We’re beekeepers, we know all about the bees and the flowers, don’t we?
Well, no matter what you do know, you almost certainly would have learned a lot more as Chris Paxford took us on a fascinating journey through the relationship between bees and flowering plants at our 2nd Monday meeting on Monday 10th July.
By ‘bees’, Chris of course meant all the 270 (plus or minus, as Chris discussed!) species of bee that can be found in the UK. For example we discovered that bumble bees are bred and moved in large numbers in hives to pollinate strawberries as they are particularly efficient pollinators of soft fruit crops.
Chris also discussed the use of honey bees to pollinate the vast groves of almonds, oranges and avocados in California – and the impact on the bees being moved from one mono-culture to another.
We had the expected quiz – can you recognise these spring, summer and autumn flowers – and I’m pretty sure that between us we got them all right. This led on to an interesting discussion around ‘wild flower’ meadows, the pros and cons of ‘no mow May’, and how the seed packs for wild meadows often contain annuals that flower and look good that year but of course don’t re-appear the next year. Indeed it seems that wild flower meadows are quite difficult to sustain.
A thoroughly enjoyable evening was had by the 28 members that attended the talk. We were delighted to see new, and some of our most long-standing, members. We thank Chris for his excellent talk and look forward to having more fascinating talks as we move in to the winter schedule.
