From Buggered to Bee-Friendly: A Father-Daughter Guide to Not Screwing It Up
How my daughter’s intervention turned my barren patio into a five-star insect resort.
The Intervention
Jennifer was over for tea (still no milk, the heathen) when she caught me mid-rant. I was passionately explaining to a very unimpressed robin that if he didn’t pull his weight with the slug population, my entire garden would look like Swiss cheese.
“You know, Dad,” she said, sipping her milkless abomination. “For someone who’s so worried about the bee-pocalypse, you’ve got a patio that’s about as welcoming to pollinators as a locked pub at closing time. It’s all slabs and one sad rosemary bush.”
She wasn’t wrong. I’d been busy writing about the problem but done sod all to fix it myself. It was like publishing a fire safety manual while my own bin was on fire.
“Right,” I said, properly chastised. “What do we do?”
What followed was a crash course in turning any space, from a sprawling garden to a scruffy windowsill, into a proper insect service station. And it turns out it’s not about grand gestures. It’s about thinking like a very small, very fuzzy tourist.
The Bee-Lining Diner: Stop Serving Junk Food
Most of us, me included, plant for our eyes not for the bees. We go for flashy, double-petalled blooms that look great in photos but are about as useful to pollinators as a plastic fruit bowl. They can’t reach the nectar.
The Fix: serve proper grub.
Think of it as running a pub that sells real ale, not a nightclub flogging fluorescent cocktails.
- Singles only. Old-fashioned single-petalled flowers are easy access. Lavender, cosmos, poppies, marigolds (the plain orange ones, not the frilly nonsense) are prime.
- Season tickets. Bees don’t just need lunch in June. Plant snowdrops and crocuses for spring, catmint and borage for summer, sedum and ivy for autumn. Ivy, by the way, is like the all-night kebab shop of the insect world — always open when everything else has shut.
- Small spaces count. A pot of thyme on the balcony, nasturtiums in a box, one lavender by the door. Every stop helps when you’re a knackered bee commuting across town.
Bees Love Lavender - Photo by Jibin P Mathew on Unsplash
The Bee&B: Building Affordable Housing
Jennifer’s next salvo was property-related. “Where are they supposed to live, Dad? It’s a housing crisis out there.”
Most wild bees are solitary. Seventy percent nest in the ground. The rest want hollow stems or wood. Our neat gardens and paved-over patios are basically the insect version of a rental market in London.
The Fix: lower your standards.
- Luxury suite. A bee hotel. Buy one or bodge one up with bamboo canes or drilled wood. Stick it in the sun. Jennifer found a minimalist one online that looks smarter than my shed — which isn’t saying much, but still.
- Studio flat. Leave bare soil alone. A sunny patch of earth is perfect for mining bees.
- Fixer-upper. Stack logs, leave dead stems, pile broken pots. It looks messy but for insects it’s prime real estate. Yes, the neighbours might think you’ve gone feral. They can piss off.
I ordered this Bee House from Temu. It only cost about €16 - Image courtesy of Temu
The Spa Experience: Ditch the Chemicals
Spraying weedkiller on your roses is like fumigating the guest bedroom while your visitors are still asleep inside. It wipes out the customers.
The Fix: embrace chaos.
So your roses get a few holes. Big deal. The bees don’t care. Ladybirds and hoverflies will turn up like unpaid nightclub bouncers and sort out the troublemakers.
Yellow and Orange Cosmos - Photo by Sreejith rs
The Lazy Gardener’s Cheat Sheet
- Grub: A pot of lavender, some cosmos, and a few marigolds. If you can, plant ivy — it’s the kebab shop that never shuts.
- Housing: A bee hotel on a sunny wall. A patch of bare earth for mining bees. A messy pile of logs or stems for everyone else.
- Vibe: Ditch the bug spray and let nature’s security team (ladybirds and hoverflies) do their job for free.
The Reformed Hypocrite
It doesn’t take much. You don’t need to rewild the entire back garden (though it’d be great if you did). Just provide a pit stop.
One pot of flowers, a patch of bare soil, a bee hotel on the fence, and the willpower not to blast everything with bug spray. That’s all it takes. If every person with a garden, balcony, or even a windowsill did one small thing, we’d create a motorway network for insects with service stations across the country.
Jennifer has finished her tea and is back on her phone checking for wasp alerts. I’m looking at the patio differently. That boring corner? Perfect for a log pile. That empty pot? Lavender.
The bee-pocalypse might still be looming, but we’re not completely buggered yet. And frankly, any excuse to be lazier in the garden suits me just fine.
Disclaimer: Creative license applied. My patio is not, in fact, a barren wasteland of shame.
Photo at the top: taken by me. Macro mode and I are finally on speaking terms.