Bees love school gardens the best according to results from this year's Great British Bee Count, in which the public recorded sightings of over 100,000 individual bees during May.
Most bees were spotted in school gardens, with woodlands the next most populous habitat. Overall, gardens provided the greatest variety of bees with almost a quarter of survey participants recording more than four kinds of bees in their back yard. Next most popular with our fuzzy friends were allotments, followed by farmland and the open countryside.
There were lots of useful clues in the survey results for gardeners wanting to make their own gardens more bee-friendly too. Cotoneaster was by far and away the most popular plant for bees: a useful evergreen with year-round interest from spring blossom to brilliant red berries, this is a great choice for all kinds of gardens.
Here at our garden centre in Chorley you'll find a wide range, from pretty herringbone-branched C. horizontalis, ideal for training against a wall, to C. 'John Waterer', making a large, rounded dense shrub with particularly large leaves and massive clusters of white flowers. Pop over and take a look to see which is the perfect fit for your garden: the bees will thank you, too!