. So in our Bee Inspired Season 2, we’re dedicating episodes specifically to bee friendly flowers and planting a feast for bees.

There are many, many ecosystems on this fine planet of ours, each with its own [00:01:00] unique bees and flowers. We won’t be able to discuss the best flowers for all 16, 000 known species of bees, so we’re looking at this geographically. Today, we’re focusing on England and in future episodes, we’ll be looking at the United States and Australia.

Even within these countries, there are many different environments, but I hope wherever you live, you’ll be able to use some of the advice and best practices shared. So let’s go to England. Welcome and thanks for being with us, Lucy. Can you introduce yourself, please? So, I’m Lucy Witter. I’m a nature based farm advisor from Cheshire Wildlife Trust, which is part of the Royal Society of Wildlife Trusts.

So, we’re one of 47 wildlife trusts which cover all of the UK. I’d like to start on the importance of bee diversity. Why should we consider the number of different types of bees and not only the number of bees as a whole? [00:02:00] So I think quite often when people think about bees, the first thing that comes to mind is the honeybee.

And obviously that’s our, our domesticated species in the UK. But actually we have this incredible diversity in the UK of over two hundred and sixty different species.

I mean, why is that important? Sometimes I sort of think, you know, that just the fact they are amazing and incredible is, you know, answer enough in itself, but also from an environmental and ecosystem perspective, each of the different species are coming out of hibernation at different times of year. So we’ve got early solitary bee species, so the Andrina group, so their ground nesting.
Species which come out early in the season. So they’re going to pollinate some of our early flowering trees, um, in the hedgerows and also our fruit trees. So incredible pollinators. And then later in the season, we’ve got our leaf cutter bees, and then also our bumblebees, which are kind of coming across the area.

So [00:03:00] having that diversity and also. Sort of throughout the entire season, it’s so vital in terms of pollinating our wider flowers in the ecosystem and also providing food and resources for birds kind of higher up the food chain as well. So, and then of course different species have got different tongue length and so they’re going to pollinate different types of flowers.

As well, so having that diversity is really beneficial in terms of the sort of stability and helping our ecosystem and, you know, it’s quite sad at the moment because we have seen a decline in our bee species, you know, over the years, we’ve lost 97 percent of wildflower meadows, which are such a valuable, important resource for our pollinators.

Can we talk a bit about native flowers and why they are important to bees, but also any role non native plants should play in our gardens? So in terms of our native and native flowers, I think also when we’re thinking about native flowers, as well as thinking about the sort of flower element of the garden, also thinking about our trees [00:04:00] and shrubs, so our trees and our shrubs, particularly our native species, so things like hawthorn, our dandelions, which in the UK many people think of them as weeds, but actually they’re this incredible resource early in the season, so many of our sort of horticultural non native plants Aren’t in flower at those early times of year.
And that period of time is really important, particularly when, uh, for example, our bumblebees are first emerging out of hibernation, that queen bumblebee needs to find those resources straight away in order to build up their reserves to be able to then provide a nest throughout the whole season. So. If they don’t have those initial resources, you know, those nests aren’t going to survive.
So, having those early native resources are really, really important. Um, so both are in terms of, yeah, dandelions, things like ground ivy as well, which is, I think oftentimes as well, people see native plants sometimes as weeds in the garden. Actually, you know, they’re just plants in the wrong place for me.

if you’re [00:05:00] thinking of them as a weed, and they’re really important. And then there’s also been some research, it was a study by Hicks, which is called, um, Food for Pollinators. So they looked at the pollen and nectar content in both native and non native plants and actually found that native plants provided the top 10 highest pollen and nectar sources.

For the pollinators compared to non native species. So showing that actually those native species may potentially be providing higher quality of food resources for our pollinators. The other thing to say though, in terms of your non native species, there is. kind of thinking about extending the flowering season.

So quite often the native plants will kind of come up to the end of September time and some of those non native horticultural plants will extend the length of the flowering season. So by having that kind of combination of both in the garden to have that continued availability of resources throughout the season [00:06:00] is really important as well.

So I think definitely natives are really important and having some horticultural plants in, but the other thing as well to say in terms of the non native plants, it’s also the really horticultural variety. So if you think about something like a rose, the bees can’t actually get in to get to the pollen and actually access the pollen.

So when you’re thinking about plants for the garden, having those ones that can be accessed so that the bees can actually get into them to access the pollen and nectar. And then some of those more horticultural plants, so things like pansies, for example, don’t really have very much pollen or nectar content at all, so they’re really low value in terms of those.

So looking for those plants which are providing that higher content of pollen and nectar, and again, throughout the season. But I think looking at trees and shrubs as well, which provide a really high amount of pollen and nectar just for a small area, and because it’s all kind of [00:07:00] concentrated in one place.

Thank you for touching on the part about the nutritional value and how to make sure we’re kind of catering healthy food to a variety of species. You mentioned a little bit about roses and pansies. Are there other, you know, different types of flowers in terms of size and shape that we should be conscious about including?

Yeah, so I think that’s actually a really interesting, really good point in terms of looking at the size and shapes of flowers. So as we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, we’ve got that diversity of different bee species. So we’ve got solitary bees, which have got really short tongues. So they’re, um, stronger preferences for smaller kind of open, flatter species such as corn marigolds and those ones that I’ve got.

a lot flatter so they can access the pollen. Whereas in the UK, we’ve got the garden bumblebee species, which has got a really long tongue. In fact, it’s so long that most of the time it flies around with its tongue sticking out because it doesn’t want to roll it back in [00:08:00] again. For the garden bumblebee, they prefer the longer tongue, sorry, long corolla flowers.

So for example, the echiums, foxgloves. So I think going back to as well as having that continued availability of resources throughout the season, it’s also about having that variety and diversity of plant species in the garden to be able to cater for the diversity of different species that we’ve got.
And it’s also, I think, interesting in terms of thinking about where you want to put the plants in the garden. So, with our solitary bee species, they can’t really travel very far from their nest, so looking at having them Close to your bee hotel, so they don’t have to travel too far to go to get them and having them in sort of sunny spots because obviously some of our solitary bee species, they prefer nice, warm, hot, sunny weather in terms of when they’re most active.

You mentioned some varieties that are good to have around because they bloom early in the season, along with the trees and shrubs. [00:09:00] Can you mention maybe a couple of species, floral species, that bloom later in the season? Maybe into October, November, that’s still blooming season. I’d say one of the best and most important later flowering species is ivy.

So it’s not always sort of thought of as like a pollinator plant, but actually ivy is really important later in the season, it flowers. sort of September into October time and provides a really high pollen and nectar content for our bees. We also have a specialist, uh, solitary bee species called the Ivy bee, which obviously with the name linking to it actually is largely just uses that mostly for its content.
And there are some rarer bee species it’s worth mentioning that are quite specialist in terms of which plants that they will use. So again, having that diversity means that you’re going to attract, you know, it’s less likely, you know, always to see rare species in gardens. They tend to go [00:10:00] more for the wilder native habitats, but it’s definitely important to have that diversity.
And then I suppose other linking into the later flowering species, things like white dead nettle is another one which flowers both early in the season and then it comes back again later on. Any other tips you’d like to share about planting a bee friendly garden? I think that I sort of touched on it before, but as well as having that diversity of flora resources, the other thing to think about particularly for our bee species is that as well as having something to eat in terms of flowers, they also need places for nesting and hibernation as well.

So thinking about in terms of having those sort of big Those compost piles, so the common carder bee, Bombus paschorum, they tend to go in sort of underneath compost piles and they’ll sort of carve a little nest for themselves. Other species will nest underground, so our ground nesting bees. You can have your bee hotels where you have the ones that you can purchase, or you can also [00:11:00] just drill a variety of different sized holes into a sort of standing up post and having that diversity of different sized holes from two millimetres up to about nine millimetres means that you get a diversity of different bees nesting in there and then again having that in close proximity to the flowers as well so that you’ve got those resources.

Why do you do what you do? Why bees? Bees is something that I’m really, really passionate about. So my wider role is working with farmers to help them to integrate nature into their farming system. And bees is my complete, absolute passion and sort of hobby. And I think that you meet one and you think like, oh, there’s a bumblebee.

And then you sort of have a little look into that and then you’re like, oh, my goodness, there’s actually even more different species, and the more you know, the more you want to know, and I feel like it’s just one of those things where you can never sort of know everything about them, and they’re just incredible, and sort of, I think mammals often get a huge big.

sort of focus and I think our bees are just [00:12:00] so incredibly important and it’s just such a privilege and a pleasure to be able to try and help to, you know, make sure that we continue to support them and that we make sure we’re mitigating their decline because it’s, they’re so valuable to us and also just incredibly charismatic and amazing really.

Are you ready to start garden planning? Lucy shared some important things to remember. Consider early and late blooming flowers, and don’t forget to leave space in your gardens for bees to nest. Also, don’t overlook things like trees, shrubs, and the misunderstood ivy. Plants don’t need to be bright and blooming to be a healthy choice for bees.

You my friend, however, are bright and blooming, and I thank you for listening today. Please help support the show by telling a friend and leaving a recommendation on your favorite podcast app. Visit the Bees Knees website for a fantastic guide on the best flowers for pollinators and when to plant them in the UK.

And until next time, remember, trees and bees.[00:13:00]