Eco Friendly House And Garden

These little critters will eat 100′s of garden pests and help to pollinate 1000′s of plants.
 
By encouraging these little understood bugs into your garden could really improve your success in the plant world, helping to kills off pests, help generate seeds and fruits throughout the year.

So lets find out about these very different little insects and see what they can do for us – and what we can do for them.

Bumble Bees:
These are the first things we think of when we talk about bees, and we often see them in the garden as a big, furry bumbling bee, humming loudly as it moves through the plants in our yards.

Bumble Bee

These bees are not kept in hives and actually live in holes in the ground, compost heap, disused bird houses or old trees.  At the end of the summer the queen is mated and heads of alone to live out the winter before producing offspring the following spring.

She generates plenty of offspring and a colony could number up to 300 individuals as it lives out the summer feeding on and pollinating our garden plants and trees.

They have a sting, but rarely use it.

Honey Bees:
These are the ones that are kept in hives and produce plenty of honey – which bee-keepers use for human consumption.  They don’t need human intervention and can make their own hives in trees and roof spaces if necessary.

They are similar in shape and size to wasps rather than bumble bees, but don’t have the pinched-in ‘waist’ of the wasp.

They always live in large colonies and cannot survive alone for very long.  They can, however, travel and arrive in your garden in a huge swarm of up to 20,000 individuals!  Quite a site to witness as they settle as one writhing mass on a tree or building.

They are rarely ever dangerous to humans unless you antagonise them – although they will sting you.  Experts can be called in to move the swarm quite easily to a less populated environment if you don’t want quite that many in your garden!

Solitary Bees:
The other types of bees live in loose groups but do not swarm or form colonies.

They are similar in appearance to honey bees, and can be used commercially to pollinate crops just like the more popular honey bees.

There are about 250 types on solitary bees in the UK, and many live in small holes in the ground but stay close to other solitary bees spread out over some distance.

Wasps:
Although they send us into a fear frenzy on site due to their habit of stinging us – they can be very beneficial to your garden or allotment.

The queen will set up a nest of mushy paper and fibres in the spring and start to produce larvae to build up her colony – which can reach 20,000 in a few weeks if the conditions are excellent!

Intricate Wasps Nest In Trees

Adult wasps eat nectar and sugary liquids, but they feed their young on insects, so can be seen feeding off plants and killing aphids too! 1 worker wasp could catch around 100 aphids a day off your plants to feed their young.

However, if the colony becomes too large the adults may require more natural food than your garden can supply and so they will turn to other sources – like our kitchen for jams, bee hives for honey etc. and this is when they come into conflict with humans.

But as with all the different bees, if you can tolerate them around your homes and gardens you can get yourself some free insect control and some free fruit and flower generation!

So what are you doing to encourage them to your garden?

Did you know that honey bees make onions and carrots grow?

Bees pollinate a huge number of plants, fruits and vegetables, and help to improve the yields of so many others. So without them, there may be less, smaller or no fruit and veg for us to eat!

Don’t Plants Just Grow Themselves?
Well, yes. All plants will grow into an adult plant or tree from a seed in the right conditions, but most will not fruit without pollination.

Pollination is where the male parts (the pollen) are moved from one plant to another by a bee, another insect or the wind (the pollinator) and join with the female parts (the ova) and make the babies if you like – and the babies in this case are the seeds. Most seeds are normally encased in fruiting bodies like apples, pears or nuts.

So, if for example, you enclosed an adult apple tree in a bee proof environment – it would produce blossom – but not any apples. The apples only grow once the flower has been fertilised, and the apples then grow from where the flowers once were. No pollination = no fertilisation = no apples.

The same is true for any flowering plant.

Can’t Something Else Pollinate Our Food?
Well, yes of course – some are pollinated by a variety of birds, insects or mammals – and many by the wind, but certain plants have evolved over thousands of years to work best with just 1 or 2 types of pollinators.

You may have seen the incredibly long flower tubes that only certain birds can reach into to feed, or the incredibly intricate ways that plants transfer pollen onto butterflies heads. Did you know that some plants will only release their pollen if stimulated by vibrating bee wings!

We can stimulate pollination ourselves if necessary, but it takes a lot longer and is nowhere near as effective long term. There is for example a town in China where villagers have to rub feathers across all their pear trees to make sure that they produce fruit – as they killed off all their own bees with pesticides.

This is all well and good for 1 small location where everyone chips in a bit of time for their own rewards, but imagine how many people you would need, how much time it would take and how much money it would cost to pay people to pollinate – by hand – the 60 million almond trees in California alone?

And this is just one crop. We farm a tonne of other more important crops – all of which will suffer if there are no bees.

What Can I Do?
Firstly, you can make sure that you limit or stop your use of pesticides or garden chemicals for ever and garden more organically. Bees are insects and so an insecticide used to kill those pesky aphids could well be killing bees too as well as butterflies and ladybirds – and possibly even birds and mammals.

Ladybirds which eat poisoned aphids could build up the toxins inside themselves before getting eaten by birds and passing these poison on up the food chain to larger birds or mammals! So insecticides can poison sparrows, falcons and even domestic cats!

Secondly, make a home for them! Now I am not suggesting that you need to set up a hive – you can easily make a home for a single bee in a tree or a hole in the ground and help to encourage wild bees (domesticated bees in hives cannot survive without human help) into your garden.

Make sure you leave wild areas in your yard – and make sure it has flowering plants in it so the bees can eat the nectar. A garden filled with decking and concrete isn’t going to make a good home for any animal!

Wild bees are just as good if not better at pollinating some plants and foods, but they live singly or in much smaller groups and don’t always want to live in the same hive. Your garden could supply the next home for some travelling bees – helping to keep your plants alive at the same time!

Thirdly, you could support local bee keepers by buying local honey – after all – their bees could be helping to pollinate your garden and local parks. They could also be creating all the yummy fruit you keep buying from your local farm store!

Nationally, Hagen Daz have made a Vanilla Honey Ice Cream to help highlight the plight of the honey bee (bees pollinate vanilla orchids if you didn’t know). By buying some of this delicious product – I have tried it myself – you can help fund research into what is causing the massive bee losses across the world – and hopefully prevent the honey bee as we know it ceasing to exist.

As a result, you will be keeping (excuse the pun) all those apples, pears, melons, cherries, blueberries, pumpkins, carrots, onions, broccoli, soya beans, almonds and sunflowers on your table!