Garden Bears' World - Busy Bees and Busy Bears

Hello everyone!  It's Endon here again, with another Garden Bears' World episode.  

It has been so warm for the past few days that us bears haven't felt like doing any digging or planting and have spent a lot of time having naps and listening to the birds singing and the bees buzzing.

'We know how to recognise most of the birds,' said Hanley one afternoon.  'But the bees don't all look the same either.  We should see what types they are.'

He remembered that Grizzly had a chart with all the different types of British bees on it, so he asked if he could borrow it.  

One of the reasons there are so many bees in the garden is that there are lots of flowers blooming just now that they like, including some huge pink lilies and these pretty purple phlox.

The garden smells very nice too, thanks to those scenty flowers and the honeysuckle.  The butterflies' favourite food plant, the Sedum, isn't open just yet, although they also like something called Verbena bonariensis which we have too.

I don't think the bees are very interested in the big pink roses but they do like a plant called Monarda which Polar says is also known as 'bee balm' - you can see a bee on one of the flowers.  We looked it up on Grizzly's chart and it's a Common Carder Bee, or Bombus pascuorum, to use it's proper scientific name.

All the bees love borage, which comes up in the vegetable patch year after year and has lovely little single blue flowers, although it can get quite scruffy and rusty when the plants get big and old.  You can see a honey bee (Apis mellifera) and one of the bumble bees on these plants.

And here's a bumble bee on one of the sunflowers on the allotment.  I think it is a white-tailed bumble bee, although there is not much difference in colour between these, the garden bumble bee and the buff-tailed bumble bee.  The bumblebees' scientific names all start with Bombus and there are more than twenty different types!

While we were bee-spotting, Polar asked if I could help her in the front garden.  She had picked most of the yellow plums, but there were still some ripe ones at the very top of the tree, just out of her reach.

'A small bear who is good a climbing would be able to pass them down to me,' she said, so I let her carry me out to the front garden and place me in the plum tree, then up I went!

Soon we had the last of the ripe and almost-ripe plums picked and into a bowl, which Polar carried back to the kitchen - where there were already dozens of plums!

They smelt wonderful and are very sweet to eat fresh, although Polar has cooked and frozen some of them, and turned others into pots of jam, for us and for our friends and neighbours.  

We offered to help, but Polar said it was too hot in the kitchen for little furry bears at this time of year, although we will be allowed to help to eat it!