A bee uses its long tongue to collect nectar at Cambridge University Botanic Garden

At the University Botanic Garden they’re working hard to nurture our precious bees - and are keen to share their knowledge with you. Olivia Abbott went along to find out more

A beehive in the bee border at Cambridge University Botanic Garden

Escape the traffic-filled busyness of Trumpington Road, to lose yourself in the beauty and peace of the University Botanic Garden, and chances are you’ll find acting supervisor of demonstraton and display Paul Aston tending the lush bee borders. June is the time of year to see the borders at their best, and they are stunning – a riot of pinks, whites, yellows and purples… but not much red.

‘No,’ says Paul, as he points out the flowers, ‘bees can’t actually see red very well, so we don’t have many plants that colour.’

The other thing you won’t see in the bee borders is many fancy, multi-petalled flowers – bees like simple blooms that make it easy for them to get at the nectar. In turn, this means they easily pick up the plant’s pollen on their ‘furry’ legs and distribute it. But this doesn’t mean that in order to have a successful bee garden, you have to ‘go wild’.

‘It’s great to have some wild species in your garden,’ says Paul, ‘but you shouldn’t feel bad if you’re planting salvias from the Mediterranean or lavenders, too, because they all contribute.’

To keep the bees happy and healthy it’s important also to have plants with a long flowering period, so the bees have plenty to eat all year round. Here they have a lime-tolerant heather for Cambridge’s chalky soil, a lavender called Sussex, and purple loosestrife, a wild British plant.

As well as the borders themselves, the Botanic Garden has seven working hives – and you can even buy the honey produced in the Garden Shop. Not all bees live in colonies, though, and there are lots of species that are solitary and nest in old mouseholes, cracks in rocks and holes in masonry. ‘There are about 30 species of bee in the UK,’ says Paul, ‘and there are probably at least 10 of those in your back garden!’

Paul has lots of advice on how to spot a good bee plant (see box), but his main tip is to watch out for the insects themselves. ‘If you see bees round a plant and they look happy, then it’s probably a good bee plant!’ And of course, he recommends a visit to the Garden to take a look at the borders here…