Building your own Haven

Making a Honeybee haven is a piece of cake. Honeybees don’t really need a lot, you just need ot think a little bit about what you are going to do. There are two things that Honeybees need:

• Flowers (for pollen and nectar)
• Water

Now that doesn’t seem so bad does it? The choice of plants is the crucial bit, you need to make sure their Honeybee friendly.

Hold it, what if you don’t have a garden – well you can still create a haven – we’ll come back to that shortly. A quick bit of biology here – different types of Bees have different lengths of tongue. As it is their tongue that enables them to collect nectar this means that not all Bees can feed on all Bee-Friendly plants. A good example of this is the Red Clover. The nectar is way down deep in the plant, making it out of reach for Honeybees, but not for Bumblebees. So to get started there are several flowers that are good for Honeybees:

• Borage (starflower)
• Jacobs Ladder
• Michaelmas Daisy
• Bugle
• Thyme
• Sage

I would suggest you start of by putting them in container. Make it a fairly large container so you can get all your plants in, and then leave a bit of space for a small water pond (by small I mean saucer sized). For a water pond I use a pot stand (one of the plastic ones you can get form a DIY or Garden store for not a lot), put some small stones in it (Honeybees can’t swim and will drown if they have nothing to stand on) and then just fill up with water to the top of the stones (so the Bees can stand on the stones and drink the water). Now what if you haven’t got a garden. Let me introduce the concept of seed bombing. Quite simply take the seeds of your choice of plants, and mix it with an equal amount of fertiliser. Mix this with some red clay (or untreated cat litter if you would prefer). Add a little water so you can form a nice ball, or egg shape – or even a grenade! Leave them to dry. Now these can be thrown on to any land you have permission for (public land usually or by some fields, or even an area at School 😉 ). The seed bomb will break where it lands, and the next time it rains, you have the start of new Honey Bee Haven. Today you have started saving the Honeybees – but this is just the beginning.