30 Days Wild 2019 – Day 09

I didn’t have any plans for today’s ‘wild’ activity, it was meant to rain and that hampered my thoughts of what I could do.  I decided to play it safe and just spend some time in the garden.  I know at some point I want to take part in the spittlebug survey so I went to have a look at the lavender to see if there was any about, strangely I didn’t find any but did come across a rosemary beetle. 

There was a lot of buzzing coming from a neighbours garden so I popped round to see if I could find out where it was coming from.  They have a plant on the fence that adjoins our garden which was covered in bees.  There must have been approx. 30-40 bees on the bush at anyone time.  Unfortunately we have no idea what plant it is but it would be great for any garden that wants to attract bees!  

As far as I could tell there were four species of bee; Buff-tailed bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) which seemed to be the majority, honey bees which I saw two of, Early bumblebee (Bombus pratorum) and then Tree bumblebee (Bombus hypnorum).

Once I was back in my own garden I noticed I had a harlequin ladybird larvae on me, I knew there was blackfly and greenfly on the runner beans so I thought that would be a good place to relocate him.  I didn’t expect him to start eating them straight away.  I have never seen them feeding before 🙂

30 Days Wild 2018 – Day 09

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?