This page was last updated
18 February 2012
Quest for the Good Life Welcome to our bee garden pages.
The purpose of this section is to look at the role of our garden in providing some of the forage for our honey bees and other pollinators too.
Honey bees forage far and wide, in fact they can travel 4-
We also want their pollinating services for our apple, plum, damson and cherry trees so encouraging to stay a while near home can only be a good thing.
If you have not already seen our plants-
What we have done on this page is to look at all of the plants we have in our garden that are also on the bee plant lists. With the plants and seeds for 2012 ready we think we will have 112 plants varieties. This could grow further over the season though (and more than likely will).
Then we look at the flowering times for these plants. Now there is room for a bit of slack here because some plants have many varieties with a range of flowering seasons. Still, most plants will be accurate and this is a sort of guide only to see how fit our garden is for the bees.
So once we have the flowering times, we can estimate the total number of flowers in bloom for any one month. Let me explain a bit more . . .
Lets take 3 plants . . . Anise Hyssop, Borage, Red Valerian, then look at their flowering times.
You can now see that for any month of the year we have a percentage of the plants that are in flower. In this simple example, as all three are summer flowering, the percentage builds up to a peak in July, August and September, then falls off.
So we have done this same thing but for the 112 plants in our bee garden. The results can be plotted on a graph for the year.
Now this gives a simple way to look at your bee garden, and see what it has to offer over the course of the year.
As you would expect, more flowers are available in summer. But bees and pollinators need more than just the summer. Warm spring or winter days means early or late foraging. What has the garden got to offer then?
We know only a few plants will be flowering in the winter months and mostly the bees are tucked away in their hive. Come early spring though they could be out and gathering. We can see that in March the flowers start to increase and climb rapidly into summer.
Bee keepers are aware of the June Gap, the time when the spring hedges and trees stop and the summer flowers have not yet started. This shows that our garden will have considerable resources for the bees as nearly 50% of the plants should be flowering.
Towards the end of the year, the flowers fall off after September, so it may be worthwhile looking for some late flowering plants to fill in if we have an indian summer.
So that's the flowering profile of our garden as it will be for this year (2012). We can add any extra plants into the figures for next year and compare the results to see if we have improved the bee garden.
