Human Bee-ing

All the plants I use in guerrilla planting are a. tough, b. a bit invasive, c. will likely self-seed and d. most importantly, they are bee-friendly. You all should know by now that bees are in serious decline worldwide. This is obviously crap for the bees. It is also deadly for the eco-system of which we are a part. Bees pollinate flowering crops. They are intrinsic to our food supplies. We _need_ Bees. Bees need flowering plants that actually have pollen in them (so dont bother with Begonias or Buzy Lizzies or most over-bred bedding plants that produce colour but no pollen). But feeding the bees is not enough. Returning hedgerows to the land cut up by the monocrop culture of Big Agriculture is not enough. World-renowned magazines like Nature have been reporting the deadly and long-lasting effects of particular poisons called Neonicotinoids on bee colony collapse (Bayer and Syngenta are the two big brands associated with making insecticides containing neonicotinoids).

For us this means two things. Firstly stop using pesticides in your own gardens. It is pointless providing pollen rich plants if you also poison the bees along with aphids (and poisoned bees will return to their colonies thereby transmitting the poison).  And secondly keep alert to the stellar EU effort to ban neonicotinoids from not just personal use (and bees do not respect 'private gardens') but crucially mass agricultural use. At the moment the UK and Germany are trying to block this ban (countries that are the base of Bayer and Syngenta). Sign every petition you can in support of banning neonicotinoids.

Here is one to pressure our MP's to ask Owen Paterson to support the proposed ban. The Buglife website gives example wording. 

A small start is to buy organic food - that will support smaller producers, and will categorically not be grown using chemicals including pesticides.