Bees play a vital and irreplaceable role in pollinating our flowers, fruits and vegetables. The more bees in your garden the healthier, more productive and more pleasant a place it will be. Yet bees are declining rapidly and many people, even if they do not wish to keep bees themselves, are asking what can be done on an individual basis to help the bee. This book is a response to that request. It will demonstrate in one accessible volume how each of us can play our part in providing a bee-friendly environment, no matter how much gardening space and/or time we may have. It includes: * How bees forage, what bees you can expect to find in your garden and what plants are best for them. * Why honey bees are so important; what they need to thrive and how they detect and access those requirements; and what varieties of plants are best suited to provide those needs. * How the gardener can offer and maintain a bee-friendly garden, followed by a season-by-season account of what beefriendly plants are in flower and when, and what jobs the gardener can be doing during these times to help bees thrive. * A gazetteer of selected bee-friendly plants, arranged by type of plant in seasonal sub-sections. * Illustrative, practical planting plans, including a culinary herb garden, a potager, a wild flower garden, and a 3 seasons traditional border.

For many people gardening is predominantly about plants and choosing the right combination and balance to make beautiful borders. This book will help you achieve this - and more, because it will also help you create an ecologically sound, bee-friendly garden, showing that you can have an aesthetically pleasing garden full of beautiful flowers which at the same time will attract and nurture bees. It will enable you to select bee-friendly plants, and to plan borders which are beneficial to bees, encouraging these most valuable of insects to come to your garden over and over again, both for sustenance and to aid pollination. It contains a wide range of practical, beautiful and easy-to-follow planting plans for bee-friendly gardens of all sizes, including: - Traditional mixed, cottage, and colour themed borders - 'Designer' and 'natural' borders - Borders for acid and alkaline soils - Ideas for container planting This book will be of interest to every gardener who cares for the plight of the honeybee and other bees.

Includes summarized reports of many bee-keeper associations.