The charity Plantlife say:-
“Winter blooms have been carpeting many verges of late – hopefully these beautiful swathes of snowdrops, primroses and other botanical beauties are heralding in a blooming year for the UK’s road verges.”
https://plantlife.love-wildflowers.org.uk/roadvergecampaign
https://plantlife.love-wildflowers.org.uk/roadvergecampaign/your-stories
Wildlife Gardening Forum have posted the following message on their facebook page:-
Nurseries supplying garden plants are in trouble due to shopping restrictions on our daily life, and that they may have have to dispose of their spring stock. At this time, as long as these nurseries are abiding by Public Health England rules, then it’s good to support them. Many have lost their key routes to market via garden centres and UK horticulture is starting to suffer. We want these places to be there for our pollinators when this has ended!
We’re therefore starting this thread for anyone to share details of the who is doing what and where, ie still operational and available to order from. Please keep coming back to this post and update as the situation progresses, and if you are a nursery owner, please feel free to add a link to your nursery here. To find this post, go to:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/wildlife.gardening.forum/permalink/1142801456067480/
Two Citizen Science Projects :-
OPAL: Nation pollination survey
http://polli-nation.co.uk/activity/survey/
This survey is listed on the FAQ information sheet for the Welsh Government Bee Friendly Action Plan.
The British Trust for Ornithology “Garden BirdWatch”
https://www.bto.org/our-science/projects/gbw
Unlike the RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch, the BTO survey is a year-round commitment. You can just record birds if you like, but in recent years the survey has been extended to include other species of particular interest to wildlife researchers, so you can also record the butterflies and bumblebees in your garden,
The BTO are currently offering FREE membership of this survey. They have already had a fantastic response with 2,500 new members, and counting. They feel that the most appropriate way to make Garden BirdWatch accessible to all is to temporarily waive the £17 subscription. Communication with these new joiners will be exclusively electronic, they are increasing the frequency of the GBW e-newsletter to help with this.
10 ways to connect with nature without leaving your home this spring
The Wildlife Trusts, a UK movement made up of 46 wildlife charities, has compiled a list of ways to tune into the season from your home.
“Spring has arrived in splendid colour and sound,” said Kirsty Paterson from The Wildlife Trusts. “Over the past few days, hundreds of people have told us that they’ve spotted their first butterflies. These are moments of connection with nature that people find uplifting and comforting.”
“The footage is unpleasant to watch: thousands of bees writhe, disoriented, on the ground in front of their hive. The dead bodies of thousands more lie beneath them.
But the smell, said beekeeper Aldo Machado, is even worse.
“Dead bees smell like dead rats,” he said. “The smell is very strong, it really is. It’s like any other meat.”
Half a billion bees are estimated to have died from December 2018 to January 2019 in southern Brazil. Machado, vice-president of Rio Grande do Sul’s beekeeping society, has been hearing reports of die-offs since 2013.
Machado sent samples of his bees for analysis, which showed that they were contaminated with an insecticide called fipronil, commonly used to control ants and termites on soy crops.”
See the full report…
https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2020/02/27/bee-die-offs-soya-brazil-pesticide-boom-biodiverisity-agriculture/
“Brazil may be the biggest market for highly hazardous pesticides in the world, according to a new analysis of 2018 industry data. Almost two thirds of the toxic chemicals sold in Brazil were used on soya, grown to meet global demand for animal feed”.
Watch the video…
Bees and wildlife are much in the public eye these days, with frequent media reports of declines. In the UK, for example, approximately 70% of the land area is used for agriculture. Clearly, helping wildlife at a national level requires agricultural land to play a major role and there are various encouragements for this, with funding opportunities like the Countryside Stewardship scheme (Supplement 1) (244 separate grants including for ‘badger gates’, ‘beetle banks’, and ‘autumn sown bumble bee mix’) and advice and support from organisations such as LEAF (Supplement 2) (Linking Environment and Farming).
What can the general public do? A plethora of products such as nest boxes, feeding stations and wildlife friendly seeds are available to purchase on-line and in garden centres. Internet shopping websites such as Amazon UK list over 10,000 products for bees in their Garden and Outdoors section.
Here we take a close look at a number of these products which are specifically designed to help bees and other insects: bee hotels, bee bricks, bee and butterfly seed balls, and ladybird and butterfly houses. Our investigation uses a number of approaches, including expert responses and scientific research results….
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0005772X.2019.1702271
A famous University of Cambridge view is set for a change as a pristine lawn maintained for centuries is transformed into a wildflower meadow.
King’s College Chapel and its sloping lawn down to the River Cam have become one of the city’s best-known images. It is popular with tourists, featuring in thousands of Instagram posts, and is widely used to promote the city.
Head gardener Steve Coghill said it was hoped the meadow would bloom in May and create a “biodiversity-rich ecosystem”….
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-51179488
Researchers discover that neonicotinoid seed treatments are driving a dramatic increase in insecticide toxicity in U.S. agricultural landscapes, despite evidence that these treatments have little to no benefit in many crops….
https://news.psu.edu/story/604682/2020/01/21/research/insecticides-becoming-more-toxic-honey-bees
Come springtime the Brussels region’s environment agency Bruxelles Environnement will take up the beehives it manages at nature sites in Brussels, and remove them permanently.
The move forms part of a plan by the region to tackle the recent huge growth in members of the public keeping bees – a trend inspired by concerns about pollution, climate and biodiversity. Bees have become something of a mascot for this movement, in part because they are an excellent barometer of environmental conditions, and in part because of their crucial role in maintaining biodiversity.
But it’s possible to have too much biodiversity, and the honey bee – a variety essentially created by Man for Man – now represents a threat to its wild cousin….
