Beyond the bumble: how to bring more bees into your life
Boudicca Fox-Leonard on how to do your bit for thousands of species
Asingle red mason bee lands on a cerulean forget-me-not. It’s a poetic moment, given that I’m three floors up in a Soho roof garden, discussing the oftoverlooked plight of the solitary bee.
Honey bees have, with some just cause, grabbed a large share of the headlines with varroa mite and neonicotinoids devastating their number. Yet there are 25,000 species of bee (compared to 10,000 species of birds) and many of those are solitary bees, who are just as important for biodiversity and pollination and in as much need of our care and attention.
It’s the ambition of author, journalist and bee-lover Alison Benjamin to open our eyes to these amazing insects that dwell unrecognised in our gardens, parks and verges.
When she and her husband started beekeeping more than 10 years ago, she was as ignorant as most, assuming bee-keeping was all about honey and protective suits. Then in 2008, the second summer she had kept bees, Benjamin was stung, and went into anaphylactic shock.
That caused her to take a sideways step, so while her husband Brian McCallum, co-founder of Urban Bees, and co-author of three bee-related books, still keeps hives – their Regent’s Park apiary produces fine honey – Benjamin started to focus on planting and gardening for bees.
“I became a beekeeper because I thought it was the only way to help bees,” says Benjamin. “And it was fascinating and honey bees are amazing, but they are a lot of work. It’s more like having livestock or chickens. And they do sting.” Most solitary
bees do not. And Benjamin now feels grateful for the journey she’s been on since then. Her previous books were A World Without Bees and Bees in the City. The most recent, The Good Bee, aims to show how important bees, and in particular solitary bees are, the threats they face and how to plant the right flowers. “Flowers which are good for them and look great,” says Benjamin.
The rooftop garden she’s tending to today belongs to the cosmetics store Lush and is filled with low-maintenance plants in hexagonal planters: Erigeron karvinskianus, Anchusa officinalis and wallflowers abound.
It’s a scorching spring day. A few streets away Extinction Rebellion are holding court in Oxford Circus, but here all is quiet as newly woken red mason bees hover around their bee hotel; a smart way of describing a series of tubes in which solitary bees can nest.
“When Lush first contacted me, they asked to have honey bees up here. So I explained there are all these other bees and they are a lot gentler and you can still use your rooftop for entertaining,” smiles Benjamin.
They’re also gloriously relaxed company as we chat. Solitary bees generally live about six weeks, during which time the female will lay her eggs. If she uses a bee hotel, she divides each tube into seven cells, loaded with pollen and separated with lumps of earth. Once she dies, the next spring a new generation is born. “I feel like solitary bees are for our time. We’re all living a solitary existence and they’re a symbol for us,” Benjamin says elegiacally.
Still, the Lush garden is only just over a year old, and quietly thrums with solitary bee activity. The bee hotel (find them in garden centres, just make sure the tubes are wide enough, says Benjamin: 5-15mm) gives them a place to nest, while careful, or rather deliberately careless, planting gives them the pollen and nectar they need. “Forget-me-nots are the easiest thing to grow. People think they’re weeds, but they’re just so pretty. Dandelions in lawns are wonderful for bees. And apple bloom is so important. The rosemary was looking great a couple of weeks ago. And the heathers looked fantastic around March.”
It’s been a process of trial and error to provide enough food from February to October. “Everyone says, ‘I’ve got loads of lavender in my garden,’ which is fantastic, but only for a few weeks a year. What are they going to have for the rest of the year?”
And while honey bees may love lavender, some solitary bees aren’t fussed, she adds. They need not only food but water in the form of a shallow pool with pebbles, as they can’t swim. Plus available earth for stuffing into the tubes. Could I get a bee hotel for my northfacing balcony? “Hmm, they do tend to like a sunny spot, but lungwort and comfrey in a north-facing garden work well,” says Benjamin. I look across to a nearby roof garden. It looks green but not very floral; would the bees bother going over there? “There is a trend of architectural planting which is very green, palms and grasses. It looks nice but it’s no good for bees. They need that nectar and pollen,” she says.
Habitat loss is the reason for solitary bee decline. “In cities, all the brownfield sites are being built on. And in the countryside monoculture farming doesn’t help where we’ve ripped up all the wild flowers,” says Benjamin. “I know we need to be fed, but at the same time it’s at the cost of our pollinators.”
This makes the margins of urban life – road verges, roundabouts, any nooks and crannies where we can plant for bees – extra important. Benjamin urges us all to lobby our councils to make parks and new developments more bee-friendly.
Not all solitary bees use a bee hotel. The hairy-footed flower bee, for example, doesn’t check in, preferring soft mortar in walls. “They’re common earlier in the year, on comfrey and wallflowers,” says Benjamin. “They fly
with their long tongues stuck out.”
‘Lavender is fantastic for a few weeks. But what are they going to have for the rest of the year?’
Another is the tawny mining bee, which nests in lawns, while patchwork leafcutter bees cut discs out of rose leaves to construct their solitary nests. Watch out for them flying with the discs from June to August.
“I want to let other people know there are loads of bees out there, flying around. Until you can put a name to them it doesn’t mean so much,” says Benjamin. “You can’t really love what you don’t know.”