Nature Notes

 

 

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The photo shows a bee gathering pollen from a Borage plant in Grange Park in the middle of Wenvoe. Why is this important? The last and previous issues of Whats On have highlighted the many problems our bees are facing and if our bees are in difficulties we will suffer some of the consequences. Our parks can be wonderful green spaces but without any flowers that are good for bees they can be a lost opportunity. Regular cutting of the whole park means that most of the time a bee would be hard put to find a single flower to forage on. So, the chance to create a wildflower bed in the park was too good to miss and during July it was great to see bees working their way around the flowers and as late as 8pm on sunny evenings.

It has not been perfect as the enormous amount of shade from the park’s mature trees has caused the flowers to grow slowly and with a pronounced lean towards the west from where they get their main dose of sun. There is also competition from the dandelions and other ‘weeds’ and helpful squirrels have ensured that we have some ‘Conker’ trees growing in the bed. However, the bees are not bothered and during July their favoured plants were Borage and Bugloss. Incidentally Borage was often added to summer fruit cups – some refer to it as ‘the cup that cheers’ and herbalists many years ago used it to help hypochondriacs. In London Borage leaves floating in claret used to be ladled out to thirsty travellers at the Railway Stations. The bees clearly know what they are doing