A couple of months ago, the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society had guests from Howland’s Honey talking about honey production and bees. If you missed it, you missed a fascinating talk! But there’s more buzz about bees!
Sometimes we think that big business doesn’t care about nature, but that is not the case with the makers of Honey Nut Cheerios. They are teaming up with Vesey’s to plant 35 million seeds. Their website says “Let’s plant a wildflower for every Canadian and sow the seeds for a healthybee population. Get your FREE wildflower seeds from Vesey’s Seeds.”
Just log on to www.bringbackthebees.ca to register for your free wildflower seeds, and also to learn some fascinating facts about bees. For instance, did you know that “one in three bites of food we eat is made possible by bees and other pollinators, who spread the pollen that crops need to grow. That includes many of our favorite foods like apples, almonds, coffee, and of course, honey.”
And did you know that bees have good color vision. That’s why flowers are so showy. They especially like blue, purple, violet, white and yellow. And imagine this: It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world !
Buzz the Bee will be absent from Honey Nut Cheerios boxes to create awareness of the plight of the bees. The website says “Buzz is missing because there’s something serious going on with the world’s bees. With deteriorating bee colony health, bees everywhere have been disappearing by the millions and it’s time we all did something about it.”
So what can we do? “How can you help the bees? Plant lots of wildflowers! Bees need wildflower pollen and nectar to stay happy and healthy, so planting wildflowers is a fun, easy way to help the bees.”
When I logged on the other day, they were rapidly reaching their goal to distribute the seeds, so log on as quickly as you can to get your free seeds and be sure to plant them to help the bees! What other kinds of flowers can we plant for the bees? Just some possible choices include cat mint, chives, dahlias, lavender, sunflowers, asters, borage, coneflower, cosmos, goldenrod, and yarrow. Don’t forget, trees and shrubs that have blooms are beneficial as well: shrubs like cotoneaster, crabapple, cranberry, raspberries.
I also found this useful information on the David Suzuki website, and as gardeners we can keep these points in mind when we are planting flowers for the bees. “ Bees eat two things: nectar (loaded with sugar, it’s a bee’s main source of energy) and pollen (which provides proteins and fats). Choose a variety of plants that flower at different times so there’s always a snack available for when bees are out and about. (Rule: native plants attract native bees and exotic plants attract honeybees.) Flowers bred to please the human eye (for things like size and complexity) are sometimes sterile and of little use to pollinators. Native plants or heirloom varieties are best. ” Log on to www.davidsuzuki.org for more information.
Let’s do our part to help the bees—life as we know it depends on their hard work!
The next meeting of the Yorkton and District Horticultural Society will be on April 20 at 7:00 PM at SIGN on North Street. Our special guest will be Lionel Hughes from Prairies North magazine talking to us about gardening ideas from the magazine, and how they choose those wonderful ideas for our reading pleasure! Everyone is welcome!
