The weather has not been bad or good, but the bees are out at every opportunity.
The summer flowers are blossoming, and we are hoping for a good honey harvest come August!
Tag: Flowers
Frosty Morning
Quite beautiful this morning. Everything covered in frost glinting in the early morning sunlight. This Witch Hazel looked like a little glimmering jewel.
Happy New Year! 2020 is here!
A new year has begun, and the garden is already showing signs of life. Apart from the daffodils and snowdrops poking up through the ground, this beautiful and fragrant Viburnum flower is putting on a beautiful show!
Ivy Flowers, good for the Bees
Even though October is drawing to a close, on warm days the bees are VERY busy.
If you look closely at the ivy, you can see it covered in insects busy at work on the ivy flowers. Not only honey bees, but wasps, flies and bumble bees. All going about their work gathering or consuming the produce of the ivy flower.
The Ivy flower is quite easily overlooked, but is a valuable source of nectar and pollen for the bees. Especially at this time of year when there is not much more forage around. This is one of the last chances for the bees to gather last minute stores.
Busy Bee
We are having some warm weather at the moment. The sunny warm days are great for the bees allowing them to get out and about to build up their winter stores. Caught this lady foraging on a flowering ‘Iceberg’ (Sedumspectabile ) plant.
Bees are all over our New Zealand Flax Flowers
This year, in our garden (North Devon, UK), the New Zealand Flax’s have sent up some beautiful long flower spikes with small tubular flowers delicately displaying in reds and oranges.
The anthers protrude from the top of the tubular flower. Here the high protein orange coloured pollen can be collected by the bee.
But where the bees seem to spend mot of their time is climbing right into the flower to collect the nectar.
This is what I want, I really really want ….
I have a two acre field, I really want to turn into (revert to?) wildflower meadow. How do you do it? Can anyone help?
It seems really complicated and expensive.
Done the research over a few years and got the facts, just spent £40 on seed! (mixture of perennial and annual from Pictorial Meadows #PictorialMeadows) only does 10 square metres. 2 acres is equivalent to 8,000 square metres …… so at a price of £32,000 …. not really achievable????
A lot of money, but it needs to be done right, so hopefully this autumn we will get started. I then just need to work out how to do it affordably over the next 5 years ….. yes a 5 year project ….
#RHSGardensRosemoor have stared a wild flower meadow, and it is looking good. They are just down the road, if they are reading, perhaps someone could help out, after all we are members. I could pay in honey, vegetables or fruit ….. but I suppose that is coals to Newcastle???
Anyone any thoughts on how we can do this in an environmental way, for little cost, to achieve a native meadow.
