Exploring the garden today I found lots of bees on the Geranium – Early bumblebee, Honeybee and Brown carder bee (I think! I’m not brilliant at identifying bees!!).  The Geranium is always a favorite plant for them and there is always lots of activity around it. 

Each year Friends of the Earth run the Great British Bee Count (May 17th – June 30th 2018).  You can download the app for both android and apple which makes it all super quick and easy.  Its very simple; spot a bee, take a photo if possible, identify it, note the weather conditions and habitat, enter your location and send off the data 🙂 At the time of writing this 197,292 bees had been logged so far this year, with 21 days to go. 

As we all know our pollinators are having a very tough time with loss of habitat, intensive farming and changes in our climate.  The more we know about all of our pollinators, the more we can help them.  By adding sightings to the bee count more data is added to the Pollinator Monitoring Scheme, which is basically a health check of our bees and other pollinators.  35 of the UK bees species is under threat of extinction so knowing the abundance of them and their location, is all valuable information. 

We can all do a little to help all of our insects whether it is taking in part in the Bee Count or other record schemes, converting part of the garden to a mini wildflower meadow or just leaving the dandelions to grow in the lawn, every little thing helps.  Have you seen any bees today?