Devon SSSI nature reserve and eco lodges - Maggie's Blog
7 February
Save our bees campaign
It's a week to bee-friendly, and plant flowers to help Britain's struggling bee population. The Save Our Bees Campaign is part of the National Science and Engineering Week. You can download an information and activity pack once you register your support online.
The main idea is to plant bee friendly plants across the country in a bid to make bees healthier, help them survive infection, changing weather patterns and more.
Most people will have heard that bees are having a hard time - it's been on the news so often recently. Apparently, one in three honey bee colonies in the UK were lost last winter alone. Wet summers don't help. Changing temperature patterns don't either - the bees can come out to forage before the flowers are ready for them. And then there's infections. Varroa mites affect 95% of hives, and left untreated will often kill the hive within a few years. And there's general habitat loss - the Bumble Bee Conservation Trust says we've lost over 98% of our flower-rich habitats in the last 60 years.
I must get out and plant more flowers in the garden. Snow drops are said to be good early food sources. At least we have plenty of those. Also pulminaria (lungwort) which flowers early and spreads everywhere on its own.
We started keeping bees almost a year ago, and they have survived so far. But Ian, the man in white, admits this is probably as much luck as good husbandry. Every week he goes off to the Holsworthy beekeeping club (they have a teaching apiary)for his bee keeping course and comes back knowing something else we could have done with knowing earlier - like the shape of feeder you use is different in winter and summer because of how the bees keep warm. Complicated stuff.
The Save Our Bees site has some interesting statistics. One says there are 250 species of bees in this country, not just the commerically managed honey bee - so that leaves me asking whether these also suffer from varoa mite and are doomed?
And can a queen bee really lay her own weight in eggs in a day? At first reading it seems to defy belief. But Ian tells me a queen can carry enough fertilised eggs for a couple of years from her mating flight - so I guess that that statistic actually means she can bring her average body weight in eggs to the stage when they are ready to be laid in a day. Still sounds pretty incredible though....
It's not just honey bees that we have here. One of my upcoming tasks will be to try to find out what the solitary bees are that live in the cob wall of the old barn. When we arrived, someone suggested they were wasps and a canister of insecticide would be a good idea. But that's not really our line (and we've lived with wasps in the loft too - but that's another story). These bees have never stung any of us, and they live just by Ian's workshop.
Poking around, it looks like the online forum at the Bees Ants and Wasps recording society might be the place to start. I'll keep you posted...
Who's involved in the Save Our Bees Campaign?
The Save our Bees campaign is coordinated by the British Science Association, The Bumble Bee Conservation Trust, The British Bee Keepers' Association
Thanks to Joe's post for pointing me to this topic.