As beekeepers, we are acutely aware of the intimate relationship between bees and the nearby flowering plants, shrubs and trees. Bees and flowering plants are utterly dependent on each other for their survival. Plants provide pollinating insects like bees with the pollen and nectar that feeds them, and in turn, the insects transfer pollen between flowers allowing them to reproduce.
Plants and their pollinators have evolved together across the planet for around 100m years to the point where over 90% of all plant life across the planet reproduces through pollination by insects (and occasionally animals).
This transfer of pollen is facilitated by attracting as many pollinating insects to visit the plant’s flowers as possible by providing them with a source of food in the form of pollen itself along with a sugar-rich liquid called nectar. It’s this nectar that once stored in the upper levels of the hive eventually becomes the honey that goes into our Bee Good skincare.
When we founded Bee Good, we wanted to promote wildflower planting to help our bees and decided to bring our customers along with us. Hence the idea of giving away seed balls with all of our gift box orders.
Unlike packets of seeds, the seed balls contain around 30 seeds each from a mix of pollinator plants including Birdsfoot Trefoil, Foxglove, Red Clover, Viper’s Bugloss, Wild Marjoram, Chamomile, Cornflower, Corn marigold, and Night-flowering catchfly. These are all mixed into a peat-free compost containing chilli which discourages birds from eating the seeds before they germinate.
The seed balls can be planted anywhere from a window box or pots or sprinkled in a suitable space within the garden. This means that anyone can grow some lovely flowering plants in almost any space that will attract and provide food for passing bees and other precious pollinators.
It may seem a small gesture, but recent research indicates that all the private gardens in Britain cover an area bigger than all of the country’s nature reserves combined, estimated at over 10 million acres. Individual gardens may be small but strung together they create important green corridors allowing pollinators to move and migrate between town and countryside.
Our mission is to raise awareness about the importance of our precious pollinators and the role they play in underpinning our entire ecosystem. Having distributed over 1.5M seeds, we feel proud that we and especially our customers are contributing to the environment in a small but positive and practical way.
