15 ways to help butterflies and bees through your garden

“Gardeners,” Goulson says, “can help by making their garden more insect friendly. Avoid pesticides, grow some pollinator friendly flowers (especially wildflowers), dig a pond, make a compost heap, mow less and soon your garden will be buzzing with life. If every gardener did this it would make a huge difference for wildlife – our cities, towns and villages could soon be teeming with life.”

Here are 15 ways you can do this.

Choose blooms that attract pollinators

The more variety, the better. Bees and hoverflies love members of the daisy, carrot, rose and mint families. If you’re thinking about sowing plants and herbs for the summer, consider, allium, aquilegia, borage, catmint, columbine, delphinium, foxglove, globe-thistle, lavender, nasturtium, oregano, poppy, snapdragon, sweet pea, thyme, verbena viper’s bugloss. Double flowers can make it difficult for insects to access pollen and nectar – so plant single flowers.

Provide a water station

Bees get thirsty, so it’s good, particularly during the warm, dry summer months, to provide them with a source of water. Bird baths can work well, allowing bees to balance on the ledge of the rim as they drink. Add pebbles on which the bees can stand. Even a water bowl piled with marbles and pebbles can work.

Butterflies don’t need a water bowl as they get what they need from nectar. However, they do need places to “puddle” in what is effectively wet soil, from which they get minerals. To make a puddle take a bowl or pan and scatter a layer of soil. Place rocks or pebbles throughout, for the butterflies to land on, then scatter cut pieces of sponge throughout the soil. These must be kept wet and will release water into the soil.

Learn to love your weeds

A recent study found that plants that we classify as weeds are actually more popular with pollinators than some of the wildflower mixes that are increasingly popular. Ragwort and two varieties of thistle, species which are officially classed as injurious under the 1959 Weeds Act, are hugely popular with bees and other insects. The study found that the abundance and diversity of pollinators visiting these plants was, on average, double that seen for the wildflowers recommended by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Comma butterfly on a thistle

Create a mini-meadow

Researchers at the University of Sussex, with the help of citizen scientists, have shown that even a space of just four square metres is enough to provide a rich habitat for pollinators and support biodiversity. Wildflower mini-meadows were created in gardens and allotments, using commercially available seed-mixes. The team, led by Professor Dave Goulson, found "in the year following seed-sowing, mini-meadows were supporting on average 111 percent more bumblebees compared to control plots where no wildflowers had been sown. These resource rich habitats also attracted 87 percent more solitary bees, and 85 percent more solitary wasps."

Give your mower a break

The pressure may be on for a neat lawn but resist. Long grass gives pollinators shelter and a place to feed. If you can’t bear to let your whole garden grow untamed like this, consider dedicating a strip or patch to long grass and wildflowers. Allow lawn weeds to flower before you remove or cut them. Nature Scot points out, “Weeds have had a bad name. A good example is the much maligned dandelion. If you can avoid cutting your grass until mid-April, after the dandelions have flowered but before they set seed, they will provide an important source of food for all types of pollinators.”

Ditch the pesticides

One of the key things you can do for pollinators is to stop all use of pesticides, which have played a major role in the collapse of insect populations across the world. France banned all use of synthetic pesticides in public spaces in 2017, and garden use from 2019. Many experts, including Dave Goulson, who launched a petition last year, believe the UK should follow. Goulson said, “We don’t need them in our gardens... If we link up private gardens with flower-filled road verges and roundabouts, city parks, cemeteries and so on, that’s potentially a network of insect-friendly habitats. It would be a huge step in the right direction.”

Natural alternatives include companion planting, “soft” chemicals like soap and stinging nettles, and inviting pest predators like ladybirds into your garden. One of the problems with buying ready-grown plants is that you can’t be sure what pesticide has been used on them. Grow them from seed in order to keep your garden pesticide free.

Make your garden insect-friendly even in winter

Grow winter-flowering hardy pollinating plants to give honeybees, which don’t hibernate, something to forage, should their food run out. The blooms will colour-up your garden even in the winter months, while providing food for both honeybees and insects that emerge early from hibernation. Choose shrubs like hellebores, willows, mahonias and winter-flowering clematis. Or try lungwort, the favourite plant of the hairy-footed flower bee, or crocuses, grape hyacinths and snowdrops.

Connect up a B-Line

Buglife Scotland is a project to create a map of what are called B-lines, which are corridors and fragments of pollinator-friendly land, with the aim to ultimately join them up and create routes for bees. It may just be that your garden can be part of a B-Line or that you could team up with neighbours to help create one, or see if there are other ways of getting involved in your neighbourhood.

Bee-friend your herbs

Whether in a window box, container or bed, herbs are not only great for your kitchen, many of them are beloved by bees. Marjoram, thyme, chives, sage and rosemary, are more familiar pollinator-friendly herbs. But, says a Friends of the Earth guide to help bees, you could also strike out and try something more adventurous, “Angelica, with its nectar-rich flowers, will attract plenty of early bees and other pollinators, and unlike many other herbs, can thrive in partial shade. Fennel is rich in nectar and pollen, and will attract a variety of solitary bees.”

Snoop on the neighbours’ bees

Learn from the bees and butterflies themselves. A tip from Friends of the Earth is, “Peek over the garden fence or at your neighbour’s window boxes to see which plants are doing well, and which ones the bees like to visit.If you like the look of any of them ask your neighbour what they are or take a picture and have a look online.”

Let your ivy grow

Ivy is a top pollinator food in autumn. When a lot of other flowers have died off, it’s still going, producing its yellow-green blooms, there for the late-flying butterflies like the red admiral or the comma, by social wasps and by honeybees. Don’t cut it back until after flowering.

Red admiral on ivy

Choose flowers that butterflies love

Most obvious of these is buddleia, also known as the butterfly bush, but there are many others, including verbena bonariensis, lavender and marjoram. Butterflies like warmth, so choose sunny, sheltered spots for nectar plants.

Try to provide flowers right through the butterfly season. Spring flowers are vital for butterflies coming out of hibernation and autumn flowers help butterflies build up their reserves for winter.

Painted ladies on buddleia

Don’t forget the hoverflies

The great thing about hoverflies is that the adults are pollinators, but their larvae are predators of aphids and other unwanted garden visitors. It’s like inviting in the pest control.

Unlike honeybees and bumblebees which have tongues which allow them to access nectar, most hoverflies have simple mouthparts, which means that the nectar of some flowers, particularly tubular blooms, are inaccessible to them. Choose open flowers like apple blossom, single-flower dahlias, Michaelmas daisies and marsh marigolds, or umbellifers, like fennel or wild carrot.

Make a bee house

Approximately 220 species of solitary bees are known in the UK. Some build their nests underground, others do so in naturally occurring cavities, in cracks in stones or holes in wood. It’s the latter that you can invite to come and stay in a bee house. Such constructions are usually boxes, fixed to a fence or wall, more than a metre from the ground, and filled with either wooden blocks or logs with holes drilled into them or bamboo stems. Instructions for how to do this can be found on many wildlife websites, including the Woodland Trust and Friends of the Earth. Nature Scot notes, “In Scotland, the red mason bee (Osmia bicornis) is the most likely occupier of bee houses.”

Remember caterpillars need food too.

The following plants are particular good to feed them... blackthorn, buckthorn, holly, oak, broom, garlic mustard, nasturtium, nettle, sorrel, thistles. Butterfly Conservation offers an advice leaflet which suggests, “Grow nasturtiums to lure large and small white caterpillars away from the brassicas” and notes, “stinging nettles are a favourite of the comma and red admiral.”