How to keep your garden buzzing

French romantic Victor Hugo once said, “Life is the flower for which love is the honey”, a fitting quote for gardening with bees. Bees and their magical sweet honey have featured prominently in myth and storytelling from the beginning of mankind, illustrating their long relationship with humans.

However, their numbers have diminished at a frightening rate in the last decade due to pesticides, disease and urbanisation. Though we might not miss our honey as much as Pooh bear would, we’d manage without it. But we would struggle to survive without bees, because they are vital pollinators for the majority of crops that feed us worldwide. As gardeners there is plenty we can do to provide happy homes for bees.

About honey bees 

About 28,000 bees live in one hive, working and cohabiting in a harmonious and ordered social group. At the heart of the hive is a single queen, who spends her life laying eggs. There are a few hundred drones [male bees] whose sole purpose is to try to mate with the queen on her maiden flight. Once that’s done, they hang about and drink nectar.

The queen stores sperm from her single flight and ekes it out over the next two to three years, laying fertilised eggs and keeping the hive supplied with bees. The bulk of the hive is made up of worker bees, infertile females who do the work of foraging, creating wax comb, feeding the queen, protecting the hive and nursing the brood. These are the bees we see most often in our gardens, busily collecting nectar [for energy] and pollen [for protein and fat].   

Attracting bees to our gardens 

• Never use pesticides — they kill bees; 
• Reduce hybrid flowers, as hybridisation often results in a reduction of nectar and pollen; 
• Grow a wide range of plants, offering a succession of food throughout the year; 
• Leave herbs and vegetables to flower; 
• In windy gardens, provide a sheltered area with flowers; 
• Include variation in height and types of flowers; 
• Plant similar flowers in large clusters together to provide bees with a one-stop shop; 
• Bees prefer to sip from moist soil and easily drown in ponds and pools. Create “drinking holes” by filling saucers with wet sand and sinking them into the ground; and
• Provide plenty of nectar flowers in winter, such as aloes and red-hot pokers.

Flowers bees love

• Bees are most attracted to blue, yellow, purple and white; 
• Single-petal flowers, such as marigolds and daisies, provide easy nectar. If you can see the middle of a flower easily, it’s a good bee attractor; and
• Alyssum, borage, Boston ivy, bottlebrush, Calendula, California poppy, Cosmos, Echinacea, fruit trees in bloom, lavender, marguerite daisy, moonflower, nasturtiums, onion family flowers, poppy, purple ribbon bush, rosemary, Salvia, sunflower, Verbena and Zinnia all attract bees.