Jo McCarroll encourages all gardeners to do our bit for bees this month!
Saint John Chrysostom
September, as many of you know, is bee awareness month, although the team at NZ Gardener, along with most of you I imagine, are already extremely aware of bees and the various challenges that they currently face.
To help bees out, NZ Gardener and Gardena are giving you a free packet of bee-friendly Plan Bee wildflower seed with this issue. Loss of foraging habitat is one challenge that bees are facing which it really is simple to do something about – just grow more bee-friendly plants! Once you have sown your Plan Bee seeds, be sure to register your address on our Plan Bee map and a little bee icon will pop up where you are. We’ll be able to see New Zealand becoming more bee-friendly over the month! ( Just scan the QR code on the seed packet to go straight to the registration form or go to nzgardener.co.nz.)
But we are also running the first Great Kiwi Bee Count this September. We need you to take two minutes over the month to count the bees you can see on any flowering plant.
Take your smart phone or tablet outside at any stage over September – you need one or other to take part, sorry! Then go to stuff.co.nz/GreatKiwiBeeCount and answer a few questions about where you are, what the weather is like and what plant you are monitoring. Finally take a look at the insect ID photos and record how many of 12 different bee and pollinator species listed you see over a two minute period.
Taking part in the Great Kiwi Bee Count will help you learn more about bees, including how to identify different bee species and distinguish them from other similar looking pollinators. (A recent study in the UK found that although almost everyone questioned expressed concern for bees, 43 per cent of people mistakenly chose a bumblebee when asked to identify a honey bee!)
Plus every time you complete a Bee Count you will be entered in the draw to win a hose trolley set from Gardena worth $240. Do feel free to do the count more than once! You can survey different plants in your own garden, complete the survey at different times over the month, or complete the bee survey in different locations. Every Bee Count you fill in helps give us a better idea of how bees are doing here.
The results of the 2016 Great Kiwi Bee Count will help us build up a regional picture about what bees are where – there’s surprisingly little data available about the distribution of three of the four species of bumblebee that are found here, for instance. We will be able to get a better idea of which flowering plants different pollinators prefer – we aim to create a regionalised league table.
But we also plan to run this citizen science project every year. Over time we will be able to identify trends in bee behaviour and population. A point made by many scientists we spoke to while researching the story in this issue about how bees are doing here is that there’s still a lot we don’t know – in particular what the impact of an exponential increase in managed hives will be long-term and how feral bee colonies are faring. The more data we can pull together the better informed we will – forgive me – “bee” about the challenges facing these vital pollinators… and what gardeners can do to help them out.
PS: An update on the orchid I wrote about last month… pictured above is Laeliocattleya ‘Joanna Rose’ (after moi!). Many thanks to Lee and Roy Neale from Leroy Orchids in Whenuapai. And if anyone is visiting the Orchid + Flower Show in Auckland later this month, do stop by the NZ Gardener stand and say hi!