For the love of bees

The celebration of World Bee Day this week drew attention to the plight of the world's bees and how our behaviours are contributing to their decline 🐝

Bees are some of our most important pollinators and they do a huge amount to ensure the diversity of our ecosystems.  We rely on them for the survival of our food crops most of which are pollinated by wild insects rather than by human intervention. Without them, this would cost us £1.8 billion to achieve!  Some bees provide us with other luxuries such as honey. These bees are often kept in hives but also contribute to the pollination of farm crops.  

Sadly, bee populations are now in decline. This is due to five main causes:

❌ Habitat loss - replacing natural areas with intense farming land or urban developments deprives bees of the wildflowers and meadows that they usually thrive on

❌ Climate change - changes in weather patterns are affecting the times that flowers bloom and bees are struggling to adapt to these changes meaning that they miss out on important food sources

❌ Pesticides - these are harmful to bees and often either kill them or prevent them from reproducing 

❌ Pests -  honeybees can be particularly susceptible to pests and disease which can spread through their hove colony; beekeepers should make sure they check on the health of their hives to stop diseases spreading to other populations

❌ Invasive species - some non-native bee species pose a threat to the survival of UK bees and so these species need to be kept an eye on to ensure their numbers don't become threatening

So what can you do to help?

🐝 Get planting!  Even in you just have a windowsill or window box, get some wildflower seeds and create a little pollen pit-stop for bees to refuel on as they fly past

🐝 Let the grass grow! Try not mowing your lawn or at least leave part of it unmowed for bees to feed and shelter in 

🐝 Leave off the pesticide! Pesticides do so much harm and there are easy alternatives such as using diluted washing up liquid water to remove aphids

🐝 Plant through the seasons! If you have a garden, try to include a range of plants that will flower and seed through spring, summer and autumn to give bees the best chance of survival

For more ideas, visit Friends of the Earth at friendsoftheearth.uk/nature/10-easy-ways-help-bees for some more tips and ideas 🐝

Walk to School 2021

This week is Walk to School week! 👣

The five-day challenge will take place from 17th-21st May and will encourage everyone to get to school by walking, cycling, scooting, parking & striding.... anything to get people travelling in a clean and sustainable way that will benefit our planet and local community.

Every school day, the school run adds a huge volume of traffic to our roads in the mornings and afternoons.  This puts large volumes of carbon emissions into the atmosphere which contributes to climate change.  It also impacts on the air quality in our local area which can have a negative effect on the health of children who are trying to walk or cycle to school and end up breathing in the fumes. 

Making the effort to walk or cycle into school this week will help to challenge and reframe our perception that it's easier to drive everywhere or that it's just too much hassle to walk.  Walking has so many benefits and not just to your physical health; it has been shown to improve concentration, boost creativity, and give people a better connection to their environment and nature.  You notice more when you're walking and it's fantastic to see the changes in your local area from one season to another. 

I've been trying to walk to school at least once a week (usually on a Friday) and to be honest, I really look forward to listening to a podcast on the walk in, and then taking a slightly longer more scenic route back home at the end of the day.  It really helps me to unwind at the end of the week, and it signals that it's the weekend and that I'm ready to relax and recover from a hectic week.  It's also shown me that it's not really that hard to walk in each day... and I can easily still do any errands on the way which I don't really need a car for.  And it saves money on petrol too!

Living Streets has a fantastic website with lots of information and ideas about how to help your school have a successful Walk to School week. Visit them here at www.livingstreets.org.uk 👣

No Mow May

It's #NoMowMay!! 🐝🐛🐜🐞🌱

The month of May is when all the grasses and wildflowers such as dandelions and buttercups start to sprout up and grow in abundance in people's back gardens, public parks and countryside.  These provide a rich and sheltered habitat for bees and butterflies to live in, and these tiny creatures perform valuable tasks such as pollination which help to spread diversity and colour throughout our landscape.

Mowing these down will only reduce the biodiversity of the area and make it harder for animals and insects to exist in that environment.  No Mow May is a campaign to get people to think about their local ecosystems and to think twice before mowing their grassy areas just to make them look neat or tidy.

If you can leave an area to just go wild then that's the best option!  If you want to bring some sense of tidiness to your garden, try just mowing down the middle and leaving the edges to grow. Alternatively, get creative and mow different shapes such as a figure of eight into your lawn to break up the areas that are mowed/not mowed.  If you want to go even further, the National Trust has shared a video on how to make a 'scaremow' to encourage people not to mow their lawns.  

Not mowing your lawn is really crucial to protecting some of the UK's most valuable plant and insect species.  The Conservation Charity 'Plantlife' is asking people to do a survey of the plants and flowers in their lawn at the end of May to see the diversity of plants and flowers that have been able to grow.  You can also take part in their Great British Wildflower Hunt where they are asking people to go searching for different species and hopefully learn some new ones along the way. 

Why not take a look at their website www.plantlife.org.uk and see what you can learn or do in your local area 🌼

Protecting our coasts

The UK has around 18,000km of coastline which includes all kinds of valuable ecosystems from rockpools to sand dunes to estuaries.  Many of us will have been lucky enough to visit the coast on school holidays and some of us will even have the privilege of living with a beautiful beach or coastal stretch right on their doorstep.  Being an island, you are never more than 70 miles from the sea in Britain and our coastlines are beautiful landscapes that we need to appreciate and protect.  

Lots of UK beaches have Blue Flag Awards which means they have met the criteria for water quality, environmental management and safety.  This is fantastic as it means they are clean and safe to visit with our children and pets, and can support wildlife that thrive in their ecosystems.  However, our beaches are still subject to littering, whether that be from visitors, tourists or wild campers, or washed up by the sea itself.  Microplastics are a real problem as they are invisible and cannot simply be picked up out of the environment.  

The recent documentary 'Seaspiracy' highlighted the impact of the fishing industries on our seas, oceans and coastlines.  It claims that the majority of plastic waste in the oceans comes from fishing nets and that a huge amount of damage and devastation is carried out by trawler fishing.  When we buy and eat fish, we contribute to this industry and this in turn may have an impact on the biodiversity in our seas and the quality of our coastlines both at home and abroad.

We can take some simple steps to protect coastlines everywhere.  Making efforts to clean up the beach or change behaviours that prevent beaches from getting polluted or degraded are both equally effective.

🐬 Take part in a beach clean up - get a community group or a school group to do a litter pick along a stretch of coastline; this not only actively cleans the beach but it helps educate and raise awareness of how polluted our beaches can get 

🐬 Stop buying plastic items - we know this already but it's so hard to fully commit to; make one swap this week that will save  some more plastic

🐬 Wash your clothes with ecofriendly detergent - our waterways have a lot of chemicals in them from both households and industry; try a different detergent that us gentler on the microorganisms that live in the water

🐬 Reduce your fish intake - eating less fish will reduce demand over time; this will allow fish populations to grow back and reestablish natural balance

🐬 Visit the coast - if you don't live near the coast, take a trip there or plan a visit with your local school; there is no alternative for actually visiting a place to help bring about an appreciation and understanding of it

If you live near the coast, why not develop a Beach School either alongside or instead of a Forest School!  Any learning in the outdoors is so important and all environments have something valuable to teach us. Click here to find out more.