Part of the joy of gardening is that there is so much you can do to help keep your garden blooming year after year – for free!  Collecting and storing seeds, keeping tubers, and propagating plants using cuttings from mature plants are all mainstays of the good gardener’s practises. It’s remarkable that you can produce dozens of new plants from a single flower, and the result of this is truly satisfying.

Summer is long gone, and with autumn setting in we are seeing the males of most species of bumblebee on the wing. Males are only produced towards the end of the bumblebee lifecycle, as the first broods are all female worker bumblebees. Males of some species are easy to spot because of the yellow tufts of hair on their faces, like this White-tailed bumblebee that I found.

Bees have been hitting the catwalk at London Fashion Week!

Occasionally, my job involves working with people who want to help raise funds for BBCT in exciting and interesting ways. Artists, authors, poets and gardeners have been helping us for a while, but this week we have dipped our toes into fashion after we heard from prop stylist extraordinaire, Fred Butler, who wanted to design and sell a piece to raise money for us and raise the profile of the Trust.

Last Thursday we hosted our first Habitat Workshop as part of our Bees for Everyone project.  The workshop took place at Bettyhill Village Hall in Sutherland and was delivered by Michelle, our Scottish Conservation Officer, with Giles and Fiona from Scotia Seeds.