Flowers for pollinators.

Hi Jane

Bees (both honey and bumble) like tubular flowers as they are the ones that have the nectar in. Sometimes they are big tubes like a foxglove. Sometimes tiny ones like a toadflax. The ones with really long tubes like nasturtium are designed for butterflies and moths (by evolution) but bumblebees sometimes bite their way into the outside of the tube and rob the nectar.
You can see this on aqueligia (can't spell it - you know the one)
They also collect pollen from the middles of single non tubular flowers.
I grow big opium poppies and you can see the bumble bees there, early, as soon as they open, filling up their pollen baskets with sooty black pollen.
A bumble queen in my garden today, checking out what there was to eat. The dwarf comfrey that they love at this time of year (cream flower) was thinking of blooming at the start of Jan and is now completely frostbitten and discouraged.

Viburnam bodnantense and lonicera fragrantissma both flower in Dec/Jan/Feb and are good for providing something for the bumble bees on a sunny winter day. And if you bring a bit of either into the house they smell fantastic when they warm up - much better than an air freshener!

I love trying to make sure that my garden has something for the bees in every month of the year, just in case the sun encourages them out.

Thank you to everyone on this forum. Being very ill for the past 6 months and in bed for most of this, I was bored out of my brain with day time TV etc so I decided to remodel my garden (on paper) I have an L shaped garden and I have managed to design a garden that hopefully will encourage a wide selection of wild life (I have foxes, hedgehogs and the occasional badger so far) but I was concerned about Bees and insects. Being allergic doesn't always make this easy but I persevere. On my patio my father and I always planted Nasturtiums (his favourite) and we used to sit for hours watching the bees hover around them. You have all given me lots of ideas for improvement. I am lucky to live with a loch at the bottom of my property and this encourages frogs, toads and various other visitors to my garden. Last year I had a family of swans visit for a few days with their young. They had gone off site to have their young and then had to walk them back to the main loch via my garden. After a days rest and feeding (it was very hot on the days they chose to return to the loch) the whole family walked down to the loch with me, sat on the shore before swimming back to the island in the middle of the loch where they were met by the rest of the lochs resident swans. Thanks again everyone

Glad to have been of some help.
Redesigning your garden is brilliant.
I work with my OH doing gardens for people who can no longer manage them.
Its wonderful, and highly recommend communing with nature, great therapy.
Jane

There was an interesting series on BBC2 recently with Sarah Raven trying to get people to plant wild flower areas to attract pollinating insects, and I've noticed that there are a lot of wildflower mixes in garden centres now. I only have a small garden but am thinking I might give over part of my fairly redundant lawn to trying this. Only problem is, I think it might take a while to establish. I have to work on DH though; he likes ORDER! Being an ex military man, if you leave him to plant anything, it ends up in neat straight ranks instead of the random drifts which I like. He might not take kindly to areas of bare ground sown with things that might not come up! I do grow things like bergamot, cornflowers and cranesbill geraniums, which bees seem to like, and poached egg plants, which can be a bit thuggy but insects love them.

The bees here (in Devon) seem to absolutely love the flowers on borage, and it has the added advantage that if the sun shines you can always put a few into a jug of Pimms!

Oh your poor DH I bet he loves a stripy lawn arty.
I would not get a wild flower mix. I would choose according to size of garden.
so what wild flowers have i got in my garden?

Borage yes - if you can stand it's generally scruffy appearance. reseeds.
Field poppies - just scatter on broken ground
Welsh poppies - will re-seed for ever.
sweet violet - coming out now, smell lovely, clumpy
dog violet - later, not scented, rather invasive but cute
toadflaxes - tall purple kind (scruffy) or small yellow
campion family - all kinds , pink, white, big , small
there is an annoying thing called i think anchusa - a giant forgetmenot. cant get rid. dog daisies also reseed for ever and try to take over.
but small forgetmenots good and reseed.
there is a kind of pink deadnettle out the front. it planted itself.
nigella and cornflower also good annuals, with nigella being the more reliable.

BUT don't get seduced into thinking you can have a wild flower meadow. They have to be left unmown until the plants have seeded. They really like very impoverished soil.

bees like lavender. tiny tubes. Hidcote is a great dwarf one.

Talking of neat lawns, I did know someone whose husband wouldn't let her grow roses because they would shed their petals on his precious billiard table lawn. I think that would be my definition of anal.

I am trying to turn my bottom lawn into a wildflower patch. It only gets mowed in the autumn and hasn't been fertilised for years! Well see how it goes?

oh maybe then. The grass clippings have to be removed.
if you can get a flower called Yellow Rattle growing there is will speed things up as it is very good at stripping nutrients apparently. One of those weeds that farmers seek to destroy.

Doing all that

Jane I do take a great interest in the bees.I've put a photo on my profile taken in my garden.Can't remember name of this flower.The bees seem to like these flat single flowers e.g Ruddbeckia gp.
just now the bees are visiting the heather clumps.
We have beekeepers in our village food gp so I get really local honey

If they like impoverished soil JessM then I'm halfway there - the soil in the garden we have just inherited is horrible. There's a lot of clay by the look of it, and not much depth under the grass. We had to go round the lawn with a fork just to find a place where we could sink a metal pole for the bird feeders! I would give my eye teeth to have my old garden back. Thirty years of hard work and I got the impression that the people we sold the house to aren't very interested in growing things.

We have poor soil but the tiny flowered cotoneasters grow well here and bees absolutely adore them! Ours are generally heaving with bumble bees and honey bees when they are in flower.

herbs like thyme sage rosemary also popular with bees.

You are so right JessM.last year my DD sent me a pair of
Rosemary Trees fom M&S.-a change from usual flowers.
They are now flowering again,When I cut off a few stalks today the bees were paying them lots of attention!!

flowering! still getting frosts here. Frogs are still lying low. I did see a honey bee this morning on the pulmonaria.

which is another tubular flower

The squirrels have been digging holes again.

Bees out already!? Rosemary flowering already!?

I have just come in from the garden having made my first sowing of annuals [ mixed flowers and cornflowers ] to attract bees and butterflies. I also saw my first bumble bee! Last year I made a bees' nest out of large bamboos. Within a day of it being placed on a south-facing wall it was colonised! I have bought for this year a factory-made nest so the bees will have choices-mine or the one from Homebase. [ flowers]

But you've had frogspawn haven't you bagitha and we have none I think the frogs no winter ain't quite over.
How did you cut up the bamboo towerhouse? These are for mason bees aren't they?

JessM. I chose the thickest available bamboos and cut them into 9" strips with a very sharp saw. If a blunt saw is used the bamboos tend to split. I then bundled 12 strips together and secured them with flexible wire. The strips can become loose so I used glue to keep them in place. The finished product is a bit Heath Robinson but it worked. Yes, Mason bees colonised the nest as I had placed it on a wall that had been used for several years by Mason bees who, up to then, were content with nesting in holes left from various abandoned Rawplugs. Mason bees don't make holes any bigger so they don't upset the structure of the wall.

Ah, thank you.