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 dependant 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.
When we founded Bee Good, we wanted to promote wild flower planting to help our bees and decided to bring our customers along with us – hence the idea of giving away seed-balls with all our orders.
Unlike packets of seeds, a single seed-ball contains around 30 seeds each from a mix of native pollinator-feeding plants including Birdsfoot Trefoil, Foxglove, Red Clover, Viper’s Bugloss, Wild Marjoram, Chamomile, Cornflower, Corn marigold, and Night-flowering catchfly. These seeds are very small and 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. You can also break up the seedball to spread the seeds over a wider area. 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.
The little video shows an example of how the seeds with in the seedballs germinate quite rapidly as long as they are kept watered.
You can also gently break up the seedball and distribute the contents as required.
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.