Britain needs more plants for bees and other pollinating insects.
Pollinating insects are essential to food production, they work for free and without them our food choices would be very limited and probably very expensive.
Sarah Raven’s TV program Bees, Butterflies and Blooms highlighted the need for all of us to plant more bee-friendly plants and the Olympic Meadows have shown us how beautiful plants for bees really are.
Meadowmat wild flower mattinghas been carefully designed to make establishing bee-friendly wild -flower meadows as easy as possible.
Many of our garden flowers, such as double flowers and hybrid roses are the wrong shape for bees to feed from.
Meadowmat is a low maintenance way to make a bee friendly wild flower meadow with an easily accessible and rich source of nectar for a wide range of bees.
The table below shows which plants in Meadowmat are particularly good plants for bees.
UK bee species include
- Honeybees
- 200 or so species of solitary bees
- 24 species of bumblebee
| Plant | Honeybees | Short tongued bumblebees | Long tongued bumblebees | Solitary Bees |
| Autumn Hawkbit | √ | √ | ||
| Birds-foot trefoil | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Bugle | √ | √ | √ | |
| Buttercup | √ | |||
| Catsear | √ | |||
| Cranesbill | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Clover | √ | √ | √ | |
| cowslip | √ | |||
| Grass | √ | √ | ||
| Hawkweed | √ | |||
| Knapweed | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Mallow | √ | √ | √ | |
| Oxeye Daisy | √ | |||
| Red campion | √ | |||
| Red clover | √ | √ | √ | |
| Scabious | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Vetch | √ | √ | √ | |
| Vipers Bugloss | √ | √ | √ | √ |
| Yellow Rattle | √ | √ | ||
| Wild Carrot | √ | |||
| Yarrow (Achillea) | √ | √ | √ |