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If you’ve been a long time reader of the Kitchen Magpie – or even hung around here last summer- you’ll know that I’m an avid gardener. From fruit to vegetables, flowers to decorative grasses, there is nothing I love more than a beautiful, bountiful garden.
And like all gardeners, I am acutely aware of the importance that bees play in not only the fruitfulness of my garden, but the world around me as well.
This year I am happy to team up with Bees Matter to help promote their amazing Buzzing Gardens initiative, something that is very close to my heart – helping bees out with providing an abundance of nutritious food sources.
Bees are integral to not only my little backyard garden but to our entire ecosystem. The role that these little pollinating superstars play is massive. Luckily, according to Statistics Canada, the honey bee populations in our country are actually on the rise, which is fantastic to hear. More bees don’t only mean more honey – it means better pollination for our plants!
Planting a garden that helps bees is an easy and beautiful way to help them out. It takes a lot of flowers to feed honey bees, but if we all planted a packet of seeds into a little patch of earth, what a difference we can make.
How does a free packet of seeds sound? Now in its second year, Bees Matter has given out over 35,000 seed kits and is looking to continue to keep bees buzzing by helping reduce the stress on honey bees that results from their trying to find nutritious food. One of the biggest challenges facing honey bees today is a lack of nutritious food sources. There are of course many factors that affect bee health, but most experts agree that one of the biggest is the lack of healthy food sources.
So how easy is it to help out our little buzzing buddies and plant pollinator-friendly flowers? FOR FREE? How awesome is this??
If this is something you are interested in, then head on over here for your Free Buzzing Gardens Seeds Pack!
This initiative is just so amazing to me, you guys. Honey bees are one of the most important pollinators and everyone by now should be familiar with all the reports in the news on how we desperately need to keep bee populations up and healthy.
The Buzzing Gardens seed kits contain flowers that have been selected in partnership with Pollinator Partnership Canada to provide a nutritious food source for honey bees, so there is no worry for us about making sure we are planting the best flowers for our little friends. These seed packs are ready to go!
That means that everyone can help support the honey bees, because there is no cost involved! Don’t have a yard? Ask someone else in your community. Hit up your local City Councillor or Member of Parliament and ask if they’ve thought about turning city grounds into a Buzzing Community. Most bees will, on average, travel up to 3.25 kilometers (2 miles) to find pollen, which means that your Buzzing Garden has a coverage diameter of 6.5 km, or a total Honey Bee Coverage Area of 33.12 square kilometers.
Just let those numbers sink in for a little while. Our little Buzzing Gardens can do so much!
In case you need a simple little refresher about why bees are so important, we can start with the fact that our food system depends on pollinators. Every fruit or vegetable starts as a flower. That flower produces pollen and has a receptor for other grains of pollen. Very few plants are self-pollinating, meaning that we need some honey bees to feed from the pollen and nectar of one flower, then carry pollen grains on the hairs of their legs to other flowers as they feed, thus pollinating the other flowers, which then will bear fruit.
If we plant our Buzzing Gardens, we are helping bees to travel less, which means healthier hives and better colonies, and THAT means more pollinators for our food system.
To learn more, and to get that free seed package, head over to the Bees Matter website. Besides the free seed package (you’ll have to scroll down a bit to find the section!) there is so much more to learn about our little buzzing friends!
Happy Gardening Everyone! I’m ordering my own seed package right now!
Love,
Karlynn
Disclosure:
This blog post is sponsored by Bees Matter and compensation was received. I am entirely responsible for the contents of and the views and opinions expressed in my blogs and posts and not the sponsor mentioned above.
The Kitchen Magpie says
Make sure you share this on your Facebook pages too, so your friends and family can order them as well! I shared to my own personal page earlier! And my homeschooling page as well!